Kevin Spacey as Richard III

Kevin Spacey is one of my favorite actors, and even though he admits to not having done much Shakespeare, I am confident that he can pull off a dramatic Richard III on the coattails of his acting prowess.  The misshapen King is one of the most evil in Shakespeare, along with Iago and Lady Macbeth.  I imagine the challenge for any actor is to draw some measure of sympathy from the audience.

Russell Beale Does the Sonnets

Once you have memorised your favourite though, take your cue from Russell Beale for the reading itself. In a recent Guardian webchat, the actor offered his advice on good diction: "I think clarity is as much to do with intention as anything else. You must really want to talk to people in the back row and if you really want to, you will." The actor added: "Easier said than done, though."

Image credit and reference: Simon Russell Beale leads complete Shakespeare sonnets readathon.

I credit the New York Shakespeare Exchange for turning me onto to the Bard's sonnets and illuminating many of them in ways I would've never imagined.  I have many things on my plate right now, but in the future I'd like to give these sonnets a go at reciting.  In any case, if I were in London, I'd join Russell Beale & Co. for their June 1st readathon at the Southbank Centre.

Marion Cotillard as Lady Macbeth

This anticipated new production by The Snowtown Murders director Justin Kurzel happens to star Michael Fassbender as Macbeth and Marion Cotillard as Lady Macbeth; if anything can lift a curse, it’s this pair of actors.

Image credits and reference: Here Are the First Posters from ‘Macbeth,’ Starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard.

I love Marion Cotillard, and Michael Fassbender ain't all that bad, either.  She played a captivating, mysterious character, opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in `Inception, and it was easy to fall in love with her.  I am eager to see how this French beauty does with one of the more complicated, intriguing women in Shakespeare.  Lady Macbeth's unsex me is a pained call for self-evisceration.

The Case for King Lear as the Best

Sarah Polley as Cordelia and Charles Kingsman as King Lear

I cannot seem to find a satisfactory clip on YouTube on Act V scene iii, when King Lear enters center stage with the dead Cordelia in his arms:

Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones:
Had I your tongues and eyes, I'ld use them so
That heaven's vault should crack. She's gone for ever!
I know when one is dead, and when one lives;
She's dead as earth. Lend me a looking-glass;
If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,
Why, then she lives.

This offering from the Royal Shakespeare Company makes for sound, academic reading, but terrible dramatic acting!  You see, King Lear is distraught, so profoundly that his wail is less howl and more guttural, pained expression that comes from the very marrow of his bones.  I imagine Shakespeare simply had to translate this expression into words that fit his iambic pentameter, but if he had directed this production, he'd set the acting correctly.  The entire play builds up to this denouement, Lear as the agent of hubris, not just for himself but also for others, and Cordelia as its innocent victim.  It is a human tragedy of a tall order, because we see the fall of man, when conceit courses through him like poisoned blood.  It is a brilliant piece of drama.

The Millions engaged experts to offer what they saw as the best among Shakespearean plays, in honor of the Bard's 450th birthday on April 23rd 1564.  In Shakespeare’s Greatest Play? 5 Experts Share Their Opinions, Doug Lanier offers his bit on King Lear.

Now I have offered mine.  

The Case for Othello as the Best

Irene Jacob as Desdemona and Laurence Fishburne as Othello

Act V, scene ii is dark and foreboding, as it is violent and horrifying.  Othello has heard enough from Iago, about his wife Desdemona's infidelity, and is now resolved to kill her.  In his mind, he has cause to do so.  The end of ridding him (and her, too) of this infidelity justifies murder as the means.  For me, the most profound, romantic remarks in literature come from Desdemona:

DESDEMONA O, falsely, falsely murder'd! EMILIA Alas, what cry is that? OTHELLO That! what?  EMILIA Out, and alas! that was my lady's voice. Help! help, ho! help! O lady, speak again! Sweet Desdemona! O sweet mistress, speak!  DESDEMONA A guiltless death I die.  EMILIA O, who hath done this deed?  DESDEMONA Nobody; I myself. Farewell. Commend me to my kind lord: O, farewell!

Desdemona is the paradigm of love, loyalty and kindness.  She is genuinely confused and troubled about what her husband is evidently accusing her of.  She is absolutely helpless, as he muscles himself over her and snuffs her to death.  But even with her very last breath, she takes full ownership and responsibility for that very means that is Othello's.  There is no blame or guilt to be doled out here.  The play explores the psychology of envy and manipulation, along with racism and social class, in a drama that is also dripping with Christian overtones and specifically the presence of the Devil.  The play does all of this with surgical precision and dramatic patience, that I remain utterly in awe about what Shakespeare did.

The Millions engaged experts to offer what they saw as the best among Shakespearean plays, in honor of the Bard's 450th birthday on April 23rd 1564.  In Shakespeare’s Greatest Play? 5 Experts Share Their Opinions, Elisa Oh offers her bit on Othello.

Now I have offered mine.  

The Case for Hamlet as the Best

I love this bit from Hamlet.  I think it is as underrated in its import, as was the sonnet that Romeo and Juliet speak to one another upon their first meeting.  It is philosophy rife with pathos and, I argue, resolution.  Some critics and aficionados may view Hamlet's indecisiveness and inaction as some character flaw.  Which it may be, of course.  But really the entirety of the play leading up to "Not a whit..." is a contretemps to the impulse of laying moral issues neatly in a box, closing it straightaway, and sliding it into the wardrobe.  Instead, Shakespeare suggests that such moral issues must stay on the table in their agonizing ambiguity, recalcitrance and loose-endedness.  He defies that impulse, in other words.  

Imagine being in Hamlet's shoes.  Your beloved father just died, murdered more specifically.  Your loving mother re-marries way too quickly, in the midst of your grief.  You see your father in unexpected places.  If this emotional trauma and horror weren't enough, you also have emerging desire to take revenge and kill his murderer.  Which of course is at the heart of Hamlet's moral dilemma.  He is paralyzed into indecisiveness and inaction, precisely because he must be so.  He must make the effort, he must take the time, and he must undergo a painstaking process to come to grips with this trauma, horror and dilemma.  Never mind the fact that he, of course, must do something about it.  It is a tour de force effort on the dramatist-cum-psychologist's part.

The Millions engaged experts to offer what they saw as the best among Shakespearean plays, in honor of the Bard's 450th birthday on April 23rd 1564.  In Shakespeare’s Greatest Play? 5 Experts Share Their Opinions, Ros Barber offers his bit on Hamlet.  

Now I have offered mine.  

Shakespeare and The Experience Of It All

This five minute film charts the remarkable journey with Shakespeare of a class of 15 year olds from Queensbridge Performing and Visual Arts College in Birmingham as part of the RSC's national schools programme, The Learning and Performance Network. 

The film is a behind-the-scenes record of the impact on the students, their teacher and parents as they first encounter Shakespeare and The Winter's Tale, rehearse an extract for a local Shakespeare festival involving 5 other schools and then perform it on the stage of our Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. It shows the impact on young people of making a deep connection to Shakespeare.

I love the spirit and the effort of this.  There is such wealth to Shakespeare, which is relevant and applicable to our lives now.  I've read and watched Shakespeare for 35 years now, and was absolutely enthralled with the text and looked forward to their staging with delight.  Both text and staging were formal, but what I've come to appreciate more are the process, the learning, and the journey of Shakespeare.  What the high schoolers in The Learning and Performance Network do certainly doesn't have to be formal or even skilled per se.  What is most important is the experience of it all.

`Love's Labour's Lost, `Love's Labour's Won

In introducing the upcoming season for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Artistic Director Gregory Doran tells us that there is `Love's Labour's Won, along with `Love's Labour's Lost.  They're different plays, with the former being `Much Ado About Nothing.

Which sounds positively curious.

RSC Erica Whyman Offers Up a Bold Challenge

Erica Whyman, Deputy Artistic Director with the Royal Shakespeare Company, doesn't so much introduce the upcoming season's fare as she does challenge her actors and audience in a bolder, more contemporary, socially conscious mindset toward Shakespeare.  For example, she references the saying that well-behaved women seldom make history.  So she asks, What does it mean to be well-behaved and badly-behaved and to make history in the context of being a woman?

I'm intrigued.

`What You Will - A Sea Dog's Tale

Sarah Clough, Simone Ellul and Chris Galea

As a retelling, aimed at a young audience, the piece opens not with the play at all, but with the very enticing, if somewhat all-too popular, concept of an Elizabethan ship’s crew who are desperately badgered by a young Will Shakespeare to take him on as a resident sailor/writer. 

Shakespeare (Chris Galea), eager to experience life at sea and draw inspiration for his plays and writing, is allowed on board and joins in the storytelling of the captain (Phil Coggins) and his crew (Sarah Clough and Simone Ellul) as they tell him the story of the Shipwreck of Illeria.

Reference: Shakespeare Out at Sea.

In response to a post A pirate’s comic retelling of Bard’s Twelfth Night strikes a chord with younger audience by Anzan Hoshin Roshi on a Google+ community on Shakespeare, I commented:

I love this... taking the titular invitation "Or What You Will" to heart! Of course it coaxes another saying out of us, doesn't it: Where there's a Will(iam), there's a way (lol).