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Director of Shakespeare's Globe, Dominic Dromgoole
Director Dominic Dromgoole, who is leaving Shakepeare’s Globe in April, says the 400th anniversary celebrations will be his ‘last great adventure’. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian
Director Dominic Dromgoole, who is leaving Shakepeare’s Globe in April, says the 400th anniversary celebrations will be his ‘last great adventure’. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian

A film for each play to mark 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death

This article is more than 8 years old

Shakespeare’s Globe project to show 37 new 10-minute films on 37 screens laid out along Thames path between Westminster and London Bridge

Shakespeare’s Globe theatre is to mark the 400th anniversary of the bard’s death by turning London’s South Bank into a huge pop-up cinema showing 37 new films – one for each of Shakespeare’s plays.

Some 2.5 miles (4km) of the Thames path between Westminster Bridge and London Bridge will be given over to 37 screens placed in order of when the play was written.

Although each film will only run for 10 minutes – repeated on a loop throughout 23 and 24 April – viewing the entire collection would take over six hours, not counting coffee breaks and walking from one screen to the next.

The new scenes will be filmed on location: Hamlet will be shot in Elsinore (Helsingør) in Denmark, Cleopatra in front of the Pyramids in Egypt, and Romeo and Juliet in Verona in Italy – though Shakespeare almost certainly never set foot in any of these countries, and may never have left England. The films will also feature archive material, animation, and shots from Stratford-upon-Avon, where Shakespeare was born in 1564 and died in 1616.

The outgoing director of Shakespeare’s Globe, Dominic Dromgoole, said the events planned for the St George’s Day weekend which traditionally marks both Shakespeare’s birth and death – as “the last great adventure of my time here at the Globe”.

The 37 films have not yet been cast, but Dromgoole is already eyeing potential locations, including Hampton Court Palace. He said the project was looking for “actors with great Shakespeare chops – fortunately we’re not short of them in England”.

The cast and crew of the ‘Globe to Globe’ touring production of Hamlet prepare for a show in the Zataari refugee camp on the Jordan-Syria border. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

Dromgoole conceded “some spurious connection” between Shakespeare and Stratford-upon-Avon, but insisted that London made him a playwright and was threaded through his life and work.

There may be problems, however, with a few of the potential filming sites. The forests of Arden and Windsor will prove no trouble, and locations for the Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Merchant of Venice are self-evident; but scholars still argue whether there ever was a “sea coast of Bohemia” – part of modern Czechoslovakia, which may have had a sliver of coastline centuries before Shakespeare’s day – where part of The Winter’s Tale is set.

Dromgoole said several actors in the frame for parts are already strongly arguing for sun-drenched Barbados to stand in for the island in The Tempest.

He described the London’s South Bank, the setting for the 400th anniversary project, as one of the greatest cultural walkways in the world,running not just past the Globe’s doorstep, but that of of a string of venues, including the Royal Festival Hall, the BFI, the National Theatre and Tate Modern.

Back in the Globe theatre itself, the record-breaking production of Hamlet will be returning from its completist world tour for four performances over the St George’s Day weekend. Hamlet still plans to visit every country in the world, although North Korea is still refusing to let the production in, and the company’s tour of some African countries was postponed to next spring due to the Ebola outbreak.

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