Kingston Shakespeare Podcasts

Listen to this KiSSiT (Kingston Shakespeare Seminar in Theory) Work-in-Progress session with Dr Varsha Panjwani (Boston and York) and Koel Chatterjee (Royal Holloway), held on the 14th of April at the Rose Theatre Kingston, on Indian Shakespeares on Screen: Identity, Politics, Entertainment, chaired by Timo Uotinen. Find out more about their succesful conference and project at indianshakespearesonscreen.com. The recordings are divided into four parts: interview about the project, Varsha’s talk on 10 ml Love (adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Koel on Arshinagar (a Romeo and Juliet adaptation), and an open discussion about all the above. More at: https://kingstonshakespeareseminar.wordpress.com/2016/05/05/kissit-wip-indians-shakespeares-on-screen-podcast/

Where does life end, and death begin? Where does being end? What does ‘being’ mean anyway? What does it mean to be nothing? When Hamlet asks, ‘To be, or not to be’, he tries to imagine himself in a state of hypothetical annihilation. When Anthony botches his suicide in Anthony and Cleopatra, he is forced to recognise that though he can attempt to take himself to the threshold between life and death, it is not necessarily in his power to cross it. When Richard II says ‘whe’er I be / Nor I nor any man that but man is / With nothing shall be please till he be eased / With being nothing’, he conceives a state of existence as nothing which is not the same as non-being. But being and non-being are not limited to life and death. Characters in plays have a sort of being that is not identical to the being of the actor, just as fictional characters have a sort of being that is not physical. This paper will examine the threshold between being and non-being in Shakespeare’s works by scrutinising the liminal moments bet

In 2004, the Financial Times critic Alastair Macaulay argued that the role of Othello had been “diminished” by the late twentieth century convention of having only black actors play the part. The threshold for Macaulay had been what he perceived to be another poor performance as Othello. Yet since Paul Robeson’s appearance as Othello at the Savoy Theatre in 1930, language has been a major weapon of critics and journalists opposing ethnic minority performers’ appearances in Shakespearean theatre. This paper examines critical responses by arts journalists and critics to these performances, helping to contextualize discriminatory casting patterns in contemporary theatre as part of a larger discourse guided by the media. Bio: Dr. Jami Rogers trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) and holds an MA and a PhD from the Shakespeare Institute, the University of Birmingham. Prior to obtaining her PhD Jami spent 10 years working for PBS, the American public service broadcast television network, f

The symmetry and balance suggested by the title, Measure for Measure, sits oddly with a play that crosses the line in so many ways – generically (as a problem play), structurally (by muddling up the purpose of the main action as set in motion by the Duke), and emotionally/ethically (none of its characters are above the occasional unsavoury demeanour). Any of these features would frustrate audience expectations and behaviour, but their dominance appears to suggest that such frustration of ‘normal’ beahviour may actually be the purpose of the play. But why antagonise your audience in such a blatant way, or indeed why produce a play in which there is no feature that does not require some, or a lot of, ironing out? I suggest that the original conditions of production in the full light arena, casting the audience as the streetwise filth of Vienna, makes ‘crossing the line’ their basic function morally, formally (through their leading light, Lucio) and even existentially (as bystanders, they are implicated in a se

The encounter between the self and the other as understood through Jean Laplanche’s psychoanalytic theory set in the Hegelian dialectic will be explored using three instances of the word threshold in Shakespeare. Two instances occur in Coriolanus – between Virgilia and Martius and between Aufidius and Martius – and one occurs in The Merchant of Venice – between Antonio and Shylock. The circulation of libido across the threshold, and its distortion into the death-drive and the drive for the accumulation of profit will be explored in these scenes. The role of the threshold as the site for the implantation of enigmatic signifiers or the violent intromission of trauma will be explored for its role in the distortion of libido into death-drive and profit-drive. This is a preliminary experiment (for me) in thinking through Laplanchian psychoanalysis as theory in conversation with Marxism and set in the dialectic. Bio: Christian Smith is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies

Dr Kate Aughterson is currently Academic Programme Leader for Literature, Media and Screen at Brighton University. She is the author of Renaissance Woman (1995), The English Renaissance: An Anthology of Documents (1998), John Webster: The Tragedies (2001) Aphra Behn: The Comedies (2003), and most recently Shakespeare: The Late Plays (2013) as well as articles on Bacon, Middleton, Behn and Marston. This talk was part of a one-day conference 'Shakespearean Thresholds' organised by KiSSiT (Kingston Shakespeare Seminar in Theory) held at the Rose Theatre, Kingston on April 2, 2016. The session was chaired by Timo Uotinen. See video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwEv7mWSfv8

Richard Wilson is Sir Peter Hall Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Kingston University, London, and author of Worldly Shakespeare: The Theatre of Our Good Will (2015); Free Will: Art and power on Shakespeare’s stage (2013); Shakespeare in French Theory: King of Shadows (2007); Secret Shakespeare: Essays on theatre, religion and resistance (2004); and Will Power: Studies in Shakespearean authority (1993) This talk was part of a one-day conference 'Shakespearean Thresholds' organised by KiSSiT (Kingston Shakespeare Seminar in Theory) held at the Rose Theatre, Kingston on April 2, 2016. The session was chaired by Timo Uotinen. Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLdVMppHeR0

Kelly Hunter is a highly accomplished actress on stage, film, TV and radio (www.kellyhunter.co.uk) as well as a director and author. She is also the artistic director of the Flute Theatre (www.flutetheatre.co.uk) and discusses her adaptation of Hamlet titled 'Hamlet, Who's There?' This talk was part of a one-day conference 'Shakespearean Thresholds' organised by KiSSiT (Kingston Shakespeare Seminar in Theory) held at the Rose Theatre, Kingston on April 2, 2016. The session was chaired by Timo Uotinen. Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U3RjIofZaw