Tag Archives: Canterbury

The other Birthday Boy

18 Saturday Oct 2014

Posted by in History, Theatre

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Marlowe1A little Kit Marlowe, today.

First, Andrew Dickson’s nice article from The Guardian, tracing parallels with Shakespeare, and suggesting the What-if every Marlowe enthusiast worth the name must play at least once – and no, it has nothing to do with Kit and Will being one and the same.

Then a link to an overview of what the Cambridge Marlowe Dramatic Society is doing this year to celebrate.

Oh, and then there is Canterbury-based company Fourth Monkey: they are having a Marlowe 450 celebratory season – including a Massacre at Paris in the cathedral crypt, that can’t have been anything short of thrilling.

And let me add, as a finishing touch, novelist Elizabeth Bear’s thoughts on Kit in Cambridge and the Corpus Christi and Grafton portraits – posted on her blog as she did her field research for The Stratford Man.

Because, you know, it isn’t just about Shakespeare, after all.

 

 

The Paper Stage

21 Saturday Jun 2014

Posted by in Theatre

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1952.PlayReadingI guess much depends on exactly which sort of magic you seek when it comes to theatre – because there are so many.

But if you love the words, and all the imagining the words can spark off, then a play-reading group might be your thing. It might be mine: much as I have been increasingly busying myself with such production aspects as stage direction and lighting, I’m a playwright first. And, words being my stuff, I would love to be part of a project like The Paper Stage: people gathering at the Gulbenkian Cafè, in Canterbury, to read Elizabethan plays aloud.

No experience needed, and, from what I gather, no rehearsals: one just lets the group know, turns up, and… reads. And the play takes on a life of its own, judging by last month’s Romeo and Juliet.  Oh, to be in England, now that such a brilliant idea is here…

As researcher and blogger Eoin Price says in his asidenotes, this means a chance to hear – if not to see – performed plays that are seldom staged, and to explore the varied richness of Elizabethan theatre in much more depth than it is usual.

Wish I could be in Canterbury next Monday, for the second Paper Stage event, a reading of Marlowe’s Jew of Malta. And because obviously I can’t, I’m already wondering: can I think up a Paper Stage-like group around here?

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