http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4694993.stm

By opening night, they will have rehearsed using phonetic scripts for two months and, hopefully, will render the play just as its author intended. They say their accents are somewhere between Australian, Cornish, Irish and Scottish, with a dash of Yorkshire – yet bizarrely, completely intelligible if you happen to come from North Carolina.

http://www.mehrnews.ir/en/NewsDetail.aspx?NewsID=208386

Iranian director Khosro Amiri announced on Tuesday that he is currently preparing a play that tells the story of the personal life of Shakespeare entitled “Mystery of Shakespeare’s Dolls”.

“My new play is a modern tragicomedy which reveals hidden aspects of Shakespeare’s life,” he added.

“Shakespeare is blind drunk in this play. He has four dolls and writes all his masterpieces based on his own personal life. For example, he writes Macbeth because he has problems with his wife and her family; that is, Shakespeare appears totally different on stage,” he explained.

I don’t have enough of an opinion on the politics surrounding the whole Rove thing to really take a stand either way. But when somebody makes such an articulate case comparing Rove to the “calculating, corpulent and very good at self-preservation” Falstaff it merits a mention. I wasn’t about to pass up an article that has gems such as this one: “It’s time for Bush II to be less Prince Hal and more Henry V. There is no better, smarter or meaner political operative than Karl Rove. But Bush II cannot afford to keep Falstaff on staff.” It even reads like a Shakespeare lesson :)!

Here’s a great way to get people talking about Richard III again — portray him as Saddam Hussein. Biggest complaints are coming from the Richard III society, who are quoted as saying “We already have our work cut out for us as it is without going to this extreme.”

I’ll bet that if they’d portrayed him as Bill Clinton nobody would bat an eye. 🙂