I have been going to see performances of Shakespeare’s plays since the 1940s, and have seen most of the plays many times, in a wide range of production styles, on film and television as well as on the stage. I have seen some of them played in French, in German, in Swedish, in Romanian, in Hungarian, in Polish, in Greek, in Japanese, in Chinese, and in Russian. I have seen them given in pure and in heavily adapted texts. Early in my career I was a schoolmaster, struggling with the problems of making Shakespeare understandable, and if possible enjoyable, to the young. Later I taught Shakespeare in universities both in England and overseas. On being appointed director of the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham I became, I believe, the first ever Professor of Shakespeare Studies – there are quite a lot of them now.

In this interview, Maria Aberg gives a detailed account of her production of Days of Significance, which premiered at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, on 10 January 2007 and then toured to the Tricycle Theatre in London and to other venues across the UK. Aberg explains how her production highlighted a pervasive presence of violence connected to the kind of masculinity allowed and fostered in young men at home that then has enormous consequences when these same men are sent into armed conflict abroad. She also explains how the fact that Days of Significance was loosely inspired by Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing had a significant impact on how differently her production was interpreted and reviewed in Stratford-upon-Avon and elsewhere, where most members of the audience were not aware (and were not made aware) of the Shakespearean connection. In this respect, Aberg’s interview reinforces the realization shared by most of the contributors to this collection that the significance of ‘wartime Shakespeare’ is often complex and context-dependent.

This interview offers Iqbal Khan’s directorial perspective on his influential production of Othello (2015). The casting of Hugh Quarshie as Othello and Lucian Msamati as Iago made Othello a play more about intra-racial than inter-racial relations. However, Khan explains how the inclusion of references to the torture of prisoners of war by the allied forces during the Iraq War helped him highlight the ways in which Othello is more than a play about its protagonist’s doubt about his place as a person of colour in a world dominated by people with different traditions that exclude him. According to Khan, the play is equally (if not more) invested in exploring the nature of Othello’s work and the nature of his experience as the leader of mercenary forces. Besides, as Khan points out, the questions that haunt Othello haunt all of us. Some of these questions – including what makes up one’s systems of loyalty, what makes up one’s systems of justice and judgement, or whom one is accountable to – are especially problematic at times of war, because they often reveal a slippage between lack of control (and victimhood) and abuse of power (and complicity).

In May 2015, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and the University of Birmingham launched a five-year collaboration with the ambition to redefine the relationship between academic work and artistic practice. This chapter takes the form of an interview with RSC and University of Birmingham personnel, and discusses the processes and structures of the collaboration, whilst also engaging with the challenges and lessons learned over the course of the past five years. Liam Semler’s concept of ‘ardenspace’ is referenced to support the idea of a new space being created: a space where artists, scholars and students can experiment together to explore new possibilities for teaching, research and theatre practice. This chapter highlights the importance of collaboration and creative experiment while also reflecting on the challenges of enacting change beyond the walls of the rehearsal room or the teaching space. The collaboration ultimately asks for a redefinition of terms such as ‘research’ and ‘impact’ by challenging the University and the RSC into new ways of thinking, researching and teaching.

Outlining the historical scope of the book, this chapter discusses Shakespeare’s and Beckett’s works in periods that were conceived of as inherently transformational. The chapter will address the early links between Shakespeare and Beckett that were established in British theatre history. The second part of this chapter will read the scenes on Dover cliff in Act IV of King Lear as a metaphor for the theatre in which both Beckett and Shakespeare explore the edges of their very medium. This latter part examines Beckett’s ‘variations on rise and fall’ in many of his plays, such as All that Fall, Rough for Theatre and Waiting for Godot – which, in dialogue with King Lear, dramatize the experience of blindness, crawling and falling.

No-one has yet quite agreed what to call it: livecast, live from, simulcast, alternative content, cinecast, cinemacast, streamed transmission, outside broadcast, digital broadcast cinema, ‘live’ theatre broadcast, captured live broadcast, event cinema, theatrofilm. But the phenomenon of cinema broadcasts, live, delayed and encore, is a new and striking area for the experience of Shakespeare theatre productions. Their various forms of transmission and consumption mark out crucial questions about the distribution and audiences for the event-object, whatever name we give it. The chapter looks at the techniques for filming live performance and the ways it makes meaning. It then examines examples from the National Theatre in London or from other theatres whose Shakespeare productions it distributes (under the label National Theatre Live), as well as Shakespeare’s Globe and the Royal Shakespeare Company.