Calendar

The Shakespeare Theatre Company

September 12 – October 27, 2013

“Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall”

Shakespeare’s dark comedy leads a compelling season by posing controversial ideas and by exploring the corrupting nature of power. Director Jonathan Munby (STC’s 2009 hit, The Dog in The Manger) returns to direct this play of ethics and morality.

Recommended for ages 18 and above but may be suitable for mature audiences, 16 and above. Contains partial nudity, violent and adult situations.

This performance contains herbal cigarette smoke and theatrical haze.

Please note:  This performance starts with a pre-show cabaret 20 minutes before show time.  We invite you to arrive early to experience this exciting prologue. Those patrons arriving after the performance starts will be asked to wait in the lobby until the appropriate late-seating break.

Hamlet – Globe to Globe – Shakespeare’s Globe, London – World Tour

by William Shakespeare

Directed by Dominic Dromgoole and Bill Bruckhurst

A TWO-YEAR TOUR TO EVER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD

Learning of his father’s death, Prince Hamlet comes home to find his uncle married to his mother and installed on the Danish throne. At night, the ghost of the old king demands that Hamlet avenge his ‘foul and most unnatural murder’.

Encompassing political intrigue and sexual obsession, philosophical reflection and violent action, tragic depth and wild humour, Hamlet is Shakespeare’s ‘poem unlimited’, a colossus in the story of the English language and the fullest expression of his genius.

Be at the start of a completely unprecedented theatrical adventure and help us launch this two-year worldwide tour of our pared-down, small-scale Hamlet, which will visit all 205 nations on earth.

Titus Andronicus

By William Shakespeare

Directed by Lucy Bailey

BRUTALITY OF THE HIGHEST ORDER

Returning to Rome from a war against the Goths, the general Titus Andronicus brings with him the queen Tamora and her three sons as prisoners of war. Titus’ sacrifice of Tamora’s eldest son to appease the ghosts of his dead sons, and his decision to refuse to accept the title of emperor, initiates a terrible cycle of mutilation, rape and murder. And all the while, at the centre of the nightmare, there moves the villainous, self-delighting Aaron.

Grotesquely violent and daringly experimental, Titus was the smash hit of Shakespeare’s early career, and is written with a ghoulish energy he was never to repeat elsewhere.

This production revisits Lucy Bailey’s spectacular Globe production of 2006.

Shakespeare’s Globe Theater

5 – 10 May (performed in Gujarati)

When Bharatram (Bertram) flees his native Gujarat for Bombay, his mother’s ward Heli (Helena), desperately in love, decides to pursue him. But Bharatram feels differently, and attaches two obstructive conditions to their marriage – conditions he is sure will never be met.

20th-century India stands in for Renaissance France in this joyful, imaginative production of a play that reverses all the usual expectations of Shakespearean comedy.

Antony and Cleopatra

By William Shakespeare

Directed by Jonathan Munby

TWO LOVERS ARE BLOWN APART BY LOVE AND WAR

Cleopatra, the alluring and fascinatingly ambiguous Queen of Egypt, has bewitched the great Mark Antony, soldier, campaigner and now one of the three rulers of the Roman Empire. When Antony quarrels with his fellow leaders and throws in his lot with Cleopatra, his infatuation threatens to split the Empire in two.

Roman virtue and Eastern vice, transcendent love and realpolitik combine in Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s greatest exploration of the conflicting claims of sex and power, all expressed in a tragic poetry of breathtaking beauty and magnificence.