An outdoor projection with musical accompaniment
5 March 2016, The Dance Porch of Guildhall
Presented by Guildhall Library/ Guildhall School of Music and Drama

Review by Shehrazade Zafar-Arif, MA Shakespeare Studies

A cold, rainy Saturday evening was no time to be outside, and yet Guildhall Yard was filled to the brim with people, huddling together for warmth as they looked up expectantly at the beautiful old building. For the next two hours, the wall of Guildhall would come alive with an explosive, colourful celebration of Shakespeare.

The Guildhall Art Gallery and the City of London Heritage Gallery were both open late, displaying Shakespeare’s signature and the Guildhall Library’s copy of the First Folio. Also on display was Visscher’s 1616 engraving of pre-Great Fire London alongside Robin Reynolds’ modern version, which features references to Shakespeare’s works.

Shakespeare Son et Lumiere (‘Shakespeare Sound and Light’ – everything sounds fancier in French!) was hosted by Guildhall Library and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. The show featured 3D projection mapping technology and a special music composition. Spectators were treated to projected images represented various Shakespeare plays, accompanied by recitations of famous lines and speeches.

Snow fell across the wall against a recitation of the ‘now is the winter of our discontent’ speech from Richard III, a dagger accompanied Macbeth’s ‘is this a dagger which I see before me?’ and a skull appeared to signal Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy. Perhaps the images were slightly simplistic, but they served their intended purposes of being aesthetically pleasing and of capturing the gist of certain plays, or rather what we associate with them, in a single image – appropriate for a mostly non-academic crowd.

Another interesting feature of the show was the switching of the speakers’ genders: we heard a female Horatio, a female Richard III and a male witch. While this was often jarring – and one might argue that it would have been better to overcome the weighted ratio of male to female parts by utilising more famous speeches by women – it did produce an interesting effect and prove that gender-blind casting can work in Shakespeare.

The show began with a spinning, animated Globe theatre and ended with Shakespeare’s face, with the voice-overs telling spectators ‘our revels are now ended’. It was greeted with thunderous applause, which, along with the impressive turnout and the enthusiastic filming and photography that continued throughout the display, proves how far appreciation of Shakespeare stretches. A quick glance at the crowd would tell you that it did not only consist of Shakespeare academics and theatre connoisseurs, but of people from all walks of life, of all ages, families and students alike – proving that Shakespeare is indeed for everyone, and for all of time.