Globe
Jane Edwardes
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 before, and within 24 hours you are met by a woman who claims you as her husband, a man who thrusts a gold chain in your hands that he insists you had long ordered, and a courtesan who demands the return of a ring she says she gave you earlier. Farce or tragedy? That is the plight of poor Antipholus of Syracuse, who arrives in Ephesus with his servant Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
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 – it’s clear that, in Sicilia, eating is scarcely the point. When you dine among sleek Swedish interiors, surrounded by a military drill-team of waiters, it’s hardly going to be about anything so vulgar as appetite, is it?Director Sean Holmes has pulled off a coup: the first director to use both of the Globe’s theatres in a single evening. It’s an Read more ...
Gary Naylor
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 disappearing drummers for the demises? Do you go hard and locate the murders within the atrocities being committed on European soil right now? In her radical interpretation, Jude Christian never quite finds the consistency of tone that the three-hour long evening requires – we get the discomfort intended, but it’s distracting not disturbing.We open on Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
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 survives the next day. This goes on for 1001 nights, until… what?The inherently cyclical nature of the source material of the new play Hakawatis: Women of the Arabian Nights is a problem that writer Hannah Khalil never quite solves. But Pooja Ghai’s production at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, a collaboration with theatre company Tamasha, is Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
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 opening “Oh for a Muse of fire”. Here instead there’s guilt and confusion as Henry realises, in anguish, that far from ceremonially lifting the crown from a corpse, he’s taken it from his father’s head before he’s died.In their final, bitter, conversation – taken from Henry IV part II – the old king delivers a warning about the grim realpolitik Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
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 of us struggle to fit precisely into the categories that language assigns to us. There’s no sense of the erasure of the female struggle in this re-examination of Joan’s legacy – the play features many strong women, not least the king’s mother-in-law, Debbie Korley’s stylishly fearsome Yolande of Aragon. The fact is that Joan of Arc was by anyone’s Read more ...
Gary Naylor
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 make a few sacrifices along the way in their pursuit. And, boy, oh boy, does Sean Holmes go looking for the laughs in this production of The Tempest – and don’t we suffer a few sacrifices as a consequence.The storm itself is a bit of water sprayed on The Globe’s famous groundlings, with our aristocrats boozing and partying like superannuated Club 18- Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
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 extraordinary aspect of what she achieves in this production. This is a Lear that eviscerates emotionally at the same time as it illuminates the fragility of a society rotten with corruption and lies.Hunter famously first played Lear in 1997 at a moment when discussions about gender and identity were at a very different level to where we are now. Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Boris Johnson was of course not the first British leader to engineer a split with Europe for personal gain. This strikes you with full force halfway through this production. While there are no photos of Johnson rushing around at a Downing Street party wearing an erect golden phallus, we are living in a world where – as Peter Pomerantsev has said of another leader – "nothing is true and everything is possible". In this play the leader with the gilded willy happens to be Henry VIII, but as the female chorus sings "He has everything an honest man should not" to a guitar accompaniment, the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
With tyrants licking their lips around the world and the question of how to respond to their threat growing ever more immediate, Julius Caesar director Diane Page eyes an open goal – and misses. A statue stands alone on the stage (this touring production has no set and barely any props) as Caesar struts about, feigning humility, scoffing at a soothsayer’s warning to beware the Ides of March. Cassius, clever but consumed by her distaste for Caesar’s ever-growing threat to the republic with the inevitable demotion of senators like her, plots his murder. Brutus is the people’s favourite, Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Lucy Bailey’s joyous, visually ravishing Much Ado About Nothing opens on a sombre note. On stage there is laughter and merriment as people prepare for a party in the sprawling grounds of an Italian estate, but then a lone soldier enters the auditorium, his head wrapped in a bandage, and the tension becomes palpable.He is carrying a letter, and it suddenly becomes clear that the people watching his approach are all worried that it will bring news of the death of a loved one. Singing mournfully he hands the missive over; Leonata peruses it anxiously before her face lightens as she announces Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The Merchant of Venice is a comedy, you say? Shakespeare, as ever, refuses to be confined to convenient boxes, his best plays’ extraordinary pliability and longevity a testament to the piercing eye he cast towards the slings and arrows that assail humankind. More than most of his works, The Merchant of Venice requires a director to take a stance, especially these days, so as to send the audience in a chosen direction. This is not unique - no text can. nor should, be sacred - but those decisions bubble closer to the surface in The Merchant than perhaps any other play in the canon. Read more ...