The haunted theatre

Abstract

Forests, the production by the iconoclastic Spanish-Catalan director Calixto Bieito staged at the ‘Old’ Birmingham Repertory Theatre in September 2012, functions here as the starting point for an exploration of the way a radical revisioning of Shakespeare in performance stimulated through an engagement with European modernism began in this now venerable theatre over 100 years ago. What was dubbed Bieito’s ‘epic arboreal mash-up’ was I suggest haunted by the material traces of groundbreaking past performances mounted by the Rep’s founder Barry Jackson, which included the first Shakespeare in modern-dress productions of the 1920s and the highly influential 1951–53 staging of the Henry VI trilogy.