Latest news with #TitusAndronicus
What's On
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- What's On
This side-splitting Shakespeare parody is coming to Dubai this May
Shakespeare, but with a hilarious twist… For most of you, just thinking of William Shakespeare may bring back haunting memories of you back in school trying to memorise his most popular sonnet for an exam. While your English teacher's (possibly extreme) lesson plan may have put you off Shakespeare's literary works of art, there is no denying that he is one of the greatest writers in the English language. To help make you fall back in love with his works, consider checking out this performance titled The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare – the Abridged Version. But it's not what you think it's going to be, nor will it take up an entire day. This play has been performed in Dubai before, and it is back by popular demand for a limited time only. It will take place at the Zabeel Theatre – Jumeirah Zabeel Saray. So what can you expect? Expect to witness all of Shakespeare's plays (37 of them) with hilarious and comedic twists, guaranteed to have you laughing non-stop. The entire drama will unfold right before your very eyes in just 97 minutes – yes, really! *Confirmed: BEETLEJUICE The Musical is coming to Abu Dhabi* And it's not the type of verses or sonnets you would have seen in your textbooks back in school. This play delivers Shakespeare's work with a hilarious twist. Think, Othello as a rap song, Titus Andronicus reimagined as a cooking show, and The Histories transformed into an American football game. As for Hamlet – his most popular and most puzzling play, you will see it performed in just half a minute – backwards. Tickets to see this hilarious performance are available here for a starting price of Dhs200. Keep your little ones under the age of 10 at home though. Show dates are from May 21 to 24, 2025. The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare, Zabeel Theatre – Jumeirah Zabeel Saray, Palm Jumeirah, Dubai, May 21 to 24. @artforalluae Images: @westendworldwide > Sign up for FREE to get exclusive updates that you are interested in
Engadget
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Engadget
The enshitification of YouTube's full album playlists
So a professional dominatrix specializing in foot worship signs into her YouTube account for the first time in seventeen years and compiles over 900 playlists, including the debut LP of progressive math-rock band 90 Day Men, an album from hyperpop/chiptune darling Saoirse Dream and portions of the original soundtrack from early 2000s anime Chobits . There's no punchline to that one. Let me explain. Despite an entirely separate paid product — YouTube Music — vanilla YouTube's sometimes spotty enforcement of copyright has made it a goldmine for music, especially the kind that's niche, and possibly unavailable on legal streamers. Dedicated channels for screamo, doom metal or acid jazz, for instance, are regularly uploading rare releases, and searching for nearly any artist and "full album" will typically return the desired result no matter how obscure. In some cases, albums are uploaded as a single, lengthy video with timestamps indicating where one track ends and the next begins; in others, individual tracks are uploaded and compiled as playlists. ADVERTISEMENT Advertisement In recent months, however, countless tainted playlists have cropped up in YouTube search results. Engadget compiled a sample of 100 channels (there are undoubtedly many, many more) engaged in what we'll refer to as playlist stuffing. These had between 30 and 1,987 playlists each — 58,191 in total. The overwhelming majority of these stuffed playlists contain an irrelevant, nearly hour-long video simply titled "More." Engadget The robotic narration of "More" begins: "Cryptocurrency investing, when approached with a long-term perspective, can be a powerful way to build wealth." You'd be forgiven for assuming its aim is to direct unwitting listeners to a shitcoin pump-and-dump. But over the next 57 minutes and 55 seconds, it meanders incoherently between a variety of topics like affiliate marketing, making a website and search engine optimization. ( Here's the entire transcript if you find yourself pathologically curious.) What's odd is there's no link to any scam page, no specific business the video directs a listener to patronize. Its description simply reads "Other stuff I've recorded and edited that I hadn't released until now, a special for my biggest fans with footage never seen before!" For all its supposed advice on making easy money online, its best example isn't anything said in the video, it's that "More" has amassed nearly 7.5 million views at the time of this writing — and it's monetized. ADVERTISEMENT Advertisement It's far from the only video of its kind. Many longer albums, like Mal Blum's You Look A Lot Like Me , Titus Andronicus's The Most Lamentable Tragedy and Slugdge's The Cosmic Cornucopia are appear as stuffed playlists with "More," " Unreleased " and " Full Album ." Both are similar marketing slop; they have 3.7 and 3.5 million views, respectively. Unscrupulous artists also seem to engage, on a smaller scale, in a less obtuse sort of playlist stuffing. The channel Ultra Sounds has garnered 4.1 million views on its song "The Pause," after inserting it into — among other places — the Nine Inch Nails album Add Violence . Anastasia Coope's Darning Woman and 1991 , an album by shoegaze pioneers Drop Nineteens, are not made better for the inclusion of Murat Başkaya, an apparent Turkish rapper. Electronic dance group The Daring Ones have added a few hundred thousand views to several of their tracks by stuffing them into a variety of playlists, including one of last month's new Viagra Boys record . Engadget attempted to contact these musicians on their content strategy but has not heard back. "More" takes advantage of a very simple UI quirk. Besides there being no easy way to tell how many playlists a YouTube account has made (it loads them 30 at a time on scroll), search results show only the first two tracks of a given playlist. "More" is almost invariably inserted as track three. Unwitting listeners who click and tab away are greeted with irrelevant marketing jargon around seven minutes later — a scenario reflected in the often bewildered comments beneath the video. Playlist stuffing would seem to contravene YouTube's policies on playlists and deceptive practices , which proscribe "playlists with titles or descriptions that mislead viewers into thinking they're about to view videos different than what the playlist contains." A glance at the channel to which "More" was uploaded provides a hint that something more insidious is at play than just playlist stuffing for ad revenue. ADVERTISEMENT Advertisement "More" is not the only video on the channel Hangmeas. The channel description states "I produce my own custom music videos with footage I record around East Asia where me and the locals sing and dance to traditional music from their cultures," and sure enough its other two uploads are songs from Cambodian musicians — uploaded 18 years ago. The army of channels posting stuffed playlists containing "More" are all similarly ancient. One, kcnmttcnn , was created on December 26, 2005, only a few months after YouTube itself first launched. It now hosts over 900 playlists. The vast majority of channels engaged in this activity were created in 2006, and the youngest was claimed in February of 2009. In all likelihood, these accounts were abandoned long ago and have since been compromised, either by whoever is behind "More" or by a third party which sold access to these accounts to them. Just like Hangmeas, several of these possibly compromised accounts have their channel descriptions, links — like the Myspace account for the aforementioned dominatrix — and old uploads intact. Viewing them in aggregate triggers a strange kind of melancholy, like finding the photo album of someone else's family in a thrift store. Here's two friends go-karting down a stretch of farmland; here's a girl sledding down a very short hill ; here's 11 minutes off an online game of Uno ; here's two girls trying on hats in a department store; here's Muse playing "Time Is Running Out" in Paris, 2006, rendered in such poor quality it could be literally any show at all . This one's just called " David ." Its description reads "I'm cool." To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. Unfortunately none of these channels had extant contact information. It's impossible to know how the subjects of these videos feel about their old digital selves being leveraged for playlist stuffing. We can't even know how many of these people are still alive. ADVERTISEMENT Advertisement Somehow, a raft of accounts old enough to vote logged back in, probably from very different parts of the world than where they originated, and churned out playlists at a rate no human being could possibly hope to achieve. YouTube, it seems, did not find this suspicious. We reached out to YouTube for comment and did not receive comment by time of publication. Yes, amateurish, nearly two decade-old footage harkens to a simpler time, when being able to upload a video that the whole world could see — though much more likely it would be viewed by a couple of your friends, and then one reporter 18 years later — was still exciting. But the history of the internet seems to be contained here: The simple joy of connection, neglected on a megacorp's servers, slowly co-opted by anyone trying to make a quick and dishonest buck.
Times
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Titus Andronicus review — Simon Russell Beale doesn't get the blood pumping
'Blood and revenge are hammering in my head' goes the line from Titus Andronicus the RSC have shoved to the top of the publicity for this new revival. It promises something visceral, busy, berserk even. And the drains at the side of the thrust stage at the Swan in Stratford, with screens protecting the front row from the blood and bodies set to be deposited there, suggests artfully horrible things ahoy. All this and Simon Russell Beale in the title role too. His faded Roman warrior will see two sons killed and a daughter raped and mutilated. He will hack off his own hand too before finally feeding his enemy's sons to her in a pie. Shakespeare's first and bloodiest tragedy is brutal, and bananas.
BBC News
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
'We are doing gallons of blood': The ultra-violent Shakespeare play that makes audiences faint
Tragedy Titus Andronicus is the Bard's goriest work, and a new production is set to be one of the most extreme takes on it yet. It raises the question: why do we watch such brutality? Good theatre has the power to really move us – a statement that's usually taken metaphorically, rather than literally. Yet when it comes to Shakespeare's bloodiest play, Titus Andronicus, its impact can be so visceral it causes audience members to faint. I should know: while reviewing a production at Shakespeare's Globe in London, back in 2014, its disturbingly violent scenes caused me to start to feel light-headed, even while safely sat down in my seat. Unfortunately, it was a bench with no back: before the end of the first half, I had fainted away completely, falling backwards and waking up in a stranger's lap. Warning: this article contains some graphic descriptions of violence And I was far from the only person to have such a full-bodied response to Lucy Bailey's production of this gory revenge tragedy: the press went wild for stories of "droppers", with more than 100 people fainting during the run – testament to the immense power of Shakespeare's writing, and the skill of performers, as well as to the props department's handling of litres of fake blood. One of the Bard's earliest plays, written in 1591-2, and almost certainly his first tragedy, Titus Andronicus is a story of violent vengeance: Titus, a general of Rome, returns from wars against the Goths with their queen, Tamora, and her sons held as captives. When her eldest son is sacrificed by Titus, Tamora swears revenge – setting in motion a series of increasingly brutal acts that ends with an infamous scene involving the baking of pies... Boasting 14 deaths, it is the most violent of all Shakespeare's plays – and now it's back on stage, with a new production opening at the UK's Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon. Its fluctuating reputation The play's unavoidable ultra-violence has meant that, for much of the performance history of Shakespeare – whose birthday is today – Titus Andronicus was considered a bit of an embarrassment, a bloody stain on his reputation: too gruesome, too over-the-top, to be considered in the same category of greatness as, say, Hamlet or Othello. Then there's its sometimes queasy tone: the excesses can tip Titus into a gleefully macabre, manic comedy (an aspect also embraced in Bailey's gore-fest). Let's just say, the Victorians were not fans. But the play's reputation began to revive in the second half of the 20th Century. At the Royal Shakespeare Company alone, there have been several seminal productions in the past 70 years, starring Laurence Olivier (1955), Patrick Stewart (1981), Brian Cox (1987) and David Bradley (2003), while Anthony Hopkins playing Titus on screen in Julie Taymor's influential, blackly funny film version in 1999 also surely helped boost the play's standing. Some of these productions leaned heavily on the horror, too: there were fainters and walk-outs in Deborah Warner's unflinching 1987 production, which Cox once claimed was the most interesting play he'd done and the best stage performance he'd ever given. But he also pointed to the odd humour of the play, calling it "a young man's play… full of energy, joie de vivre and laughter that often strikes people as ludicrous". Titus is not always staged with grisly literalness: in the Olivier-starring production by Peter Brook, the mutilation of Titus's daughter Lavinia was famously suggested with stylised red streamers – an aestheticised approach also used in the Japanese Ninagawa Company's production in the 2000s. More recently, Jude Christian's all-female 2023 production in London's candle-lit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse enacted the violence on candles themselves, with cast members stabbing, snapping or snuffing them. In the latest production of Titus Andronicus, however, there will be blood. Buckets of it. "We are doing gallons of blood. We've made a sort of wet room [on stage], it's got a drainage system and an abattoir hook…" says Max Webster, the play's director, over a video call from Stratford-upon-Avon. He's had to figure out how to stage no fewer than 27 different acts of onstage violence, from punches through to limbs being lopped off and tongues being cut out. And the only limit on the amount of gore sloshing around is the practical question of how to clean it up between scenes. "It's an unbelievably boring thing about how many crew members and squeegees it takes," laughs Webster. "In one sentence, you're thinking 'what is the meaning of tragedy in relation to human nature?' – and then very quickly you get into 'how many mops can the crew hold?'." Webster, whose acclaimed productions include an adaptation of Booker Prize winner Life of Pi and a recent David Tennant-starring Macbeth, wanted to direct Titus Andronicus for one simple reason: Simon Russell Beale, one of Britain's greatest Shakespearean actors, asked him to. Titus was a part that Russell Beale fancied a crack at, and the RSC was happy to oblige. This version is updated – set in a crisp, besuited modern world riven by conflict, although where exactly is kept deliberately vague. "It's trying to be open – we're not setting it in Kosovo or Gaza or Sudan," says Webster, adding swiftly "And we're not going to try to produce the US army onstage or something – it's trying to make sense of Rome as a 'superpower of empire' rather than as 'the United States of America'." Still, he sees Titus as freshly, troublingly relevant, in light of shocking events such as the 7 October Hamas attacks, the war in Gaza, and the sudden invasion of Russian troops into Ukraine, the story's extreme violence doesn't seem so unimaginable. In this production, the violence is certainly no laughing matter. In rehearsals, they have been playing it entirely seriously, and eschewing the blackly cartoonish or stylishly Tarantino-esque approach to the violence that some directors explore. This has risks: Webster fully expects that, when the show is in front of an audience, there may be some nervous laughter; it'll be their job in previews to figure out where these laughs form a necessary "pressure release valve", and where they're really just a sign to make the show even more harrowing. For Webster, it isn't possible to laugh at the brutality of Titus Andronicus in 2025 – it's too real. He sees the play as "a howl of pain"; watching it becomes an act of witness, an attempt to face up to atrocities taking place right now – something that he acknowledges could be hard for an audience. "I can walk down the Avon [river], and know my family is safe and it doesn't feel like the world is burning. But you look at other parts of the world… these horrors, that maybe feel historical to us, are actually happening." The psychology behind violent entertainment But Titus Andronicus isn't a documentary; it's an old play, that people choose to stage and choose to pay to go to see. So why, when we could just watch the news, do we opt to watch such harrowing content as art, as entertainment? It's a question that partly motivated Russell Beale to do Titus, he told The Guardian last week: "I don't understand the violence. I don't understand why as an audience we feel excited, stimulated, challenged by it; it's so relentless." It may have been shunned in later centuries, but Titus Andronicus's original audiences loved it – and many other forms of graphically horrible entertainment, from bear baiting to public hangings. Titus was a hit in Elizabethan England, and in writing it Shakespeare may, in fact, have been playing to the crowd: it resembles the super-violent revenge tragedies that were popular at the time, rarely-staged works such as Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy. Such plays were, themselves, drawing inspiration from the incredibly bloody and outrageous tragedies written by Seneca in the First Century AD – including Thyestes, a source of direct inspiration for Shakespeare, where the title character is fed a pie made of the flesh of his own children. And obviously, Ancient Greek tragedies – even if they keep acts of violence off-stage – are a rich and enduring source of creative murders of family members and cycles of bloody revenge. Such tragedies, Webster points out, had their origins in ritual performances of sacrifice. "I guess theatre came out of killing goats in Ancient Greece… there's always been some relationship between theatre and violence and the sacred stuff." More like this:• Edward II: Did a gay love affair spark a royal crisis?• The Shakespeare words you don't know you know• The Shakespeare tragedy that speaks to us now It does seem that watching the very worst things imaginable unfolding has an irresistible appeal – not only do we still return to Greek or Shakespearean tragedies, but we've also turned death and violence into major sources of entertainment, apparently appropriate for daily consumption. Horror films, true crime podcasts, police procedurals, first-person shooter video games… depictions of very, very bad things happening to bodies are pervasive across all art forms, all the time. You might even say we're addicted to the adrenaline shot we get from such emotionally-wringing, extreme forms of entertainment: research shows that the blood-pumping, heart-racing high we get from fear is close to the pleasurable bodily experience of excitement. From the high body count of fantasy shows like Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon to the dystopian chills of Squid Game to the seemingly endless appetite for the torture porn movies of the Saw franchise, much of our creative output would make Seneca smack his lips in approval. But beyond the potential physical thrills, why are we so drawn to watching such violent content? When I ask Webster, he's as unsure as Russell Beale. "The truth is, I don't know. But there is a lust to watch violence on-stage – it is a basic human urge." He wonders if it forms a safe outlet for our innate human darkness. And a common theory as to why we enjoy the terrors of a horror movie or the bleakness of a dystopian novel is just this: that such fictional outings are a secure way for us to rehearse terrible acts – without ever having to experience those in real life. "Maybe it is so we don't have to do [violence] in our lives?" Webster ponders. "We all have these weird, dark, turbulent fantasies that we don't talk about because they're not socially acceptable… so maybe seeing it on-stage is an escape, or a relief?" The academics Haiyang Yang and Kuangjie Zhang confirm Webster's theory, sharing research in the Harvard Business Review that found that horror entertainment "may help us (safely) satisfy our curiosity about the dark side of human psyche… As an inherently curious species, many of us are fascinated by what our own kind is capable of. Observing storylines in which actors must confront the worst parts of themselves serves as a pseudo character study of the darkest parts of the human condition." If I'm honest, the news that there's so much blood in Webster's Titus Andronicus that they need a drain on stage has got me nervous of watching the show, rather than gleefully ready to excise my inner demons. Is he worried that this Titus might be so powerful – so bloody, and so upsetting – that people will faint? He is not. "It's important you provide a content warning, and then people can make an informed decision about if they want to see it," says Webster. "If people faint, they faint." Titus Andronicus is at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 17 June Holly Williams novel The Start of Something is out in paperback now -- For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
The Guardian
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘The violence is relentless. I don't understand it': Simon Russell Beale faces up to Shakespeare's goriest play
Simon Russell Beale finds it scary to play Shakespeare's high-status characters, 'the sort where you walk on stage and everyone bows'. It is surprising, given he is one of the nation's foremost theatre actors, a king of his own realm, but also ironic because he has played most of Shakespeare's alpha-men already: from Hamlet and Lear to Macbeth, Prospero and a brace of Richards. Still, they're difficult, he insists. 'I think you need a huge amount of confidence.' Which he doesn't have? 'I don't think any of us do, completely, do we?' Russell Beale is famously diffident. Sitting in the Royal Shakespeare Company's rehearsal studios in London, he has an almost contradictory air of being easy, affable yet gimlet-eyed, both at home with himself and not. At the age of 64, and with an accumulation of the most illustrious parts across stage and screen, as well as an armful of accolades (three Oliviers, a Tony, two Baftas and, notably, a knighthood), is he not prepared to acknowledge his kingliness? It would seem not. He speaks of never watching himself on screen, thinking a performance is not quite good enough, occasionally conceding 'Oh that's all right'. But alongside the perfectionism and picking at his performances is an unquenched appetite for work in general, and what he calls a 'limitless field of exploration' in Shakespeare's plays in particular. So comprehensive is his grounding in Shakespeare that even his family thought he had already played the titular Roman general from Titus Andronicus. 'They were getting it mixed up with Timon of Athens. Another member of my family said to me: 'Why have you decided to do it?'' It's a good question. Titus Andronicus is one of Shakespeare's bloodiest works: even the Greeks might have winced at its graphic brutality. The play features rape, murder and dismemberment (hands, head, tongue), culminating in an eye-watering finale where a mother unknowingly eats a pie made from her dead children's flesh. Titus is caught in this cycle of violence. Another actor might relish its baroque darkness – 'Brian Cox said to me: 'It's a marvellous play'' – but for Russell Beale it brings challenging questions. 'There are certain plays in the canon that teeter on the edge of acceptability. Titus is one of those for me. I don't understand the violence. I don't understand why as an audience we feel excited, stimulated, challenged by it; it's so relentless.' One of Shakespeare's earliest and most maligned works, the play was rehabilitated in the 20th century, increasing in popularity along with the rise in real-world conflict. The RSC's billing suggests this production, directed by Max Webster, will talk to the violence of our own age, its action refracted through 'the lens of 21st-century aggression'. Russell Beale hints at the graphic nature of violence it will bring. 'There's a drain round the side of the stage. I find that almost more horrifying than anything. It reminds me of the prisons in Syria when Assad fell, and stories of people going into the rooms where people were tortured.' He has never been good with watching physical violence. 'The gouging of eyes in King Lear always makes me feel sick, watching Lavinia in Titus Andronicus come on with no hands is just appalling. But, but, but … We watch it. I've done plays about grief and love and death, but not about violence. It's a very particular component in our makeup as human beings, that we are both attracted and repelled by it. That's what I'm trying to work out.' Russell Beale is scholarly in his knowledge of Shakespeare's canon, providing analysis of everything from the warring in Troilus and Cressida (he played Thersites in a 1990 production directed by Sam Mendes, with Ralph Fiennes as Troilus), to the demand for revenge in Hamlet ('My Hamlet was absolutely paralysed by that request from his father'). Russell Beale maintains a healthy respect for the bard's written word – describing himself as a 'semi-purist' in terms of the script itself. 'I do think it is worth acknowledging that these plays are mostly written in verse, therefore you have to have a rudimentary understanding of that verse. It's not rocket science – de dum, de dum, de dum, de dum. If you observe the verse form, acting it is easier. What I do, and what I would advise another actor to do, is to mark it up as you're learning it and then forget about it. When you've learned it in that rhythm, you can play as many curveballs as you like.' Clarity for the audience is paramount, he holds, and to that end, Russell Beale – shock horror! – changes bits of Shakespearean text to make it understandable to modern ears. So he substitutes a word such as 'wanting' to its modern meaning of 'lacking' in a certain context, or 'lazar' to 'leper'. 'I've changed a few things in this play – just single words – and I've occasionally changed the structure of a sentence that is the wrong way around. This happened a lot in Timon. I swapped them round just to make it easier. I think in 200 years, Shakespeare's work probably will be rewritten. We don't read Chaucer in the original Middle English. So it's part of the natural evolution of a text. The point is, as with Chaucer, the script will always be there. From the moment Shakespeare put those plays on stage, people were adapting them.' This view may resonate – or otherwise – with those involved in the (always heated) cultural debate on whether the bard's texts should be updated for modern-day understanding, or left categorically untouched in their original state, as is argued by purists such as the former National Theatre director Richard Eyre. While Russell Beale might be best associated with theatre, screen work has always ticked along beside live performance, from his role as the Soviet politician Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria in Armando Iannucci's 2017 political satire The Death of Stalin, to his 2022 turn in the Thor film franchise, Love and Thunder. So is the case now: this year he is appearing in the third film in the Downton Abbey franchise and in The Choral, a new Alan Bennett-scripted film set during the first world war and directed by Nicholas, in which he is cast alongside Fiennes. What roles remain for him on stage? Angelo, from Measure for Measure, he says, without much hesitation. He is a puritanical old judge who falls for a novice nun and so his life is upturned by this sudden romantic passion. 'I love the idea of an older man who has been impeccably behaved all his life to just fall in lust with a young woman and know in his heart of hearts it is ridiculous – that awful sense that he knows she's 20, and yet the first and last thing he thinks about is her.' Russell Beale has spoken frankly about the absence of a romantic partner in his life and now reflects on what other kind of love fills that breach. 'It's interesting that I've ended up living near my family' – his father, in his 90s, is still alive, and Russell Beale is the eldest of five living siblings – 'I think that's the great love of my life: siblings.' I wouldn't know what to do without them. I have occasional nightmares about what happens if they're no longer around. Luckily, I'm the oldest and the most unhealthy so with any luck I'll go first!' The absence of romantic love does not perturb him in the way that it used to. In the past, he has spoken of love and single life as a gay man. He says now: 'If you'd asked me about 20 years ago, I would have gone 'Damn' or 'Where is it?'' What if a late flowering love did turn up out of the blue, as it did for Angelo? It would be lovely, he says, but, after a pause: 'Imagine the change of lifestyle … Reorganising his books: where's he' – a hypothetical romantic partner – 'going to put them? I love the idea of married couples living in their own separate houses!' Sometime later, he returns to Angelo: 'Perhaps I should have a word with Nick [Hytner] about Measure for Measure.' Spoken with the bearing of a true king of the Shakespearean stage. Let's hope Hytner says yes. Titus Andronicus is at Swan theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 17 April to 7 June
