Shakespeare city: Bristol
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Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory’s 2000 production of King Lear: Roland Oliver as Lear (below) and Paul Nicholson as the Fool (below, right).
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much-loved, but often-overlooked city in the South-West of England, Bristol makes no claims to have any particular connection with the living, breathing William Shakespeare. There are a few passing mentions of the city in Henry IV pts 1 & 2 and Richard II – mostly in connection with troop movements and ‘the caterpillars of the commonwealth’ who rebel against the monarchy – but it wasn’t a particularly prominent feature on Shakespeare’s imaginary map of England. The playwright’s posthumous presence, however, looms large. Maybe that’s because, having passed through Stratford, the river Avon snakes through the city, runs under Clifton Suspension Bridge and out to the Bristol Channel. You might say, in fact, that the river plugs the city into the Shakespearean heartland. A rather less fanciful explanation, perhaps, is that Bristol has a long and eminent theatre tradition and, not surprisingly, productions of Shakespeare’s plays have been a prominent part of that. Peter O’Toole’s 1955 performance as Hamlet at Bristol Old
Vic is the stuff of legend while the same theatre’s 1997 production of Macbeth with Pete Postlethwaite as the eponymous Scottish king saw the professional stage debut of one Chiwetel Ejiofor (as Malcolm). More recently, the city has also gained an annual Bristol Shakespeare Festival – with many a production staged outdoors or in unlikely venues – and the simultaneously acclaimed and popular Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory. The brainchild of Bristol-based director Andrew Hilton, the latter began life a few weeks after the millennium, when it opened with King Lear. On the face of it, it was absurdly ambitious: a full-cast production of the bleakest tragedy staged in a rough-andready space on the first floor of a stripped-out factory building in what was then a fairly rundown part of south Bristol. On press night, not more than a dozen people showed up. Only two of us were journalists. Of the rest, at least three or more members of the audience appeared to have wandered into the place by accident and had only stayed because it was marginally warmer than the street outside. We spread ourselves out in the auditorium in a desperate attempt SHAKESPEARE magazine
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