feeling listless

Theatre Shakespeare continues to be eminently adaptable. The Coatesville Cultural Society are finishing rehearsals on their version of the disputed 'King John' (no one can decide if he wrote this one), and finding it difficult to cut it down to a manageable length, so they're employing some unauthodox tactics:

""It's two hours now, but we still left a lot out of it," he said. The other difficult part, he said, was "keeping the juice" in the play. "It's dry for a modern audience," he admitted. However, to "keep the juice" in the play, Jones added modern devices such as the music of rapper DMX playing over the top of one scene.

In Sweden they're cutting 'Hamlet' down to an hour and a quarter for practicality -- because of a lack of venues, they're trying something else:

"The Ice Globe -- a replica of Shakespeare's Globe Theater in London -- is built of some 15,000 tons of snow and ice from the nearby Torne River. It stands beside Jukkasjarvi's Ice Hotel."

Basically if the play was any longer, they audience would freeze to death before the end of the second act.