Courtyard Theatre in London brings expeimental Shakespeare to the Stage

Following on from the success of their production of Romeo and Juliet staged in the Isles of Dogs last year, the Admiration Theatre Company are performing their latest Shakespeare adaptation - Tower Hamlet.

The challenging performance will be given by five small groups of experienced actors and delivered using one of five theatrical methods - Traditional British, Stanislavski, Lecoq, Mime, and Grotowski. The ambitious project takes four scenes from Shakespeare’s famous play and adapts them for a contemporary audience ever mindful of local history and current geography.

Admiration Theatre are an experimental group who are clearly on a mission to promote theatre as a unique and challenging art form and persist to educate the public in the differences between the many forms of stage acting traditions. Artistic Director, John Seaforth explains: "We believe that putting these five methods in one production is the best way to create for the audience a public debate on theatre as an art form."

Asked about the inspiration for selecting the chosen traditions, Seaforth believes Stanislavski is "the greatest single influence on theatre training of all time," and that "mime is underrated in Britain."

As for the others, Lecoq was a natural choice due to the influence and reputation of Shakespeare adaptations in London whereas Grotowski’s pioneering methods of ’being’ the character was a radical step forward from an actor ’representing’ a character. The essence of a good actor is not acting, but reacting.

To add a local and contemporary flavour the performers were asked to research the local history and geography of the locations setting, Tower Hamlets, so the audience can expect to discover some interesting, and perhaps little known facts of past events in Tower.

Tower Hamlets runs from 2^nd February to 21^st February at the Courtyard Theatre on Pitfield Street in North London. Tickets prices are £12.

How does a competition where the winner gets a month of time to spend at a choice of resorts sound to all of you? All of you must put your names forward, I am convinced we need to to win this and get out of London for a bit because I am deadly bored of it!