Shakespearean Summer Theatre Festival at Prague Castle

In the summer months, Prague Castle will again become a gathering place for all those who love Shakespeare's plays. The Shakespearean Summer Theatre Festival in Prague, which will be held for the fourth consecutive year, will present 58 performances of six selected plays by Shakespeare - mostly comedies which seem to match well with the summer season. Alena Skodova has the details:

William Shakespeare

The festival opens on July 2nd, with a premiere of Love's Labour's Lost, which will be truly remarkable occasion since the performance, and the party after - has been completely reserved for handicapped people and celebrities from Czech cultural life. For more information about the festival I spoke to one of its organizers, Rostislav Krivanek :

The Shakespearean Summer Theatre Festival will be staged as usual in a courtyard of the Old Burgrave's Palace in Prague Castle. Its tradition dates back to the early 1990s, when president Havel urged artists to enliven the Castle atmosphere, which previously had seemed a dull and lackluster. The Shakespearean festival this year will feature 6 plays by Shakespeare, two of them have been specially tailored for the occasion - Love's Labour's Lost and The Taming of the Shrew which will again be staged after proving highly successful last year. The special aspect of the latter performance will be that Kate is played by a Slovak actress in the Slovak language, so it's a bilingual performance.

But there will be companies from Poland, Slovakia and Japan performing at the festival. The Shakespearean summer festival will also be held in Brno and in the Slovak capital, Bratislava.