Shakespeare may have touched this door, Ian McKellen's fat suit saved him, *was* Antonio a notable pirate?
Plus: the name's Macduff. Gaven Macduff.
Shakespeare’s Dressing Room Door Discovered (Maybe)
Archeologists at St George’s Guildhall in Norfolk saw a “weird shape” in a wall and discovered the archway to what may be the Guild’s robing room, which may have been used as a dressing room for visiting actors, who may have included Shakespeare.
O, What a Fall Was There
Ian McKellen’s Falstaff fat suit saved him from more serious injuries after falling off the stage during Henry IV back in June. Also revealed: McKellen was the quizmaster at his local pub but “was sacked by [his] colleagues because they thought there were too many questions about Shakespeare.”
The excellent “Decoder Ring” podcast discussed fat suits earlier this year, and started the conversation with Falstaff.
Romeo and Juliet in Vogue
The show was cast “primarily over Zoom and, according to Gold, largely on ‘gut feeling.’”
Tell Us How You Really Feel
Shakespeare drew such light from Chaucer that he was almost blinded: two of Shakespeare’s worst plays, Troilus and Cressida (written around 1602) and The Two Noble Kinsmen (co-written with John Fletcher; performed 1613-14), were based respectively on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1380s), itself based on Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato, and “The Knight’s Tale,” based on Boccaccio’s Teseida. These Shakespeare plays lack energy in part because the author venerates his source too much…
Camille Ralphs for the Poetry Foundation.
Hard disagree, Troilus and Cressida is great. I’ve gone back to this clip of John Barton working through a scene with RSC actors – Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart (with hair!), Michael Pennington, and Alan Howard – many times. Skip to 1:09 for Pennington and Howard going at each other as Hector and Achilles.
Barton’s note: "I thought you did that very well indeed and I haven't very much to say about it."
Jasper Fforde on Shakespeare
Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series is brilliant. Set in an fantasy 1980s Britain where the UK is still fighting the Crimean War, the series follows a police officer protecting the characters in books who can travel among literary works and into the real world. Miss Havisham gets arrested for reckless driving, the ProCaths try to assassinate Heathcliff, and “The Raven” is a particularly nasty prison.
There is also a fifteen-year-long run of Richard III with an enthusiastic audience and actors pulled from the audience half an hour before the performance starts because most of them know the entire play by heart – a perfect fantasy of fandom.
Fforde is currently writing the eighth book in the Thursday Next series (the seventh came out in 2012). I haven’t read his Red Side Story, set in “Chromatacia, where the societal hierarchy is strictly regulated by one's limited color perception” but it also includes some Shakespeare. Fforde recently did a reading for the New York Public Library where he discusses how Shakespeare operates in his books and reads an excerpt from Red Side Story featuring a performance of The Tragedy of the Chromatically Non-Compliant and Clearly Idiotic Romeo and Juliet.
Thou'lt be afraid to hear it
Turner, for his part, gave Macduff a first name, “Gaven,” an old Scottish word meaning “white hawk”—a reference to the real-life white hawk Turner’s grandfather used to own.
Handing out pizza to your audience is absolutely pandering and you should totally do it.
Growing up, I saw a lot of plays but when I was about 16, I saw Filter’s version of Twelfth Night at the Tricycle Theatre (now the Kiln). In the party scene, before Malvolio comes in, they handed out pizza to the audience and set up a huge game with those fuzzy balls that you throw and catch onto a disc. It was a raucous affair, a frivolous moment of fun that meant when Malvolio came in to stop the fun, we all felt completely chastised, because we were part of the action. Something really clicked for me – I was forced to engage with it in a different way and I felt the wrath of Malvolio coming in and shaking us all up.
-Letty Thomas, currently playing Rosalind at the RSC.
Usually audience participation leaves me cold but handing out pizza to the audience? Sold.
Quick Links
Patrick Page’s solo show All the Devils Are Here will be a book.
The costume exhibit at the Public Theatre in NYC runs through the end of the month and features Kevin Kline’s Richard III costume and a picture of Denzel Washington as Richard III in 1990 looking very mischievous.
Podcast: Theatrical Mustang: August Forman’s Romeo Is Trans in American Theatre.
[Guz Walz] hath a daily beauty in his life/That makes [Ann Coulter] ugly." -Joyce Carol Oates
“An election year in Britain and America seemed a particularly fitting moment [to stage Coriolanus], especially since politics on both sides of the Atlantic has become so dominated by personality.” (Paywalled)
Straight-to-camera monologues are hard but David Oyelowo pulls it off:
Saturday 24 August 1661 – Pepys’ Diary
But I took him to the Mitre and gave him a glass of sack, and so adieu, and then straight to the Opera, and there saw “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,” done with scenes very well, but above all, Betterton did the prince’s part beyond imagination.
From the Archive
Prince of Jutland – has anyone seen this film? There was much to-do two years ago when a very bloody very shirtless Alexander Skarsgård went literally berserk in The Northman, but this is an Amleth adaptation from 1994 starring Christian Bale (five years after playing the boy in Branagh’s Henry V) with Gabriel Byrne, Helen Mirren, Kate Beckinsale, and Andy Serkis in his film debut.