Shakespeare on European Festival Stages ed. by Nicoleta Cinpoeş, Florence March, and Paul Prescott

Abstract

Reviewed by: Shakespeare on European Festival Stages ed. by Nicoleta Cinpoeş, Florence March, and Paul Prescott Rowena Hawkins Shakespeare on European Festival Stages. Edited by Nicoleta Cinpoeş, Florence March, and Paul Prescott. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. Pp. vii + 235. Hardcover $100.00. Ebook $90.00. This timely collection addresses “the relative paucity of literature on European Shakespeare festivals” (2) by providing a comprehensive introduction to the topic. Across eleven chapters, its contributors offer immensely readable accounts of events ranging from the famous Festival d’Avignon to a little-known grassroots festival in the Bulgarian village of Patalenitsa that “runs on enthusiasm and professional dedication” (161). Some of these festivals are wholly dedicated to Shakespeare, while others feature his plays as part of broader programs. Part travel guide and part cultural criticism, Shakespeare on European Festival Stages shows the value of festival theater. The volume opens with sentences that would not feel out of place in a tourist brochure: “Dear Reader, you have before you a travel companion, the first of its kind. This book will take you across continental Europe[,] offering an introduction to each of the festival stages that have illuminated the works of William Shakespeare over the last seventy or so years” (1). With this warm welcome, Paul Prescott, Nicoleta Cinpoeş, and Florence March set the tone. As they outline the scope of the collection they promise “the widest imaginable variety of theatrical and artistic offering[s] on a range of stages,” preparing us for a journey packed with discoveries that they describe as a tour “of the exquisitely ephemeral” (1). Remarkably, our local guides, the “resident experts” (2) selected to write each chapter, deliver on these enticing promises. First, we are whisked away to southern France, where March introduces us to the variety of Shakespearean performance on festival stages in Avignon, Montpellier, and Nice. Almagro, Spain is the next stop on our “Shakespearean Grand Tour” (1), and here Isabel Guerrero offers us an evocative glimpse of a festival at which “early modern theatre is not only preserved, but also reinvented” (50). We then head to four castles in the Czech Republic and Slovakia with Filip Krajník and Eva Kyselová before visiting a reconstructed Globe Theatre in Neuss, Germany. At this replica playhouse, which is “neither exactly a cultural heritage site nor [. . .] a tourist attraction” (79), Vanessa Schormann introduces a festive celebration of Shakespeare’s global afterlives. [End Page 307] Our journey across the continent then takes us to Craiova, Romania, where we encounter the vibrancy of the city’s “large-scale international biennial” festival (95) with Cinpoeş. We travel on to the Italian cities of Verona and Rome with Lisanna Calvi and Maddalena Pennacchia before heading north “to the sea-swept Baltic [setting] of Gdańsk” in Poland (1) with Urszula Kizelbach and Jacek Fabiszak. Boika Sokolova and Kirilka Stavreva then guide us “toward the softly undulating Rhodope Mountains” and “through a luminous field of sunflowers” (157) to Patalenitsa, Bulgaria, before we stop at the Gyula Shakespeare Festival in Hungary with Júlia Paraizs and Ágnes Matuska. Our penultimate destination is Helsingør, Denmark, where Anne Sophie Refskou introduces the interculturalism on offer at Kronborg castle, before we end our journey in Inđija, Serbia, with Alexandra Portmann’s “portrait” (213) of the Itaka Shakespeare Festival. This whirlwind tour makes for exhilarating reading, and there is a real sense of discovery underpinning every chapter of Shakespeare on European Festival Stages. As the editors observe, “Shakespeare festivals are disproportionately likely to occur in a small- to medium-sized town [. . .] doubtless because the magnetic pull of the Shakespeare brand can survive relocation to an otherwise small and/ or overlooked town or city” (10). As a result, the collection achieves a curiously intimate feel, as if we are being given exclusive glimpses of previously undiscovered wonders courtesy of those who know the festivals best: the authors, who “are united in their desire to share their subject with a new audience” and “put their festival on the map” (13–14). The collection also offers escapism through its vivid descriptions of the places and spaces that host Shakespearean performance, the electric atmospheres that descend at festival time, and the diverse productions that...