Globe
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... |
Henry V, Shakespeare's Globe review - anatomy of a violent, murky world of leadershipSaturday, 26 November 2022
It begins in darkness. All that can be heard is the sound of a human struggling painfully for breath so that even before the lights go up we have the sense of a life coming to an end. It’s a stark contrast to the triumphalism of the play’s original... Read more... |
I, Joan, Shakespeare's Globe review - a non-binary retelling that's as ebullient as it's irreverentFriday, 02 September 2022
This raw, joyous, irreverent take on Joan of Arc made headlines before opening night for its depiction of the fifteenth-century warrior saint as non-binary. Yet what shines out in Charlie Josephine’s fresh, deliberately pared-down script is that all... Read more... |
The Tempest, Shakespeare's Globe review - occasional gales of laughter drown out subtletySaturday, 06 August 2022
Alexei Sayle, in his angry young man phase, once said that you can always tell when you’re watching a Shakespeare comedy, because NOBODY'S LAUGHING. That’s not entirely true, of course, but sometimes a director has to go looking for the LOLs and... Read more... |
King Lear, Shakespeare's Globe review - eviscerates emotionally while illuminating a society rotten with liesMonday, 20 June 2022
Kathryn Hunter’s performance as Lear forges its heat from contradictions. She is as frail as she is strong, as detestable as she is loveable, as powerfully charismatic as she is physically diminutive. That she is a woman playing a man is the least... Read more... |
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