Shakespeare
Rachel Halliburton
King Charles I famously declared that Much Ado About Nothing should be renamed the "Beatrice and Benedick play". So it’s not difficult to imagine him – or indeed any fan of romantic screwball comedy – relishing Chelsea Walker’s elegant, sorbet-hued production in which Pippa Nixon’s flinty Beatrice and Ken Nwosu’s jocular, easy-going Benedick strike sparks from the off. Sometimes it takes a while for the banter to ignite in a Much Ado production, but Nixon’s wiry physicality and waspish delivery means that every insult lands with perfection. When the Messenger observes that Beatrice is Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The erotic life of puppets – we discover in this show – is filled with intriguing possibilities that are denied to mere flesh and blood lovers. They can float up into the air when they kiss, glide backwards if they’re upset, and perform acrobatics that would be ambitious even for devotees of the Kama Sutra. In this revival of Greg Doran’s wonderful production – first devised in collaboration with Islington’s Little Angel Puppet Theatre in 2004 – such attributes do not divide them from the human experience but provide a wittily alternative expression of love’s highs and lows. In effect, Read more ...
Graham Rickson
You’d watch Hamnet for the visuals alone, director Chloé Zhao and cinematographer Łukasz Żal flooding the screen with lush greens and browns, 16th century rural England brought to physical life with an eye-popping attention to detail. We first meet Jessie Buckley’s Agnes in dense woodland gathering plants, a gift for falconry signalling her otherness. Though the locals whisper that she’s the daughter of a witch, she proves irresistible to glove maker and Latin tutor William (Paul Mescal). He charms her with his storytelling abilities and she reciprocates by reading his palm, hinting at a Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Just a flimsy music stand on the RSC’s biggest stage greets us. Sir Ken, no longstaff in hand as we might have expected, dons his coat, perhaps left over from Abanazar’s costuming in an upscale pantomime, and raises his weedy, reedy baton. Instantly, all hell breaks loose on Bob Crowley’s beautiful sparse, now tilting set, supplemented by Akhila Krishnan’s Donner and Blitzen videos. The game’s afoot all right.The clue is in the title of course. Prospero, like a wizardy Leonard Bernstein, conjuring a storm to shipwreck his usurper brother, Antonio, Duke of Milan and shipwreck, amongst others, Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
There has been a trend in productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in recent years to portray Athens as a sexually repressive regime in which Queen Hippolyta is resentfully shackled to Theseus after he has conquered her in battle. The Bridge Theatre’s – ultimately gloriously escapist – Dream, portrayed Theseus as a tyrant from The Handmaid’s Tale. Meanwhile, the beautifully austere Dream which played at The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse last Christmas, showed him as a psychotic misogynist.This is a completely valid reading of the text – I personally have never recovered from the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Time is a terrifying force in Romeo & Juliet, and Robert Icke's headlong production never lets playgoers forget that fact. Returning to a tragedy he first directed for Headlong touring company 14 years ago, Icke reprises many of the conceits deployed first time round, this time wedded to a starry company headed by Sadie Sink and Noah Jupe that, in the first act at least, gives pride of place to his supporting players.Some may resist the apparent tricksiness of devices that include repetitions or reprises of scenes, as often as not accompanied by searing flashes of light separating out Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Tim Crouch is one of our great theatrical alchemists. Most famously – in his conceptual show An Oak Tree – he creates a portrait of grief in which each night an actor who’s never seen the script before plays a grieving father who believes that his daughter has metamorphosed into an oak tree. What’s so extraordinary about the piece is the way that Crouch breaks down any factor that might seem to contribute to authentic emotion, carefully pointing up the show’s anomalies until the story itself grabs by us the throat. In his directorial debut at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, he does something Read more ...