Shakespeare in the Theatre: The National Theatre, 19631975: Olivier and Hall

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

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Robert Shaughnessys Shakespeare in the Theatre: The National Theatre, 19631975: Olivier and Hall makes a valuable contribution to Shakespearean performance history and provides a cornerstone to Bloomsburys Shakespeare in the Theatre series. * Theatre Journal *
Shows the actor shaping the legacy that so strongly shaped himHighlights include unsparing accounts of Oliviers 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 Shakespeares centrality to the National Theatres sometimes canny, sometimes desultory handling of the periods political and aesthetic churn. * Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 *

Author Bio

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