Actor interviews
Steven Berkoff: Shakespeare's Heroes and Villains
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 104 Since the 1990s, playwright and actor Steven Berkoff has been traveling the world performing a one-actor show called Shakespeare’s Villains. Berkoff promotes the show’s examination of Iago, Shylock, Richard III, the Macbeths, and others as “A Master…
Antioch Shakespeare Festival: John Lithgow, Robin Lithgow, and Tony Dallas
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 99 Over the course of three summers in the 1950s, Arthur Lithgow and a troupe of actors he’d gathered performed every single one of Shakespeare plays, in rep, at the Antioch Shakespeare Festival, also known as Shakespeare…
Paterson Joseph: Julius Caesar and Me
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 98 In 2012 the Royal Shakespeare Company staged the first-ever, high-profile, all-black British Shakespeare production, Julius Caesar, set in Africa. The actor who played Brutus, Paterson Joseph, recently wrote a book about the experience called Julius Caesar…
Antony Sher
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 94 Sir Antony Sher, one the greatest Shakespearean actors of the 20th and 21st centuries, died in December, 2021, in Stratford-Upon-Avon. He was 72. In 2018, we were lucky enough to record an interview with Sir Antony and, to…
Derek Jacobi: Acting Shakespeare
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 92 Actor Derek Jacobi talks about his remarkable career, including the advice he received from Richard Burton, a disappointing rejection by the Royal Shakespeare Company, sharing the stage with Laurence Olivier, performing King Lear in 2010, his…
Derek Jacobi: Playing Hamlet
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 91 Renowned actor Derek Jacobi talks about the Shakespearean role for which he is best known, Hamlet. Beginning at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1957, Jacobi has acted this role on stage nearly 400 times, and as you…
Shakespeare and War: Stephan Wolfert
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 81 In his one-man show Cry Havoc! actor Stephan Wolfert, a US Army veteran, draws together lines in Shakespeare’s plays spoken by soldiers and former soldiers—including Macbeth, Othello, and Richard III. He puts those words to the…
Q Brothers - Othello: The Remix
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 64 Since 2002, Gregory and Jeffery Ameen Qaiyum, better known as GQ and JAQ – the Q Brothers – have been using hip-hop to adapt and update the plays of William Shakespeare. At the time we recorded…
Keith Hamilton Cobb on American Moor
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 54 Othello is the story of a tragic murder and suicide involving a dark-skinned general and his aristocratic, white-skinned bride. Who should direct it? Who’s “allowed” to? What if, say, a white director and the actor he’s…
Reduced Shakespeare Company
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 45 Discovered in a treasure-filled parking lot in Leicester, England, an ancient manuscript proves to be the long lost first play by none other than the young William Shakespeare from Stratford. That’s the premise of the latest…
Actresses on Shakespeare
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 2 In Shakespeare’s time, only men appeared on stage, with teenage boys playing the women’s parts. Today, women play women and sometimes men—and vice-versa. In this podcast we have gathered some of the best-known actresses in the…