Shakespeare's 400th Anniversary: When is it and how is it being celebrated?

      

        Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love (1998) Credit: Moviestore/Rex

• BY Beth Ryan

 On April 23, we celebrate the 400^th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare.

Many of Britain's cultural institutions are planning to pay tribute to the Bard’s life and works. It promises to be an impressively imaginative programme.
From Benedict Cumberbatch as Richard III to Hamlet being played by an inkpot, here are the moments you won’t want to miss:

BBC

Launching on April 23, the BBC’s Shakespeare Festival will see an array of exciting productions.
Upstart Crow, Ben Elton’s BBC Two sitcom about Shakespeare’s life and works, will star David Mitchell as the playwright and Harry Enfield as his father, while Benedict Cumberbatch and Judi Dench will star in the next instalment of BBC2 drama The Hollow Crown.

             
           Benedict Cumberbatch as Richard III in The Hollow Crown Credit: BBC


Russell T Davies is filming A Midsummer Night’s Dream for primetime BBC One, and David Tennant, lauded for his portrayal of Hamlet in the RSC production, will host The Shakespeare show – a celebratory show broadcast from the RSC theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon.

• No tickets will be available for The Shakespeare Show, but a ballot will be held for a chance to attend. Details will be announced soon.

Royal Shakespeare Company

Dream 2016 is the RSC’s mammoth production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which, along with its near 700 cast members made up of professionals, amateurs and schoolchildren, will launch in Stratford-upon-Avon in February before touring the country.
There will be new productions of Hamlet, Cymbeline, King Lear and others. The RSC will also take Henry IV Parts I & II and Henry V to China on their first major tour of the country, before continuing on to New York with those plays, as well as Richard II.
Shakespeare’s hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon will host daylong celebrations on Saturday April 23, with events including live music, stage fighting workshops and a Blood, Guts and Gore demonstration (which shows how fake scars and bruises are created) all building up to a grand firework finale.

• Buy tickets for RSC's Stratford-upon-Avon shows from Telegraph Tickets; 0844 871 2118

Shakespeare's Globe

The open air theatre nestled along the Southbank will be the centrepiece of the celebrations.

Over the weekend of the April 23 - 24, its spectacular main event, The Complete Walk, will see the banks of the Thames lined for 2.5 miles with 37 screens, each showing a specially-made film shot in an international location (Cleopatra in Egypt, Hamlet at Elsinore).

           

           

                    Emma Rice, Shakespeare's Globe's new director

In the Globe theatre itself, its ground-breaking production of Hamlet, currently on a world tour, will return home for the St George’s Day weekend.

• Hamlet, April 23-24 (020 7401 9919: shakespearesglobe.com) Tickets are currently sold out but more will be released closer to the performances

The British Library

Shakespeare in Ten Acts, an exhibition seeking to show how the bard became the cultural icon he is today through ten key performances, will feature the only surviving play-script in Shakespeare’s hand. The British Library is also helping to organise an exhibition in the public space of the Birmingham Library.

• Shakespeare in Ten Acts, April 15 - September 6 (01937 546546; bl.uk/events/shakespeare-in-ten-acts)

Glyndebourne

Glyndebourne’s 2016 season will feature two operas based on Shakespeare plays: Béatrice et Bénédict by Berlioz, which is based on Much Ado About Nothing, and Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Berlioz’s opera was last performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1993, while this will be the first revival of Peter Hall’s popular 1981 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for ten years.
Their celebrations continue into 2017, when the world premiere of a new commission based on Hamlet, composed by Brett Dean and with libretto by Canadian writer and director Matthew Jocelyn, will take place.

• Béatrice et Bénédict, July 23 - August 27 and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, August 11 - 28 (01273 815000; glyndebourne.com)

Barbican

They kicked off the year with their Cycle of Kings programme, which brought together Richard II, Henry IV (parts one and two) and Henry V. In April they will pick up where they left off, with Kings of War – Ivo van Hove’s radical combined staging of Henry V, Henry VI and Richard III.

Their classical music offerings begin in February, when the LSO will play Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

                

          Jennifer Kirby as Katharine in Henry V at the Barbican Credit: KEITH PATTISON

Shakespeare on the Silent Screen is their exciting silent film programme, which opens with Sven Garde’s 1920 Hamlet.
But their most imaginative effort is Table Top Shakespeare, an experimental production in which each of the Bard’s 36 plays is condensed and represented by an everyday object – Macbeth becomes a cheese grater, Pericles a light bulb and Hamlet a bottle of ink.

• Kings of War, April 22 - May 1;  Mendelssohn: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, February 2; Shakespeare on the Silent Screen, Hamletm April 10; Table Top Shakespeare, March 1 - 6. (020 7638 8891; barbican.org.uk)

BFI

The BFI will launch their biggest ever programme of Shakespeare on film, launching on March 31 with the premiere of new film Play On! Shakespeare in Silent Cinema – a compilation of scenes from the  best silent Shakespeare adaptations. Shakespeare’s Globe Players have been commissioned to write a score for the film, which features clips from the first ever Shakespeare movie, King John (1899).


               
                       A still from King John (1899)

April will focus on the Classics, including Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948), Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V (1989), Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971).

• Shakespeare on Film, March 31 - May 31 (020 7928 3232; bfi.org.uk)

Royal Festival Hall

The London Philharmonic Orchestra will play a range of Shakespeare-inspired pieces: Sibelius’s The Tempest (February 10) will be followed by Richard Strauss’s Macbeth (February 26) and Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet (April 15).

• The Tempest, February 10, Macbeth, February 26, Romeo and Juliet, April 15 (0207 960 4200; southbankcentre.co.uk/venues/royal-festival-hall​

Other London highlights include S***-faced Shakespeare at Leicester Square Theatre. The Edinburgh Fringe hit show sees the irreverent Magnificent Bastard Productions perform A Midsummer Night’s dream nightly, with a different cast member extremely drunk. The remaining cast improvise around them and hilarity, inevitably, ensues.

• April 26-June 11 ( 020 7734 2222; leicestersquaretheatre.ticketsolve.com)

Celebrations elsewhere include The Complete Deaths – a show in which experimental theatre company Spymonkey draw together all 74 onstage deaths for a strange and bloody Shakespeare-inspired evening.

• Previewing at Royal and Derngate, Northampton, then touring (spymonkey.co.uk)

Andrew Hilton directs Hamlet at Tobacco Factory Theatre in Bristol, The Merry Wives is on at Newcastle’s New Vic Theatre, and The Herbal Bed – Peter Whelan’s play about Shakespeare’s daughter – will be touring after a stint at the Royal and Derngate in Northampton.

• Hamlet, February 11 - April 30, then touring (0117 902 0344; tobaccofactorytheatres.com)
• The Merry Wives, February 5 - 27, then touring (01782 717 962; newvictheatre.org.uk)
• The Herbal Bed, February 5 - 27, then touring (01604 624811; royalandderngate.co.uk)