Brush up your Shakespeare

In the twelve months leading up to April 2007, the Complete Works Festival will perform everything Shakespeare wrote that was longer than a shopping list in Stratford-upon-Avon. The first time that this has ever been done under the umbrella of a single event or festival.

While the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) - not to be confused with the smaller Reduced Shakespeare Company - will pick up much of the work, other UK-based companies and international productions will join in the fun. Expect such delights as:

• New York-based theatre company, Tiny Ninja Theater, performs Hamlet for the first time in the UK using an inch-high cast of small, plastic ninja figurines.
• Multi award-winning Teatr Piesn Kozla (Song of the Goat Theatre) from Poland, presents its current work in progress, based on Macbeth.
• Forkbeard Fantasy’s production of Rough Magyck which looks for the supernatural in Shakespeare using mechanical sets, film, cartoon and puppetry.
• Yellow Earth in association with Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre give King Lear a modern spin in its bilingual (English and Mandarin) production.
• Chekhov International Theatre Festival in association with Cheek by Jowl performs its all-male Russian version of Twelfth Night.
• Cardboard Citizens applies its unique brand of theatre to Shakespeare's supposedly unfinished text Timon of Athens.
• and lots, lots more from Brazil, Germany, India, Japan, Kuwait and South Africa.

Something for everyone, and then some.



In the words of Cole Porter’s song from the musical Kiss Me Kate …

The girls today in society
Go for classical poetry,
So to win their hearts one must quote with ease
Aeschylus and Euripides.
But the poet of them all
Who will start 'em simply ravin'
Is the poet people call
The bard of Stratford-on-Avon.

Brush up your Shakespeare,
Start quoting him now.
Brush up your Shakespeare
And the women you will wow.