Georgian Soviet-era theatre posters among world’s best honouring Shakespeare
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A series of historic Georgian theatre posters have been selected for a global catalogue marking 400 years since the death of legendary English playwright and poet William Shakespeare.
Eight posters for Shakespeare's plays staged in Georgia were included in the Presenting Shakespeare catalogue, created by Mirko Ilic and Steven Heller. The collection was published this year to honour Shakespeare’s death in 1616.
The Georgian posters were chosen to be part of the final collection alongside 1,100 prints from all over the world after submissions from only 56 countries out of 200 were accepted.
A Georgian poster (bottom) for a 1964 staging of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Rustaveli Theatre in Tbilisi. Photo by Art Palace.
The catalogue's publishers Princeton Architectural Press called the publication "an indispensable resource for anyone promoting one of the 5,000 Shakespeare productions put on every year".
The eight Georgian posters were created for theatre plays based on Shakespeare's tragedies Hamlet, King Lear and Othello and comedies The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Two of the oldest Georgian posters were made in 1903; one featured the name of celebrated late 19th Century Georgian author and poet Akaki Tsereteli who directed the-then play.
A collection of posters for theatre productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream including the Georgian poster (bottom row, second from left) for the Rustaveli Theatre. Photo by Art Palace.
The posters were preserved at the Art Palace museum in Tbilisi.
Born in 1564, Shakespeare was regarded as one of the history's pre-eminent dramatists with dozens of plays and hundreds of other works written during his creative life.
The English poet died in April 1616 at the age of 52.
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Visual messages from the Soviet past, in the form of political, social and commercial posters created across decades of the Union, can now be found on the web where a repository of the works on wide-ranging subjects has been launched.