Overview

The National Theatre’s years at the Old Vic were the most Shakespearean period in its history, one which included Laurence Olivier’s Othello and Shylock, a radical all-male As You Like It, the Berliner Ensemble’s Coriolanus and Tom Stoppard’s classic offshoot, Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead. Drawing extensively upon the company archives, this book tells the interlinked stories of the National’s relationship with Shakespeare through a series of production case studies. Between them these illuminate Olivier’s significance as actor and director, the National’s pioneering accommodation of European theatre practitioners, and its ways of engaging Shakespeare with the contemporary.

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9781474241045

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Reviews

Robert Shaughnessy's Shakespeare in the Theatre: The National Theatre, 1963-1975: Olivier and Hall makes a valuable contribution to Shakespearean performance history and provides a cornerstone to Bloomsbury's Shakespeare in the Theatre series. * Theatre Journal * Shows the actor shaping the legacy that so strongly shaped him...Highlights include unsparing accounts of Olivier's infamous productions of Othello in blackface and of The Merchant of Venice with a custom set of dentures that rearranged his celebrated face into a Semitic caricature. From such appalling expressions of minstrelsy-like love and theft, Shaughnessy does not permit the reader to look away. Yet the picture he paints, of a company cast in the shadow of the Royal Shakespeare Company and fighting to shake its superfluous reputation, is more pointillist tableau than knife-edged portrait. Taken as a whole, the book deftly captures Shakespeare's centrality to the National Theatre's sometimes canny, sometimes desultory handling of the period's political and aesthetic churn. * Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 *

Shows the actor shaping the legacy that so strongly shaped him...Highlights include unsparing accounts of Olivier's infamous productions of Othello in blackface and of The Merchant of Venice with a custom set of dentures that rearranged his celebrated face into a Semitic caricature. From such appalling expressions of minstrelsy-like love and theft, Shaughnessy does not permit the reader to look away. Yet the picture he paints, of a company cast in the shadow of the Royal Shakespeare Company and fighting to shake its superfluous reputation, is more pointillist tableau than knife-edged portrait. Taken as a whole, the book deftly captures Shakespeare's centrality to the National Theatre's sometimes canny, sometimes desultory handling of the period's political and aesthetic churn. * Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 *

Robert Shaughnessy’s Shakespeare in the Theatre: The National Theatre, 1963–1975: Olivier and Hall makes a valuable contribution to Shakespearean performance history and provides a cornerstone to Bloomsbury’s Shakespeare in the Theatre series. * Theatre Journal * Shows the actor shaping the legacy that so strongly shaped him…Highlights include unsparing accounts of Olivier’s infamous productions of Othello in blackface and of The Merchant of Venice with a custom set of dentures that rearranged his celebrated face into a Semitic caricature. From such appalling expressions of minstrelsy-like love and theft, Shaughnessy does not permit the reader to look away. Yet the picture he paints, of a company cast in the shadow of the Royal Shakespeare Company and fighting to shake its superfluous reputation, is more pointillist tableau than knife-edged portrait. Taken as a whole, the book deftly captures Shakespeare’s centrality to the National Theatre’s sometimes canny, sometimes desultory handling of the period’s political and aesthetic churn. * Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 *

Author Information

Robert Shaughnessy is Professor of Theatre at the University of Kent, UK

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