Cymbeline

There's some sort of London festival on at the moment, I think it's a bit of a combination of the Queen's 60th Jubilee and the Olympics, but they are trying for a variety of different arts events at the moment.  One of which seems to also be a Shakespeare festival, a festival within a festival, London does do some crazy things.  We went along to one of the performances, it was of Cymbeline, which is one of his very early plays, had some classic Shakespeare themes, star-crossed lovers, women dressing as men, that sort of thing.  But the reason perhaps that this performance made it into the festival roster was that it was performed by a Japanese troupe.  When I booked I thought it was a dance company, and that the play would be intermingled with Japanese dancing.  Turned out they weren't going to do any dancing that night, it was just straight up Shakespeare, just all in Japanese.  So you just ended up reading a play really.

The thing I find with Shakespeare is that it needs judicious editing, especially around the ending.  Perhaps it was because it was one of his first plays, but they sometimes seem to drag on a bit.  I think modern audiences kind of get the old actor-in-disguise thing and it doesn't need to be padded out so much.  Just get them to confess all at once and be done with it, rather than an interminable round of people saying "ah ha, you thought I was a man, when in fact I am your sister".