Episode Detail: Shakespeare; Ireland - Changing Stages
British director Richard Eyre opens this six-hour review of English-speaking theater in the 20th century. But he begins in the 16th, with Shakespeare. “The luck of the British theater is that we had Shakespeare,” Eyre says, and in the first hour he traces how 20th-century actors and directors interpreted the Bard. Eyre sums up Shakespeare's importance thusly: “He's our theatrical DNA..” In hour No. 2, Eyre visits Ireland. “Without Irish playwrights,” he says. “British theater would have died.”
