Twelve years after the critical success of their first production of Hamlet which starred Alan Cumming and Eleanor Bron and transferred to the Donmar Warehouse, ETT once again take to the road in a new production with Ed Stoppard in the title role and Anita Dobson playing Queen Gertrude.
Hamlet wrestles with his demons, while his two sidekicks take centre stage. Full of dazzling wordplay and theatrical invention, Stoppard’s comic masterpiece reveals surprising new twists on Shakespeare’s most famous play.
Tom Stoppard is one of Britain’s greatest playwrights. His brilliant debut, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, launched an award-winning writing career that has included the plays Jumpers, Travesties, Arcadia and The Invention of Love as well as the screenplays for Empire of the Sun and Shakespeare in Love.
Identical twins Viola and Sebastian are shipwrecked. Believing her brother drowned, and determined to survive alone, Viola disguises herself as a boy. As ‘Cesario’ she enters the service of Orsino and is sent by him to woo Olivia.
But Olivia isn’t interested and ‘Cesario’ is swept into a merry-go-round world of unrequited love, mistaken identities, high comedy, low tricks and desperate passion.
You love someone, you can feel it, like a lump, summat you carry around with yer. Bloody hell, it’s either there or it int, like a hat.
If Romeo and Juliet had lived, would their marriage have survived? How long? Ten years? Twenty? Fifty? How would the union have coped with poverty, corruption, his ignorance, her aspiration, an ungrateful daughter, no sons, infidelity with an attractive bloke on a night class, God knows how many miscarriages and even murder?
Post war Verona.
Two warring families.
A chance meeting between two of their children.
A passion for each other sets a fateful chain of events in motion.
Hindered, frustrated, thwarted and defeated, only their deaths can bring an end to their parents’ bitter feud.
Michael Pennington’s celebrated one man show Anton Chekhov takes the form of an evening in
the company of the Russian writer towards the end of his life. In it he reminisces about his life, his
times and work; he demonstrates his writing technique by telling stories, speaks about the theatre and
engages deeply with his English audience. Everything in the performance was said or written by
Chekhov himself.
Universally praised, Anton Chekhov was premiered at the National Theatre, has played at the
Belfast Festival, the Jerusalem Festival, toured Israel and Germany, played seasons in Barcelona, Dublin,
the Peter Hall season at the Old Vic and the Chichester Festival Theatre. It has most recently been seen
in 2003 again at the National Theatre. The forthcoming production has been substantially revised.
John Gabriel Borkman has been in voluntary seclusion in an upstairs room since serving a prison sentence for embezzlement. His estranged wife Gunhild, her twin sister Ella, his son Erhart, the divorcee Mrs Wilton and Borkman himself, are all trapped in the suffocating atmosphere of their household.
There are only two ways out.
Nine-year-old Kevin is in bed reading Rockfist Slim and the Case of the Green Shakr. Before he knows it, Kevin falls into the action and meets his favorite detective. Together they journey through Kevin’s other books, meeting chess players, Red Riding Hood, the Wooblie family, ghosts, and Monique the assasin.
The Boy Who Fell into a Book emphasizes the importance of reading and the power of the imagination.
This must-see new staging reunites Timothy West with ETT’s Artistic Director Stephen Unwin. They last collaborated two years ago on a much-acclaimed production of Ibsen’s The Master Builder, for which West received a Manchester Evening News Best Actor award.
Ghosts asks a number of profound questions … Are we trapped by our parents’ mistakes? Do the ghosts of the past exert a hold on the present? Is it possible to be free? Ibsen’s extraordinary drama, with its frank questioning of marriage, caused a scandal when first performed. It still speaks today.