A New Approach to Shakespeare

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 30 April 2018

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Royal Shakespeare Company opened in Britain in 1961 and changed theatre forever. 400 years after his death, the playwright's work began to be performed in a radical new way. Claire Bowes has been listening to archive of the founder of the theatre company, Sir Peter Hall, and speaking to Britain's longest serving theatre critic, Michael Billington about the move which made Shakespeare more relevant than ever before.

Photo: Portrait of English dramatist William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), circa 1600. Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Transcript

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0:00.0	Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless
0:06.8	searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the
0:11.8	telly we share what we've been watching
0:14.0	Cladie Aide.
0:16.0	Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.
0:19.0	Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.
0:21.0	And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less
0:24.9	searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds just before this
0:30.3	BBC podcast gets underway here's something you may not know.
0:34.4	My name's Linda Davies and I commission podcast for BBC Sounds.
0:38.3	As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely
0:46.0	engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,
0:54.2	poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories.
0:57.6	And that's just a few examples.
0:59.4	If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.
1:06.3	Hello and thanks for downloading Witness the History Podcast from the BBC World Service.
1:11.3	I'm Claire Bowes and today we're remembering an event which helped
1:15.0	redefine Shakespeare for the modern age, the opening in the spring of
1:19.4	1961 of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
1:23.0	He's filthy, he's violent, his cynical,
1:27.0	he's destructive, his nihilistic.
1:30.0	Sir Peter Hall, who founded the Royal Shakespeare Company, speaking to the BBC in the 1990s about William Shakespeare.
	...

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