The British Council organised a theatre trail titled 'Shakespeare Shoptok' in an innovative way on 23 and 24 April 2016 at the Dhaka University campus office. This trail was a part of the British Council’s global Shakespeare Lives programme in partnership with Theatre and Performance Studies Department of the University of Dhaka.
The trail included seven scenes from seven plays by Shakespeare – Hamlet, Othello, As You Like It, Taming of The Shrew, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet. Each of the pieces was ten minutes long and three plays were simultaneously performed at five different locations in the Dhaka University campus office. This show was open to the public.
On each evening of the event, nearly about 500 audiences came to the British Council premise. The audiences highly appreciated this innovative site-specific artistic attempt with a desire to capture the condensed emotion as well as the vitality of humanity which reflected by immortal playwright’s soliloquies monologues of his universal tragedies and comedies.
The driving force of this presentation was to create a site of confrontation where audiences can encounter the paradoxical logic of individuality of Elizabethan era blended with the contemporary performance of a young theatre students group of the department.