25 Thursday Nov 2021
Posted in Theatre
Tags
dress rehearsal, Noises Off, Opening Night, Philip Henslowe, Shakespeare in Love, stage superstitions, theatre
Us – after dress. Or tech. Or whatever it was.
So the play opens tomorrow night.
We had dress rehearsals, last night – or perhaps not quite… I mean it in that Noises-Offish way, you know: if this is tech, when do we do dress? And if this is dress, when do we do tech?
Yes, well… Continue reading
09 Thursday Aug 2018
Tags
Annie Whitehead, Henslowe's Diary, historical novels, Internet, Mercedes Rochelle, Philip Henslowe, research
There is no doubt that, when it comes to researching historical novels, there is a Before the Internet and an After the Internet.
I daresay the same applies to a lot of fields – but let me stick to mine: I’m old enough to remember a time when, if you were Italian and wanted, say, to read Henslowe’s Diary, your best option was a trip of several hundred kilometers – to read the book in Bologna or Venice, supposing someone had told you that Nineteenth Century copies of JP Collier’s edited version were to be found there at all*… Continue reading
17 Tuesday Jan 2017
Posted in Theatre
Tags
Brutus, Chamberlain's Men, Elizabethan theatre, Julius Caesar, Philip Henslowe, protagonist, top billing, William Shakespeare
I re-watched Mankiewicz’s 1953 Julius Caesar, last night – the one with James Mason, Marlon Brando and John Gielgud – all the more happily because I’d been very much afraid that Shakespeare would disappear from Italian television after the end of 2016.
Of course it’s early days – but let us hope. Meanwhile, I I was once more struck by how much the play is centred on Brutus, for all that it is titled for The Life and Death of Julius Caesar… Well, certainly Caesar’s death is the centrepiece, and in life and death he deeply affects all the other characters well after he is stabbed in Act 3. Still, Brutus, his doubts and his resolutions are often centre-stage, and I can’t help wondering. Continue reading
10 Tuesday May 2016
Geoffrey Rush as Henslowe in Shakespeare in Love
Even apart from Shakespeare’s death, 1616 was a momentous year, theatre-wise, and Shakespeare’s Globe is going to make the most of it, by celebrating this year’s numerous anniversaries with a host of events, shows, talks, concerts…
This month, the focus is on Philip Henslowe, one of the two great impresarios of Elizabethan theatre, Edward Alleyn’s father in law, and the man whose diary, preserved through the centuries, gave us most of what we know about the daily business of playhouses and companies. Continue reading
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