Peter Hall (1930–2017) is one of the most influential directors of Shakespeare's plays in the modern age. Under his direction, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre rediscovered Shakespeare as a writer who could comment incisively on the modern world. Productions such as Coriolanus, The Wars of the Roses and Hamlet established his reputation as a director able to bring Shakespeare to the heart of contemporary politics. He later cemented his reputation with epic productions of Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra at the National. With the Peter Hall Company, Hall continued to work intensively on Shakespeare, directing plays in the UK and America. Reviewing Hall's work in its cultural and creative context, this study explores his approach to directing and rehearsal. This is the first book to analyse all of Hall's professional Shakespeare productions in a historical context, from the Suez crisis to the 9/11 attacks and beyond.

This volume is a comprehensive overview of scholarship on this play. It includes chapters on criticism, sources and background, textual studies, bibliographies, editions, and translations. Also covered are the stage history and major productions of the play, and films, music, television, and adaptations and synopses.

This collection of twenty original essays will expand the critical contexts in which Antony and Cleopatra can be enjoyed as both literature and theater.

This handbook offers a way in to reading Anthony and Cleopatra theatrically. Through analyses of key productions, an account of the historical conditions in which the play was first produced, and a scene-by-scene account of how the play might be approached in performance, this book focuses on the challenges of staging the notorious lovers.

Play Directing describes the various roles a director plays, from selection and analysis of the play, to working with actors and designers to bring the production to life. The authors emphasize that the role of the director as an artist-leader collaborating with actors and designers who look to the director for partnership in achieving their fullest, most creative expressions. The text emphasizes how the study of directing provides an intensive look at the structure of plays and acting, and of the process of design of scenery, costume, lighting, and sound that together make a produced play.

This books looks at Antony and Cleopatra in performance from 1606 to 2018, examining how actors, directors and designers pick up the play's themes of desire and delinquency, exoticism and erotic politics to locate the most ambituous love story ever told in a new present. Is the play tragedy? Comedy? Farce? Rutter shows it's all three.