All The Devils Are Here Tickets

By: Patrick Page, based on the works of William Shakespeare Director: Simon Godwin
Cast list: Patrick Page

Shakespeare's plays were groundbreaking in many ways, but the way he wrote villains was a major one. Before his time, most literary villains were less complex — they were almost ridiculously evil, featured in morality plays as the opposite of what audiences should be like. Shakespeare's villains, in contrast, aren't all pure evil. Many are just flawed people whose desires — for love, power, justice, recognition — get the better of them.

Page has a long history with Shakespeare, making him the perfect person to create a show like All the Devils Are Here. He's played such coveted Shakespeare roles as the title characters of Macbeth and King Lear, Claudius in Hamlet, and Iago in Othello, which earned him the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Leading Performance by an Actor.

What to watch for

• Page's show takes its name from a line in Shakespeare's The Tempest, spoken by the (non-villainous) character Ferdinand. The full quote is, "Hell is empty, and all the devils are here."
• Page is a veteran stage baddie, and not just in Shakespeare plays. Besides Hades, he's also played Scar in The Lion King, Frollo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and the Green Goblin in Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, to name a few.
• Page has also taken his villanous talents on screen, playing the shady club owner Octavius Kratt in the musical TV show Schmigadoon!
• Director Simon Godwin heads up D.C.'s Shakespeare Theatre Company, which presented the world premiere of All the Devils Are Here digitally in 2021.