Looks like a TARDIS has materialised on stage at Stratford. Externally larger than Dr Who's Blue Police Box I find myself trying to work out how the cast interact with it?
Is it a borderline between The Quick & The Dead, a sort of 3-D Styx which once stepped into cannot be stepped back out of? Or is it a Gateway, one through which the characters of the cast wash out from, on entering the stage, and then swash back in through, on exiting the stage? Or could it, going back to morphing time, be that one night's production is in Jacobean dress but another night's could be costumed in period dress of a later, Dickensian, era?
I'm getting more curious to fathom further the way in which Shakespeare's text is lifted into life from the pages over which it is laid out with whatever assistance is afforded by 'The Death Box' in this latest incarnation of Othello. This being so I can say that this your pithy review has achieved its purpose: I would away to Stratford to catch a performance, were I in a position to do so.
Hee hee! I think your descriptions of the Box of Death are interesting and probably what the Director was hoping / going for (a 3D Styx is a nice idea). There were other elements of the final scene (not mentioned to avoid spoilers) which persuaded me that these decisions were actually stemming from a nervousness about what Shakespeare is actually showing us. But I may be wrong.
You strike just the right fine balance, in your review, between 'enticing' and 'spoiling'.
Another thread of thought that was in my mind as I wrote in reply to your post was something like...
"I wonder when this fashion for planting 'Death Boxes' on stage sprang up? I wonder might there be anything in the timeline that might suggest an impact of creative directors of stage having read and been influenced by George Saunders' setting his 'Lincoln {with its cast of 168 characters / voices} in the Bardo'? Line of thought being based on the sense that what 'Death Boxes' on theatre sets and 'Bardo' set in a Washington DC cemetery have in common are being 'liminal spaces'?"
Now there they are, these thought-words that were running through my mind as I typed my first reply, overjoyed to have been retrieved from the discard pile on the writing room floor and posted into this thread for any passing reading 👀 to read.
As you say you may be wrong and just so might I be but - "hey ho the nonnio" - it is always good to free write speculatively... who knows what nuggets might, unexpectedly, flow out in the text to trapped and captured amongst the phrases, lines and paragraphs framed in each of these Substack Comment Boxes via which we occasionally correspond.
Looks like a TARDIS has materialised on stage at Stratford. Externally larger than Dr Who's Blue Police Box I find myself trying to work out how the cast interact with it?
Is it a borderline between The Quick & The Dead, a sort of 3-D Styx which once stepped into cannot be stepped back out of? Or is it a Gateway, one through which the characters of the cast wash out from, on entering the stage, and then swash back in through, on exiting the stage? Or could it, going back to morphing time, be that one night's production is in Jacobean dress but another night's could be costumed in period dress of a later, Dickensian, era?
I'm getting more curious to fathom further the way in which Shakespeare's text is lifted into life from the pages over which it is laid out with whatever assistance is afforded by 'The Death Box' in this latest incarnation of Othello. This being so I can say that this your pithy review has achieved its purpose: I would away to Stratford to catch a performance, were I in a position to do so.
Hee hee! I think your descriptions of the Box of Death are interesting and probably what the Director was hoping / going for (a 3D Styx is a nice idea). There were other elements of the final scene (not mentioned to avoid spoilers) which persuaded me that these decisions were actually stemming from a nervousness about what Shakespeare is actually showing us. But I may be wrong.
You strike just the right fine balance, in your review, between 'enticing' and 'spoiling'.
Another thread of thought that was in my mind as I wrote in reply to your post was something like...
"I wonder when this fashion for planting 'Death Boxes' on stage sprang up? I wonder might there be anything in the timeline that might suggest an impact of creative directors of stage having read and been influenced by George Saunders' setting his 'Lincoln {with its cast of 168 characters / voices} in the Bardo'? Line of thought being based on the sense that what 'Death Boxes' on theatre sets and 'Bardo' set in a Washington DC cemetery have in common are being 'liminal spaces'?"
Now there they are, these thought-words that were running through my mind as I typed my first reply, overjoyed to have been retrieved from the discard pile on the writing room floor and posted into this thread for any passing reading 👀 to read.
As you say you may be wrong and just so might I be but - "hey ho the nonnio" - it is always good to free write speculatively... who knows what nuggets might, unexpectedly, flow out in the text to trapped and captured amongst the phrases, lines and paragraphs framed in each of these Substack Comment Boxes via which we occasionally correspond.
Thank you. Yes, I would love to know what the origin of the craze is...