Category: Shakespeare Plays

William Shakespeare is widely regarded as one of the most influential playwrights in history, and his plays have been performed and studied for centuries. From the timeless tragedy of Romeo and Juliet to the hilarious antics of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s plays continue to captivate audiences around the world. Whether you’re a fan of tragedy, comedy, or romance, there’s a Shakespeare play for everyone. So why not revisit these timeless classics and discover the magic of Shakespeare for yourself?

Browse the entire text of Shakespeare’s plays right here on Shakespeare Geek.

Twelfth Night On PBS (Leaving Soon!)

December 9, 2025December 8, 2025 ~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Every year it’s the same, for those of us not living in New York. The play and cast are set for Public Theatre’s summer Shakespeare In The Park performances, and we gasp at the star power, knowing that we’ll never get to see it. Even if you’re in walking distance, apparently you’ve still got to wait in line for hours for “first come first served” tickets.

Not so fast! This year it was recorded, and now showing on PBS Great Performances! Sadly, it’s leaving on Dec 31, 2025, so you’ll have to be fast! Luckily I got to catch it.

This year we got Twelfth Night, starring: Peter Dinklage (Malvolio), Sandra Oh (Olivia, Jesse Tyler Ferguson (Andrew Aguecheek), Khris Davis (Orsino), and, in an inspired bit of casting, Lupita Nyong’o and her real-life brother Junior Nyong’o as Viola and Sebastian,

Thoughts

Jesse Tyler Ferguson as Andrew Aguecheek — Jesse Tyler Ferguson was unfortunately little to work with as Andrew Aguecheek.

It took me a little while to realize, in the opening scene, that Viola keeps dropping in to Swahili. This had to be confusing for the audience who’d already be struggling to hear the words, only to have them randomly becoming incomprehensible. It’s not a new idea, plenty of tv shows have characters switching back and forth between English and Spanish, or other appropriate language for the context. I get it? As someone who only speaks English I don’t like it, for obvious reasons – but I understand that someone who is bilingual, maybe somebody for whom English is not their native or primary langauge, might actually appreciate this. I still stand by my argument though that it makes Shakespeare just that much harder to understand.

I really liked the way Orsino dealt with “the boys”, his entourage of followers who laugh at his jokes, agree with his pronouncements, and drop to do pushups when he’s displeased. I don’t usually think of Orsino with a posse, but it works here and nicely offsets Olivia’s crew who do this fun little switcheroo number when Cesario first shows up to deliver his message, all “masked” in sunglasses and taking their turn as the lady of the house. Lots of movement on stage, lots of laughs for the audience.

If I had to pick the “big name” from this year’s cast it would be Peter Dinklage. I hate to say things like “he’s easily recognizable in everything he does” but I think that Game of Thrones had a lot to do with that. So when I heard he’d be playing Malvolio, that’s what I looked forward to.

Peter Dinklage as Malvolio — Peter Dinklage kept doing that thing with his hands that Mike Johnson does, I have to assume it was on purpose.

And I have to say, I didn’t love his portrayal. They’ve got him doing the weird “I don’t move my arms when I walk” thing that seems to accentuate his short stature, like they’re playing up some “little people walk funny” clichè. He’s got a silly haircut and he’s doing a silly voice, too. So yes, every time he’s on stage, there’s a good audience reaction for everything he does. But is that acting? He gets the laugh just by showing up, or changing how he stands, without ever saying anything.

Here’s the thing about casting Junior to play Viola’s brother – he’s actually Viola’s brother. That’s an opportunity I’m sure many directors would kill for. They look alike. Viola, as Cesario, spends most of the play dressed up in a man’s suit, which only adds to the charade. Shakespeare did love to play with twins, but I’m sure we’ve all been to many productions over the years where little more than a hat or scarf is all we get to say “Oh, ok, these two are supposed to be indistinguishable” and then go with it. For once, this time, we actually believe that they could easily be confused for one another. Except for the height – Junior’s significantly taller :). But you can’t have everything!

And then … and I love this … Junior speaks Swahili. Now the opening scene makes sense! Of course opening that way was confusing, here she is a little stranger in a strange land, speaking a language only she knows. She’s lost and confused; she has no one. That sets up Viola’s story beautifully.I don’t remember if she slips into Swahili randomly at other times in the play, but it would be great if she did. English is part of her cover story and it’s hard to keep up with it all the time. So, the reunion when her brother arrives, and they can both return to speaking their mother tongue? That’s great stuff, and I’m glad I saw it through to the end.

See It Before It Leaves

It’s Shakespeare, it’s free, it’s got celebrities you know. How can you not see it? Catch it before December 31, 2025! I hope they make this the new standard and we get to see the show this way every year.

Macbeth as a 13yr Old Girl? Say More.

September 9, 2025September 4, 2025 ~ duane ~ Leave a comment

There’s a long-standing debate about what it means to produce your own interpretation of Shakespeare, and what the limits should be. How closely do you have to track the original plot? How many characters do you need to keep? Stuff like that. Tell me that the Lion King has elements of Hamlet and I’ll agree with you. Tell me that it’s a modern adaptation of Hamlet and we’ve got an argument on our hands. An evil uncle and redemption for a murdered father isn’t all you need to call yourself Hamlet.

Then again, I’m bored with every Macbeth interpretation between about a “powerful” husband and wife where all we do is swap out the environment. Media moguls, restaurant owners, samurai warriors, mafia. But can we break it down more? Do we have any interpretations of Macbeth as a woman? What about as a child? If we take the standard “theme” of Macbeth to be ambition, heaven knows that there are plenty of ambitious teenagers out there roaming high school hallways and plotting takeovers of everything from the cheerleading squad to student government.

What if Macbeth were a 13-year-old child star trying to make it big and Lady Macbeth her pushy stage mum? Throw in a séance and a geriatric make-up artist with a vision and, snap, crackle and pop, we’ve transported Macbeth to a television studio in 2006.

https://www.watoday.com.au/culture/theatre/what-if-macbeth-were-a-13-year-old-pop-star-audiences-are-about-to-find-out-20250812-p5mmal.html

And so we have Mackenzie, a project by Australian playwright Yve Blake. I’m intrigued by the changes here – the gender flip and the age shift most notably, but also Lady Macbeth as stage mom? Brilliant. Every Macbeth I can think of has them as a married (or close enough) couple. But what about the power a mother wields over her daughter, no matter how ambitious the daughter? And where does that daughter’s ambition come from, was it ever really hers? Or is it just planted there from behind the scenes by Mom whispering in her ear?

Sadly this fascinating new idea is limited to being a stage play in Sydney, Australia, so my chances of ever seeing it are pretty small indeed! But I wanted to shout it out here because I love the idea and wish I could see more.

How Do I Get This Lady Macbeth Game From The RSC?

September 8, 2025September 4, 2025 ~ duane ~ Leave a comment

https://mashable.com/article/royal-shakespeare-company-video-game-macbeth-lilli

I’ve seen multiple links about this upcoming Lady Macbeth game from the Royal Shakespeare Company, and I think I may have even posted about it in the past. But it seems closer now to reality, so I wanted to dig in deeper and see if there are some hints about how we’ll be able to play it. (Spoiler alert – alas, not yet.)

Lili has now been shown at Cannes and the Venice Film Festival, which I still don’t fully understand because isn’t it a videogame, not a film? Or is it really going to turn out to be a film that’s got just enough interactive elements that they’re pitching it as a game?

In Lili, one must enter a hacker’s den with a USB stick in hand, don headphones, and follow the poetic instructions of the Hecate collective — Macbeth’s three witches, reimagined here as hackers.

Ok, I’m with you so far. Are you this Lili character? She never actually interacts with the witches, so probably not.

Lili begins as an initiation, where the player is asked to take a vow and accept the hacker persona, giving you agency within a moral grey zone. One assumes control of the game’s surveillance technology to the fullest, as you have access to Lili’s personal documents like her marriage certificate, photos, and passport, and can tune into one of the three different CCTV cameras placed in her house as well as her phone and computer screens.

Ok, so we’re not Lili, we’re spying on Lili, which is cool from a game perspective. But I’m not sure who that makes us, and how it maps to Macbeth.

At one point, you are prompted by the Hecate witches to shut off Lili’s access to a YouTube makeup tutorial, just like the Iranian government can do it at any time. You can then control Lili’s VPN connection and, with that, the flow of information.

Again, interesting. Reminds me a little of the David Tennant / Patrick Stewart version of Hamlet, where they kept showing us angles through security cameras and really playing up the sense of paranoia. Here we’re taking that even further, it’s not just what Big Brother knows, it’s what power they have over things like your access to information.

But will we ever get to play this game? <starts skimming…>

The creators behind Lili are hoping to keep the momentum going to raise funds for the full version of the game,

Aw, man! So basically it’s still just a demo to be shopped around the festivals, and probably will be for some time. What a shame. The ideas sound fascinating, even if they’re not as directly related to Macbeth‘s text as one might hope. It does appear to be a VR game, regardless, so even if it does get made you’re presumably going to need an Oculus or something similar.

Still, we can hope! I’ve been doing the Shakespeare Geek thing for 25 years now and I’ve written about a whole lot of Shakespeare video games – some big, some small. Some made it out the door, some never did. Who knows where this one will end up.

Ready for Hamnet?

August 28, 2025August 28, 2025 ~ duane ~ 2 Comments

The much-anticipated movie adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet hits theatres this Thanksgiving, and the trailer dropped this week. Let’s watch!

Ok, thoughts?

I never actually read the book. It came out in 2016 as part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series by Random House, a project to create modern novelizations of many Shakespeare classics by well-known authors. I did read Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood and Macbeth by Jo Nesbø, but something about Hamnet just didn’t work for me. I don’t think it really fit the pattern of the others, first of all. Are you retelling Hamlet, or are you imagining a life where Shakespeare’s son didn’t die? I wasn’t into a story about the latter. When tragedy happens in real life, I don’t find it a useful exercise to imagine how life might have been different. I don’t find it hopeful, I find it depressing.

But, that’s just me. Maybe I’ll try it again, before the movie? I definitely want to see the movie. I saw All Is True, and I loved All Is True – except the bits about Hamnet. I’m nothing if not consistent.

Ok! Let’s talk about the trailer. Somebody who’s read the book, fill me in, because right off … who is Agnes, and is she a witch? When we’re not blaring the soundtrack and the cinematographer is not taking inspiration from Millais’ Ophelia, the first bit of dialogue I got was, “If you touch people, you can see their future.” So, then, this is neither a reimagining of Shakespeare’s life if Hamnet had lived, nor a retelling of Hamlet? It’s a fantasy?

Really, that’s about all their is to say about the trailer. We see repeated shots of Paul Mescal as Shakespeare and Jessie Buckley as Agnes, and we hear a whole lot of soundtrack. We have no idea what the plot is, we get no meaningful dialogue or meet any supporting cast. It’s almost like the trailer’s made just for people who read the book, which isn’t how these things usually go. Usually the movie goes out of its way to appeal to the audience that hasn’t read the book.

So, people who’ve read the book, what do you think?

Review: Commonwealth Shakespeare’s As You Like It 2025 (Part 2)

August 6, 2025August 4, 2025 ~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Ok, I had to get all those stories out of the way, sorry about that. For me, those were the highlight of the night.

How was the play? It was good. Fine. I’m not a big fan of this one because there’s not really a lot to work with. The plot is thin, the characters for the most part are so shallow a casual audience-member will easily lose track of which one is which. And the ending is just nuts.

It dawned on me this year that AYLI is basically a teen sitcom storyline. It’s all “OMG he likes me what do I do what do I say?!!” with lots of giddy screaming and running around. It’s definitely funny at parts, a real crowd pleaser when it’s being over the top obvious and not lost in the wordplay. But there’s nothing to sink your teeth into and discuss.

Or is there?

I don’t know if I just never noticed it, or this production really played up the angle, but it seemed this year that Ganymede leaned really heavily on the “How can you not see that I’m Rosalind?” moments. He says, talk to me like you’d talk to Rosalind Just go ahead and call me Rosalind. There’s even an awkward scene with a kiss. Orlando’s confused about a lot of feelings, to put it mildly.

Which got me thinking, Maybe this is obvious to the younger crowd maybe I’m just an old man trying to understand. But …let’s start the play in the forest. Orlando meets a new friend, Ganymede. Ganymede certainly looks and talks and presents himself like a fellow boy. But Ganymede’s also obviously much more comfortable talking about girl things. He wants to tell Orlando what girls want. He wants Orlando to talk to him like a girl. And then, just like that, one day Ganymede is gone and Rosalind is in their place.

We the audience know that it’s Rosalind disguised as Ganymede. But, and I’m sure I’m going to get my terminology wrong here, what if Ganymede was in fact a character that on the outside was presenting themselves to the world like a male, but inside, identified as female? Until one day they are?

Orlando, for his part, doesn’t seem to have a problem with his attraction for this character, either. I don’t think Orlando cares who Ganymede identifies as. Is that what they mean by “pan”?

I don’t really know where I’m going with this. Like I said, I’m just an old dad trying to understand a lot of new things. Tell me that AYLI isn’t just about “gender bending” and “cross dressing,” tell me it’s about gender identity, and suddenly I’m paying attention. Then it’s something more than just a farce to laugh at. Then it’s got a point to make the audience think about.

How about I get off my soapbox now and share some pictures?