Globe
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... |
As You Like It, Shakespeare's Globe review - vibrant, ebullient fun in a forest where anything goesTuesday, 05 September 2023
To proclaim that you’re playing gender games with Shakespeare’s As You Like It seems a little like announcing that you have a bicycle with two wheels, or indeed that you’re doing something interesting with rhythms in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.Let’... Read more... |
Macbeth, Shakespeare's Globe review - uneven production of intermittent powerFriday, 11 August 2023
That Shakespeare speaks to his audiences anew with every production is a cliché, but, like so many such, the glib blandness of the assertion conceals an insistent truth. The Thane of Glamis has had some success in life, gains preferment from those... Read more... |
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare's Globe review - busy production overflowing with new ideasThursday, 25 May 2023
Two years on from Sean Holmes’ production and seven on from Emma Rice’s (both of which featured diverse casts), Elle While takes a turn with the old warhorse’s lovers and fairies, its sparring couples and its Morecambe and Wise-like shambles of a... Read more... |
The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare's Globe review - comedy and confusionSaturday, 20 May 2023
Shakespeare drew on Plautus’s Menaechmi for this early short comedy. Was it his competitive streak that made him up the ante with not one set of identical twins but two?Imagine that you have newly arrived in a place that you have never visited... Read more... |
The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare's Globe review - clever concept never quite catches fireSaturday, 04 March 2023
As course after course of Noma-style creations are served up to Leontes and his guests – curious mouthfuls with their accompanying spoons, edible branches as though straight from the tree, elaborate miniatures ritually revealed from beneath a cloche... Read more... |
Titus Andronicus, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse review - notorious play hits and missesFriday, 03 February 2023
If All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida have earned the sobriquet "‘problem plays", what price Titus Andronicus? Does a director seek out a Saw vibe for the horror? Do they go for a deadpan Spinal Tap’s... Read more... |
Hakawatis: Women of the Arabian Nights, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse review - magical stories by candlelightMonday, 19 December 2022
Do you remember how the 1001 Nights ends? You know how it starts: Scheherazade has been married to a king who kills his brides the day after he marries them. She tells him a story so good that he simply has to know what happens next, and she... Read more... |
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