#will kempe

[shakespearenews]

The Shakespearean Oscars | Upstart Crow | BBC Comedy Greats

Move over Oscars, it's the London Theatre Awards! Will is nominated in every category, so surely he'll win one? Subscribe: http://bit.ly/BBCComedyGreatsWATCH...

[mariocki]

Pledge Night (A Hazing in Hell, 1990)

"Look what he did to my hand!"

"Wow, looks like a burn. Looks like you got his burns!"

"I'm suing."

[themaninthegreenshirt]

The Sally Fowler Rat Pack

[voxsart]

Cannes 1990.

Dylan Hundley, Chris Eigeman, Isabel Gillies, Will Kempe, Bryan Leder, Whit Stillman, Carolyn Farina, Edward Clements, and Allison Parisi.

[shakespearenews]

The First Comedian - Los Angeles Review of Books

Jason Crawford discusses the career of Robert Armin, the first modern comedian.

IT’S THE SUMMER of 1599, and a stand-up artist has just come on at the Curtain. He paces downstage, an arresting presence, visibly atypical, numinously strange. The crowd looking on knows already that this bristling figure isn’t going to be like the other clowns they’ve seen on the Curtain stage. He doesn’t do jigs or pratfalls. He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t offer winks or reassurances. And he doesn’t intend to make this easy, for himself or anyone else. But these 2,000 paying customers must also know that Robert Armin, a.k.a. Snuff the Clown, has something else to offer. They are here, after all, for him.

There’s a potential role for Armin in everything Shakespeare wrote from 1601 to 1611, from Lavatch (All’s Well That Ends Well) and Thersites (Troilus and Cressida) to Autolycus (The Winter’s Tale) and Caliban (The Tempest).

[shakespearenews]

Walking Shadows | Ed Simon

Meet the actors who first brought Shakespeare’s characters to life.

Scholar Stanley Wells explains in Shakespeare & Co. that “after Armin’s recruitment Shakespeare began to create clowns who are more wistful, introverted, and musical: semi-choric commentators on the action.” These included Touchstone in As You Like It, Feste in Twelfth Night, and Lavatch in All’s Well That Ends Well. The disturbing, nihilistic clown who accompanies King Lear on the element-blasted hearth—“I am better than thou art now; I am a fool, thou art nothing”—was a role supposedly written with Armin’s particular genius in mind, as was Iago from Othello (though there is far from a scholarly consensus on the casting). Critic Frank Kermode speculates in The Age of Shakespeare “that if Armin had not joined the company these roles might not exist in the forms familiar to us.”

[shakespearenews]

Making Shakespeare A Classic | OUPblog

Despite his foundational status in today’s academy, William Shakespeare was not particularly welcome in the early modern English universities. In the

The modern resonance of the Parnassus plays is difficult to miss, as two undergraduate protagonists, Philomusus and Studioso, struggle after graduation to find any practical use for their liberal arts degrees. At one point they attempt to be professional performers, auditioning for the early modern actors Richard Burbage and Will Kempe, who appear as characters in the trilogy’s third installment. 

During the audition, Burbage comically asserts that Philomusus’ “face and the proportion of [his] body” would be right for playing Richard III, and Burbage asks him to “act a little of it.” Philomusus immediately launches into the opening speech from Richard III: “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by the sonne of Yorke.” 

Professional players were strictly banned from university precincts, but the Parnassus playwright brought them to life inside the walls of St. John’s College, Cambridge, animating two prominent members of Shakespeare’s troupe in front of a university audience. This is also a major moment in the history of student performance, representing the earliest known instance of Shakespeare’s words being performed before a live audience in an academic setting.

[howardhawkshollywoodannex]

Isabel Gillies and Will Kempe in Metropolitan (1990).

Isabel has 20 acting credits through an episode of Law and Order: Organlized Crime. She was also in 32 episodes of Law and Order" Special Victims Unit and I Shot Andy Warhol.

Will has 20 acting credits, and is the only cast member with a previous screen credit. He made his film debut as Acid Sid in 1988, and was most recently seen in an episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit in 2010. He was also in 10 episodes of All My Children in 2007, as a doctor.