At a York festival, Shakespeare is the world’s common language

With Love’s Light Wings is a poetic, funny, deeply moving reimagining of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with two young Georgian actors (Mariam Gabadze and Irakli Lomidze, pictured right), using masks, puppets, movement and words (spoken and projected on to a screen, in English). Spotlit on a dark stage, a tiny town, domed and towered, seems to float; two dark-cowled figures pull it apart. Here, the lovers meet, fall fatefully in love.

They touch hands – lights flash, thunder rolls. Music composed by Dato Evgenidze accompanies their adventures, playful, percussive; romantic violins; rumbling threateningly when the cowled figures appear. Shifting scales of perception – human, puppet, mask, projection – open up new routes to experiencing the play’s themes of love, death and “ancient grudge”.

Created by the Shota Rustaveli Theatre and Film Georgia State University and Tbilisi Giorgi Mikeladze state professional puppet theatre, under the artistic direction of George Shalutashvili and director Nikoloz Sabashvili, this is a fitting opening production in York international Shakespeare festival, shaped by the director Philip Parr around the belief that “Shakespeare is the world’s common language. His works are important not least because they help us to talk to – not at – one another.”

Lisa Wolpe’s vividly delivered, one-woman play, Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender, explores the ways in which embodying Shakespeare’s characters can open up dialogues within and beyond the self, revealing routes to love through the devastations of death.

Wolpe, an actor for half a century and founder of the Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company, has particular expertise in playing roles such as Hamlet, Shylock, Richard II, Romeo, Juliet, Hermione. Here she weaves an account of her own life and her discoveries about the life of her father, who died in shocking circumstances when she was four, with her experiences of embodying Shakespeare’s characters.

It is a journey of widening understanding and compassion (although not, in the case of power-hungry Richard III); an expression of faith in dialogue between peoples.

York international Shakespeare festival runs at York St John University venues until 3 May

Photograph by Shota Rustaveli Theatre & Film Georgia State University