15 Thursday Jun 2017
Now, gentlemen, betake you to your arms,
And see that Malta be well fortified;
And it behoves you to be resolute;
For Calymath, having hover’d here so long,
Will win the town, or die before the walls.FIRST KNIGHT. And die he shall; for we will never yield.
23 Tuesday Aug 2016
Posted in Theatre
Back in 2012 Douglas Morse directed a movie version of Kit Marlowe’s Jew of Malta. Judging by the trailer and teasers, it looks like filmed theatre, with a curious mix of period and non-period costumes and settings… Continue reading
28 Saturday May 2016
Tags
christopher marlowe, Edward Alleyn, Infinite riches in a little room, Tamburlaine the Great, The Jew of Malta
F. Murray Abraham as Barabas
It has always seemed to me that, while the first part of Tamburlaine the Great is all
black and white and red and gold, Marlowe’s later play, The Jew of Malta, bursts with colours.
It struck me from the very first time I met on the page Barabas, the eponymous Jew, first seen in his counting-house, lamenting the nuisance of counting silver… Continue reading
21 Saturday Jun 2014
Posted in Theatre
Tags
asidenotes, Canterbury, christopher marlowe, play-reading groups, The Jew of Malta, The Paper Stage
I 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?
Scribblings 