"Obsessive and dark, Free Will twins Shakespeare with Fellini...this is a cultural ragbag, exuberant, vicious and tender." -- Marilyn Bowering
Product Description
Rhenisch’s first artistic love was the theatre. Twenty-eight years after first playing Puck, he brings him alive for us in this sparkling and inventive work fusing drama, poetry, and consummate clowning. These poems are onstage, under the lights, dressed in greasepaint and tights. Some of them are vaudeville acts, others are new stagings of Shakespeare’s plays, scripts for Punch and Judy puppet theatre, stand-up comedies and carnie shows.
Settings range from the London Blitz, to Chernobyl and the Cariboo, and from Berlin in 1933 to the Globe Theatre in London, where the actors and their roles change places and are faced, at last, with the choice of free will. Along the way, Rhenisch recasts Shakespeare’s major tragedies so they focus on their women, and puts on and takes off masks, always with the goal of freeing Will Shakespeare and releasing the passion of the poetic and dramatic traditions from the cloak of habit. This is Rhenisch the trickster at his best, in poems that renew the lyrical and satiric traditions and move them into a heightened sense of myth and light-footed irony.
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