Shakespeare performances in England (and Wales) 2013

Mid January. I’m sitting on a train headed for London; opposite me, a colleague who sees almost as much Shakespeare in a year as I do. We're nattering about the ‘state of the art’. He says he’s fed up to the back teeth with ‘event’ Shakespeare. ‘Event’ Shakespeare? The kind of theatre he thinks we had too much of last year, productions aimed at some ‘event’ or other – ‘Globe to Globe’; the ‘World Shakespeare Festival’; both attached to the London Olympics – where the ‘event’ seemed to be what was driving and defining and selecting the Shakespeare on offer, rather than the creative energy and imagination of actors and directors and designers. The result for spectators was a number of productions that frequently didn't work on their own terms, productions that didn't have to work on their own terms, but only as bits and pieces fitting up the conceit of the big corporate project. He longs, he says wistfully, for productions that give us a whole vision of a play, the kind of Shakespeare that was standard at the RSC back in…(the date he offers is firmly in the last century). I say I saw a few ‘whole vision’ productions last year; most of them, it has to be said, independent of the frenzied corporate ‘event’-making. A couple of them, it’s true, had been officially ‘umbrella-ed’ by the sponsor but remained cockily resistant to wearing the corporate logo. Still, I take his point. We sit in silence. We gaze at each other’s feet, considering the bottoms of our trousers, wondering if it’s time we started wearing them rolled. Maybe we're just a couple of Prufrocks