Shakespear in Perfomance

Commodity culture doesn’t want Shakespeare, it wants Shakespeare without Shakespeare.


Doubtlessly William Shakespeare is one of the most important and influential dramatist of the world.   His work in literature and drama is considered to be as very important, thus most of his poems and plays were translated into other languages reaching every corner of the world. Shakespeare’s work continued to flourish even after his death, as other theatre practitioners continued to produce his successful plays. His plays are still being produced in the present time by various contemporary theatre practitioners; however their productions are done within a considerable difference.
Different contemporary theatre practitioners are adopting Shakespearean plays, however they modify the play in order to suit their ideas. This means that they do not centrally stage the play, but they incorporate their own methods, and hence subject Shakespeare into the world of the modern artist.   Consequently contemporary theatre directors are no longer performing Shakespeare in a conventional way instead they are incorporating other mediums such as digital technology in order to create innovative performance
French theatre director Robert Lepage is a contemporary theatre practitioner who adopted various Shakespearean plays. He is considered by many as a genius in his use of video and multimedia projections through which he transforms the theatrical space. Shakespeare’s plays are quite important for Lepage in fact he produced several adaptations of his plays such as; Midsummer night dreams and Macbeth. All these productions were quite successful however, his most popular and successful adaptation of Shakespeare’s play is Hamlet. To Lepage ‘Hamlet’ is an interesting play mainly because of the links that the main character Hamlet, creates between his own taught and the acts he had to make, in fact Lepage declares that;
'What draws me to 'Hamlet' is his ability to forge a link between the acts...