November 5, 2011

IS SHAKESPEARE STILL RELEVANT TODAY?  
Diana Dekker
Dominion Post: YOUR WEEKEND, pp 9-11
Saturday November 5, 2011

Four hundred years away from his time and as far as possible from his place, Shakespeare has not lost his following. The Shakespeare Globe Centre New Zealand is thriving, two local Shakespeare productions will be on at next year’s New Zealand International Arts Festival, and so will another two international takes.

The all-male Shakespearean company Propeller, from London, is doing Henry V and The Winter’s Tale, and Irish company Pan Pan is bringing The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane. The latter is described as “an irreverent riff on Hamlet that does not so much update or deconstruct the play as explode it.”

But it’s the two main players of the Kiwi productions – Ngakau Toa’s te reo version of Troilus and Cressida and Royale Productions’ Frequently Asked Questions: To Be or Not to Be, etc – who have had their lives changed by the Bard. [More]