Much Ado About Nothing

Shakespeare’s Globe

Touring Production

Claudio loves Hero and Hero Claudio and nothing seems capable of keeping them apart. Claudio’s friend Benedick loves Beatrice and Beatrice Benedick, but (because neither will admit it) nothing seems capable of bringing them together. Only the intrigues of a resentful prince force Benedick to prove his love for Beatrice – by killing his best friend.

Driven along by a romance all the more charming for being in denial, Much Ado About Nothing is a miracle of comic and dramatic suspense and gives us, in the bantering Beatrice and Benedick, one of Shakespeare’s wittiest, most lovable pair of lovers.

Royal Shakespeare Company

30 April – 2 October 2014

Directed by Polly Findlay

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When wealthy landowner Arden’s suspicions of his wife Alice cheating on him are confirmed, Arden, Alice and her lover find themselves playing a deadly game as a series of would be murderers set off in pursuit of Arden.

Polly Findlay makes her RSC debut to direct this anonymously written thriller.

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.

The Shakespeare Theatre of NJ

Begins May 28

Directed by Bonnie J. Monte

Artistic Director Bonnie J. Monte directs The Tempest for the first time since 1991, her inaugural production at The Shakespeare Theatre. Prestigious company veteran Sherman Howard, an actor Ms. Monte describes as “a force of nature in himself,” will portray Prospero, the powerful magician who rules over his enchanted island home.

Julius Caesar

by William Shakespeare

Directed by Dominic Dromgoole

FRIENDS CLOSE, ENEMIES CLOSER

When Caesar returns to Rome from the wars a virtual dictator, Brutus and his republican friends resolve that his ambition must be curbed – which in Rome can mean only one thing: the great general must be assassinated. But once the deed is done, the idealistic conspirators must reckon with the forces of a new power bloc, led by Mark Antony and Caesar’s nephew Octavius. When their armies close at Philippi, will Caesar’s ghost be avenged?

Opposing dictatorship and republicanism, private virtue and mob violence, Shakespeare’s tense drama of high politics reveals the emotional currents that flow between men in power.

This production will employ Renaissance costumes and staging.