Shakespeare Magazine 11
The shiny new-look Shakespeare Magazine 11 is adorned with a stunning cover image of Lily James and Richard Madden in Kenneth Branagh’s Romeo and Juliet. Also in Issue 11, SK Moore tells us about his compelling new graphic novel of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, while broadcaster Samira Ahmed turns her magnificently mercurial mind to the subject of Shakespeare. We have words with Pub Landlord comedian Al Murray about his recent brush with the Bard (and Judi Dench) at RSC Shakespeare Live. And our Editor raves about a 3-DVD box set of 1960s TV Shakespeare classic The Wars of the Roses. We chat with the great Don Warrington, star of Talawa Theatre’s earth-shaking King Lear at Manchester’s Royal Exchange – youthful co-star Alfred Enoch joins in too. Also this issue: we imagine what Tom Hiddleston’s Hamlet would look like, we explore the life of Elizabeth Siddal, Victorian Ophelia, and Bristol’s Insane Root scare the living daylights out of us with their Macbeth!
The shiny new-look Shakespeare Magazine 11 is adorned with a stunning cover image of Lily James and Richard Madden in Kenneth Branagh’s Romeo and Juliet. Also in Issue 11, SK Moore tells us about his compelling new graphic novel of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, while broadcaster Samira Ahmed turns her magnificently mercurial mind to the subject of Shakespeare. We have words with Pub Landlord comedian Al Murray about his recent brush with the Bard (and Judi Dench) at RSC Shakespeare Live. And our Editor raves about a 3-DVD box set of 1960s TV Shakespeare classic The Wars of the Roses. We chat with the great Don Warrington, star of Talawa Theatre’s earth-shaking King Lear at Manchester’s Royal Exchange – youthful co-star Alfred Enoch joins in too. Also this issue: we imagine what Tom Hiddleston’s Hamlet would look like, we explore the life of Elizabeth Siddal, Victorian Ophelia, and Bristol’s Insane Root scare the living daylights out of us with their Macbeth!
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Samira Ahmed<br />
Samira presented<br />
The National<br />
Theatre’s NT Live<br />
cinema broadcast<br />
of As You Like It in<br />
February 2016.<br />
Did you have a formative <strong>Shakespeare</strong><br />
experience? I know from experience that<br />
parents who place a high value on education<br />
often drum the Bard into their children...<br />
“Although my mum’s an actress I had no predirection<br />
towards <strong>Shakespeare</strong>. In fact, when we<br />
first read Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar and<br />
The Merchant of Venice in Year 8 at my school, I<br />
decided I loathed him. The language is undeniably<br />
hard at first encounter and Merchant is a bizarre<br />
choice to foist on children at that age. I felt<br />
genuinely cross at all the fuss being made about<br />
this writer! There’s much more innovative teaching<br />
now to get younger children into <strong>Shakespeare</strong><br />
through exposure to the theatricality of it. About<br />
six years ago I saw the RSC did a great Twitter<br />
Romeo and Juliet around the streets of London<br />
in a kind of real time – so brilliant. I can’t even<br />
recall what <strong>Shakespeare</strong> play we did for O-Level<br />
but I do know that my English teacher Mrs<br />
Anne Kirman was amazing and she transformed<br />
my understanding of him. We did Measure for<br />
Measure and Hamlet at A-Level and I fell in love<br />
with Hamlet like teenagers do. The transformative<br />
moment was probably being taken to see Hamlet<br />
for the first time in the lower sixth in 1984 or ’85.<br />
It was with John Duttine at the Thorndyke Theatre<br />
in Leatherhead, in Elizabethan costume. It all came<br />
alive – I loved it.<br />
“The single greatest <strong>Shakespeare</strong> experience of<br />
my life was Robert Stephens as Falstaff in Henry IV<br />
Part 1 and 2, with Michael Maloney as Hal. First<br />
time back on stage after decades in a Falstaffian<br />
real-life wilderness of his own, and I was very close<br />
to the front row. It was a faultless, charismatic<br />
performance. It felt like he made eye contact with<br />
every member of the audience.<br />
“They have such great plots, too. I never fail to<br />
be excited at the way Hamlet builds to that climax<br />
with all those bodies strewn across the stage at the<br />
end, and you think: WTF, how did we get here?<br />
“It was school trips that made me discover<br />
theatre. It wasn’t something my family did. Mrs<br />
Kirman took her small Oxbridge class to the<br />
“Interestingly the Fiennes/Goold Richard III has<br />
almost no blood in it. The horror is all in the<br />
presentation and the ghastly menace on stage”<br />
22 shakespeare magazine
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