Shakespeare's Globe

Battlefield Henry VI to be Broadcast Live

The Globe's fourth and final open-air battlefield performance of Shakespeare's three Henry VI plays will be filmed and broadcast live from Monken Hadley Common, near Barnet, between noon and 10 p.m. on Saturday, 24 August 2013.

The Space, the digital arts service from Arts Council England, in partnership with the BBC, will present the live event from multiple different viewpoints, including aerial cameras that will capture the stage, audience, and landscape from above. Sparkly Light will do the filming, the production company responsible for filming last year's multilingual Globe-to-Globe Festival in its entirety, producing 37 films in 42 days for use on The Space.

The event will be presented by stage and screen actor Jamie Parker, who played Prince Hal and then King Henry in the Globe's productions of Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V in 2010 and 2012.

To complement the live stream of the Henry VI trilogy, The Space will offer an innovative digital program giving audiences access to all the information available to a playgoer at the Globe and more. A rich resource of text and images—including cast biographies, rehearsal photos, interviews with director Nick Bagnall, interactive maps, and historical material—will create an immersive and informative audience experience.

After the live broadcast, edited films of each of the three plays will become available on-demand on The Space's website. These versions will be accompanied by a further series of exciting online features, including embedded hyperlinks allowing viewers to access biographies of characters as they enter the action, historical contexts for important speeches, and the complete text of each play in synchronization with the action.

Four major battles of the Wars of the Roses are featured in the Henry VI plays: Towton, Tewkesbury, St Albans, and Barnet. During the Battle of Towton alone, 28,000 men died, the largest loss of life on English soil in a single day in recorded history. The Battle of Barnet was one of the most decisive conflicts of the Wars of the Roses, and Edward IV's brutal defeat of his erstwhile friend and ally the Earl of Warwick marked the beginning of 14 years of Yorkist rule over England.

The Space is a digital arts service, developed by Arts Council England in partnership with the BBC, designed to change the way people can connect with and experience the arts. It provides live, free, and on-demand access to the work of the UK's greatest artists and arts organizations. Piloted from May 2012 until March 2013, The Space service was designed to build the digital skills of the arts and cultural sector, support creativity and experimentation, and connect arts organizations with a wider audience. Arts Council England and the BBC are continuing to work in partnership to capture all the good practice and learning from The Space pilot to improve, develop, and shape a future service. During this development phase, The Space will occasionally publish work from an arts organization that enables it to test technical and creative concepts. The Space (http://thespace.org) is available globally free of charge via the internet, on computers, smartphones, and tablets.

August 22, 2013

If you have Shakespearean news to share, e-mail editorial@shakespeareances.com