The Belfry team is working hard to prepare this year’s Shakespeare play, A Winter’s Tale
After blowing the GA community away with their production of Urinetown in November of last year, the Belfry crew is kicking off the new year by working on Shakespeare’s intriguing play, A Winter’s Tale.
Prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, the Belfry team would perform a Shakespeare play every four years, allowing students a chance to perform Shakespeare once during their time in the Upper School.
Drama teacher K. Richardson is happily continuing this GA tradition, saying, “With the ways things have been disrupted in the last couple years, it’s been a while, and it’s good to go back.”
Shakespeare wrote A Winter’s Tale in 1623, basing it on the book Pandosto by English author Robert Greene. It is set during a cold winter in Sicilia and later on during summertime in Bohemia, with five acts following the dramatic life of King Leontes and his family’s politics. The play’s central themes focus on the concepts of betrayal, loyalty, loss, and forgiveness; it portrays how these raw human characteristics can either make or break a person’s state of well being.
Richardson compares this show to the popular HBO series House of the Dragon, saying, “Both are about how great, strong women deal with a system that isn’t set up to empower them. It is also a story about forgiving the unforgivable, which is interesting to examine as we come out of a very difficult time.”
Most Shakespearean plays are labeled as one genre, however, this play is both a tragedy and a comedy. The Winter’s Tale includes a bit of light humor but has a deeper physiological aspect to it, which is why the play is “a little bit of something for everyone,” says Performing Arts teacher Ms. Emma Hearn.
When compared to other Shakespearean works, The Winter’s Tale is different not only because of its dual genre, but because of its unique formula. Liam Richardson-Harris ‘24 says,“Shakespeare breaks scansion [the action of scanning a line of verse to determine its rhythm] a ton in The Winter’s Tale, which in his earlier works he stuck to most of the time.”
The Belfry actors spent a month in Shakespeare workshops even before auditions started, and the casting process began right before winter break. They practice daily and are in the process of piecing the play together.
While in the learning phase, the actors sit with the text and get to know their characters. Shakespeare wrote his works in Early Modern English, which is extremely difficult to decode wihtout a lot of practice.
Maddie Quinter ‘24 identifies one of the most important parts of putting on Shakespeare as “really just knowing what we’re saying before we can even go up and do it.”
The cast is extremely excited to put the show on this year and looking forward to the production on March 17 and 18. Richardson-Harris says, “Don’t be scared off if you didn’t like your 8th grade English class; it’ll be better than that!”