Bardwatching: Spring Term 1 2022-23

One man in his time plays many parts

There's a new Shakespeare remix afoot, with Much Ado About Nothing undergoing a reality TV transformation in a production by poet and playwright Debris Stevenson at the Duke of York's Theatre in the West End. The rising stars of National Youth Theatre are set to bring this story of gossip, matchmaking and manipulation to the stage in the 10th anniversary celebration of the NYT REP Company.

If money go before, all ways do lie open

New Zealand's arts council has pulled its funding for a school Shakespeare festival, because it focuses on a ‘canon of imperialism’. The Sheilah Winn Shakespeare Festival is a secondary school competition in which students perform excerpts from the Bard's best-loved plays. Since it was first launched in 1992, more than 120,000 high school students have taken part in the festival, which is run by the Shakespeare Globe Centre New Zealand. The funding from Creative New Zealand – the country's arts funding body – represented around 10 per cent of the festival's overall costs, which will now have to be sought elsewhere.

Creative New Zealand decided to pull its funding this year, stating that although the festival had strong youth engagement and had a positive impact on its participants, it ‘did not demonstrate the relevance to the contemporary art context of Aotearoa (the Māori-language name for New Zealand) in this time and place and landscape.’ One of the board's assessors said that the funding application had made them ‘question whether a singular focus on an Elizabethan playwright is most relevant for a decolonising Aotearoa in the 2020s and beyond.’

If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival recently held the second edition of Quills Fest, which invited the public – both in person and virtually – to experience Extended Reality projects that brought to life immersive and interactive storytelling. From anywhere in the world, audiences tuned into the O! Digital Stage using a web browser or a VR headset to experience prototypes, projects and works in progress by the festival's creative technologists in residence.

My native English now I must forgo

Modern Britain can only be properly represented in Shakespeare if we use actors with foreign accents, the National Theatre's casting chief Alastair Coomer has said. Stage performances must include a wide array of different languages and accents to accurately portray our changing world, he told The Stage. ‘If you're out in the streets of London you'll hear Ukrainian accents, you'll hear accents from across Europe, but we don't necessarily hear that on stage,’ he said. His remarks came after the National Theatre hosted a casting day for Ukrainian actors who had recently moved to the UK.

A beggar's book outworths a noble's blood

In 1622, the Frankfurt Book Fair released its catalogue with a special announcement: William Shakespeare's plays would be published in print for the first time. Referred to at the time as Mr William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, the edition has now become known as the First Folio. Before this time, only individual plays had been published, with many not published at all. Without the First Folio, large parts of Shakespeare's canon may have disappeared forever.

400 years after that initial announcement, the German Literary Archive Marbach is hosting an exhibition about the book that went on to make literary history. This will be one of many exhibitions and events over the next year dedicated to the First Folio, which was published in 1623, seven years after the death of its author. Although about 750 copies of the 1623 First Folio were first printed, only 235 are known to have survived to this day, with 51 copies in the UK, 149 in the US and 36 in other parts of the world.

To unpathed waters, undreamed shores

When asked where they'd like to visit in the UK, a group of Ukrainian refugees in Solihull said Shakespeare's birthplace was top of their list. Local volunteer Kate O’Hara worked with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust to bring more than 70 Ukrainian women and children to Stratford-upon-Avon. Kate's hoping to continue to arrange more visits to help the families discover more about the rich culture and history of the UK.