The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) is a major British theatre company, based in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England. The company employs over 1,000 staff and produces around 20 productions a year. The RSC plays regularly in London, Newcastle upon Tyne, and on tour across the UK and internationally.
Peter Stephen Paul Brook, CH, CBE is an English theatre and film director who has been based in France since the early 1970s. He has won multiple Tony and Emmy Awards, a Laurence Olivier Award, the Praemium Imperiale, and the Prix Italia. He has been called "our greatest living theatre director".
Bishopsgate is one of the 25 wards of the City of London and also the name of a major road between Gracechurch Street and Norton Folgate in the northeast corner of London's main financial district. Bishopsgate is named after one of the original eight gates in the London Wall. The site of this former gate is marked by a stone bishop's mitre, fixed high upon a building located at Bishopsgate's junction with Wormwood Street, by the gardens there and facing the Heron Tower.
Sir Peter Reginald Frederick Hall, CBE, was an English theatre, opera and film director. His obituary in The Times declared him "the most important figure in British theatre for half a century" and on his death, a Royal National Theatre statement declared that Hall's "influence on the artistic life of Britain in the 20th century was unparalleled".
Paul Philippe Cret was a French-born Philadelphia architect and industrial designer. For more than thirty years, he taught a design studio in the Department of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.
The Aldwych Theatre is a West End theatre, located in Aldwych in the City of Westminster. It was listed Grade II on 20 July 1971. Its seating capacity is 1,200 on three levels.
Shakespeare's Globe is a reconstruction of the Globe Theatre, an Elizabethan playhouse for which William Shakespeare wrote his plays, in the London Borough of Southwark, on the south bank of the River Thames. The original theatre was built in 1599, destroyed by fire in 1613, rebuilt in 1614, and then demolished in 1644. The modern Globe Theatre is an academic approximation based on available evidence of the 1599 and 1614 buildings. It is considered quite realistic, though contemporary safety requirements mean that it accommodates only 1,400 spectators compared to the original theatre's 3,000.
Brian Bedford was an English actor. He appeared on the stage and in film, and is known for both acting in and directing Shakespeare productions. He received seven Tony nominations, the second most for a male actor behind Jason Robards, who had eight.
Adrian Keith Noble is a theatre director, and was also the artistic director and chief executive of the Royal Shakespeare Company from 1990 to 2003.
"All the world's a stage" is the phrase that begins a monologue from William Shakespeare's pastoral comedy As You Like It, spoken by the melancholy Jaques in Act II Scene VII Line 138. The speech compares the world to a stage and life to a play and catalogues the seven stages of a man's life, sometimes referred to as the seven ages of man. It is one of Shakespeare's most frequently quoted passages.
James Anthony Church was an English actor, who has appeared on stage and screen. In 1989 he became the Dean of the National Theatre Conservatory, which is the teaching arm of the Denver Center Theatre Company in Denver, Colorado.
Cheek by Jowl is an international theatre company founded in the United Kingdom by director Declan Donnellan and designer Nick Ormerod in 1981. Donnellan and Ormerod are Cheek by Jowl's artistic directors and together direct and design all of Cheek by Jowl's productions. Cheek by Jowl's recent productions include Russian-language productions of William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle, an English-language production of The Winter's Tale and a French-language production of Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Cheek by Jowl is an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation and an Associate Company of the Barbican Centre, London.
Sir Michael Boyd is a British theatre director, and the former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Albert Ray was an American film director, actor, and screenwriter. He directed 76 films between 1920 and 1939. He also appeared in 18 films between 1915 and 1922. He was born in New Rochelle, New York and died in Los Angeles, California.
Ian McDiarmid is a Scottish actor and director best known for portraying Emperor Palpatine in the Star Wars film series. He has received an Olivier Award for Best Actor and a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play for his performances.
William Shakespeare has been commemorated in a number of different statues and memorials around the world, notably his funerary monument in Stratford-upon-Avon ; a statue in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, London, designed by William Kent and executed by Peter Scheemakers (1740); and a statue in New York's Central Park by John Quincy Adams Ward (1872).
The Life of Shakespeare is a 1914 British silent biographical film directed by Frank R. Growcott and J.B. McDowell and starring Albert Ward, Sybil Hare and George Foley. It follows the life of the English playwright William Shakespeare.
Bernard Mordaunt Ward was a British author and third-generation soldier most noted for his support of the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship and writing the first documentary biography of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.
A statue of William Shakespeare, sculpted by Giovanni Fontana after an original by Peter Scheemakers, has formed the centrepiece of Leicester Square Gardens in London since 1874. The marble figure, copied from Scheemakers' 18th-century monument to Shakespeare in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, stands on a pedestal flanked by dolphins at the centre of a fountain. It is the result of improvements to the gardens made by the financier Albert Grant, who bought the Square in 1874 and had it refurbished to a design by James Knowles.
