VENUS & ADONIS (Stanzas in Solidarity)****

 

By Megan

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WAbL_U_AYg

Availlable until: Unknown

This is a really lovely performance of a Shakespeare work which probably gets performed even less than Edward III! It’s not a play, it’s a very long narrative poem but it (obviously) has really beautiful language and good characters. In this production, each actor reads one stanza.

It is really good hearing one stanza from so many actors. Each person brings something different to it. There are different styles of reading – some actors read it like a poem and some sound more like they’re telling a story. Some are narrators and some change their voices for the different characters. There are lots of different accents which is really lovely and lots of diversity and it’s interesting to see where people are when they record their stanza, some are inside so you see part of their house and some are outdoors.

It is quite difficult to keep track of who is reading. I like knowing who each person is and there were lots of people I know already and I was worried I might not recognise them so I had to keep scrolling down to the list and working out where I was up to. So that was quite difficult but maybe not everyone will want to do that.

There are loads of names I recognised (and probably also quite a few which I didn’t recognise but should have done) and it is lovely to see people we know already. Kristin Atherton (TSMGO), Lynsey Beauchamp (TSMGO), Dominic Brewer (TSMGO), Emily Carding (Sofa Shakespeare, TSMGO), Alix Dunmore (The Factory, Finborough Theatre, TSMGO), Danielle Farrow (Read for the Globe, Sofa Shakespeare, TSMGO), Julie Martis (Sofa Shakespeare, TSMGO), Danann McAleer (The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, TSMGO), Alice Merivale (TSMGO), Ruth Page (TSMGO), Emma Pallant (Shakespeare Happy Hours), George Readshaw (The Lord Chamberlain’s Men), William Sutton (Shakespeare Happy Hours) and Valentina Vinci (Shake-Scene) are all in Venus and Adonis and they’re all so good!

Everyone was good and we’re all going to have different favourites but just a few of my other favourites are Amy Victoria Percy, Bobby Harding, Alex Scott Fairley, Jon Tarcy, Rebecca Davies and David Osmond. But there are some other really good people I didn’t write down because I was too busy watching. Everyone is really good though and it’s a very good story. I thought I knew it because I’ve heard John Blow’s opera Venus & Adonis but Shakespeare’s Venus & Adonis isn’t exactly the same so there were a few surprises.