Globe
The Crucible, Shakespeare's Globe review - stirring account of paranoia and prejudiceThursday, 22 May 2025
A society ruled by hysteria. Lurid lies that carry more currency than reality. There’s no shortage of reasons that Arthur Miller’s 1953 drama about witchcraft and revenge resonates so strongly today.In an article in the New Yorker he described how... Read more... |
Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare's Globe - swagger and vivacity cohabit with deathMonday, 05 May 2025
Holsters, Stetsons and bluegrass music bring a distinctive flavour to this Wild West riff on Romeo and Juliet that flings us into a vortex of frontier-town politics where men are men and bad girls wear gingham. Sean Holmes’ vigorous production stirs... Read more... |
Three Sisters, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse review - Chekhov's anatomy lesson on the human conditionFriday, 14 February 2025
Russia.It’s impossible to be ambivalent towards that word, that country, indeed that idea, one so very similar to our own, yet so very different. You feel it in Moscow, where I spent a week exactly 40 years ago. Like London, it is a vast city,... Read more... |
Cymbeline, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse review - pagan women fight the good fightSaturday, 25 January 2025
There’s not much point in having three hours worth of Shakespearean text to craft and the gorgeous Sam Wanamaker Playhouse as a canvas if you merely intend to go through the motions, ticking off one of the canon’s less performed works. The question... Read more... |
Hansel and Gretel, Shakespeare's Globe review - too saccharine a retelling for our timesSaturday, 07 December 2024
Growing up within a few hundred yards of a major dock, I hardly knew darkness or quiet – the first time I properly felt their terrible beauty was on the Isle of Man ferry in the middle of the Irish Sea, its voids still vivid half a century on.... Read more... |
All's Well That Ends Well, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse review - Shakespeare at his least likeableMonday, 25 November 2024
"All’s well that ends well". Sounds like the kind of phrase a guilty parent says to a disappointed child after they’ve been caught in a white lie and bought them a bag of sweets to smooth things over. It’s a saying that betokens bad behaviour, a... Read more... |
Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare's Globe review - Egypt in sign language, Rome in pale forceMonday, 19 August 2024
More surely than any other London stage, the Globe has opened up our theatrical perspective on different languages. Its triumphant “Globe to Globe” 2012 season presented the Shakespeare canon in 37 different linguistic interpretations.Among those... Read more... |
The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare's Globe review - riotous comedy jars with the bitter pill of the production's messageWednesday, 19 June 2024
A recent Crime Survey for England and Wales estimated that 2.1 million people in the UK had been victims of domestic abuse in the year ending March 2023. So it makes sense that director Jude Christian has addressed this tricky, troubling Shakespeare... Read more... |
Richard III, Shakespeare's Globe review - Michelle Terry riffs with punk bravadoThursday, 23 May 2024
There’s a fierce, dark energy to the Globe’s new Richard III that I don’t recall at that venue for a fair while. The drilled cast dances seemed more frenzied, and there are more of them, and for once let’s start with a shout-out for James Maloney’s... Read more... |
The Duchess of Malfi, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse review - the good end badly, but act bestTuesday, 05 March 2024
“All discord without this circumference,” the Duchess of Malfi tells the good man she’s just asked to be her husband, “is only to be pitied and not feared”. Perhaps the villains should be more feared and less pitied in the imbalanced casting of... Read more... |
Othello, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse review - 21st century interpretation delivers food for thoughtThursday, 08 February 2024
Detective Chief Inspector Othello leads a quasi-paramilitary team of Metropolitan Police officers investigating gang activity in Docklands. With a chequered past now behind him, he has reformed and has the respect of both the team he leads and his... Read more... |
Ghosts, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse review - a claustrophobic descent into purgatoryFriday, 24 November 2023
Henrik Ibsen may well have wanted to shake things up, to rile against the social mores of his time. But his visionary critiques didn’t usually come with anything as radical as, say, optimism. And there’s no more of a downer than Ghosts.... Read more... |
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