Globe
alexandra.coghlan
Say what you will about The Taming of the Shrew (and you’ll be in good company), but it is one of Shakespeare’s clearest plays. Asked to summarise the action of, say, Richard II or Love’s Labours Lost and you might lose your way somewhere between rival Dukes or intrigues within intrigues, but the marital tussle between Petruchio and his “shrew” of a wife Katherina is –for good or ill – secure. Whatever else director Maria Gaitanidi has done with Shakespeare’s most provocative play here, the overriding impression here is one of confusion. Wrapping unpalatable clarity in abstraction doesn’t Read more ...
David Nice
No Joan of Arc means no Henry VI Part One. France, where we left the victorious Henry V - the superb Sarah Amankwah, a shining light of this company - in the Globe's summer history plays, only figures briefly in the last act of a candelelit, intimate stepping-back to the more problematic saga. It's earlier in terms of composition - though it seems strange that people used to reject Shakespeare's authorship - but in terms of historic kingship actually shows how everything about England and its French posessions fell apart with the advent of the introverted Henry VI. Concentrating on the second Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Welcome to A Midsummer Night’s Dream as carnival – a blazing-coloured, hot-rhythmed, kick-ass take in which Oberon appears at one point as a blinged-up Elizabeth I and Puck exerts his powers as a flash-mob. Last month the glitter-ball hedonism of Nicholas Hytner’s gender-fluid Dream, which opened at The Bridge, felt like an impossible act to follow, but this riotous production by Sean Holmes at Shakespeare's Globe shows that the Battle of the Dreams is on.The Latin American vibe that pervades the romantic madness in the woods is given a sinister twist through the decision to introduce Theseus Read more ...
David Nice
Need Shakespeare 's Falstaff charm to be funny? Those warm, indulgent feelings won by Mrisho Mpoto in the amazing Globe to Globe's Swahili Merry Wives and by Christopher Benjamin in a period-pretty version are rarely encouraged by this season's Helen Schlesinger (in Henry IV Parts One and Two ) and now Pearce Quigley for Ellie While's 1930s romp. Both cut handsome figures with padding, not puddings, in their bellies; Quigly's not-so-fat knight is a tenorial Northerner to whom melancholy seems to come more readily than mirth - sometimes amusing in itself, as in the cued-then-cut laughter of Read more ...
Heather Neill and David Nice
Henry IV Part One (***)Women as Hal, Hotspur and Falstaff? It's been done before, and superlatively well, in Phyllida Lloyd's Shakespeare-in-prison trilogy (Henry IV Part One, with several crucial scenes from Part Two, between Julius Caesar and The Tempest). Loyalties need some shifting from lock-in with an all-female-cast to Wooden O with men in the picture too. The different values of Shakespeare's Globe - which is all about communication, too, but of an even more direct sort - as well as the knowledge that the best woman standing, the supremely charismatic Sarah Amankwah, will make it as Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
A loo with fuschia-pink carpet to catch splashback; an Archbishop of Canterbury who’s in it for the skirts; a gobbing Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. A Jacobean theatre like the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse will have witnessed most extremes of human behaviour, but this soaringly irreverent, camper than tinsel, and – let’s face it - outrageously Eighties evening, takes it down alleys it’s never ventured before.It starts with a literal bang: heavenly music from above, a bit of a shriek, darkness, and then a man lying prone on the stage. The next thing we know, the Archbishop of Canterbury is Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Emilia Bassano Lanier is not a household name. But maybe she should be. Born in 1569, she was one of the first women in England to publish a book of poetry. And she was also a religious thinker, a feminist and the founder of a school for girls. Oh, and a mother too. And maybe, just maybe, at a long stretch, she was also the "dark lady" of Shakespeare's sonnets. Anyway, she's a fascinating Elizabethan cypher and you can easily see why Morgan Lloyd Malcolm's account of her life and times was such a hit when it opened at Shakespeare's Globe last August. Now remounted in the West End, the play Read more ...
Heather Neill
Forget the cloak in the puddle. Never mind potatoes and tobacco. The children's book cliché of Sir Walter Raleigh (or Ralegh as he seems to have preferred in an age of changeable spelling) represents little of the real man and is at best misleading. The cloak incident was a later invention and potatoes and tobacco were already known before Ralegh's adventures in the New World. He did, however, popularise the smoking of tobacco at court.Good-looking and courageous, Ralegh was a favourite of Queen Elizabeth. He fought with the Huguenots in France, helped quell rebellion in Ireland, attempted to Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Macbeth has rarely seemed quite as metrosexual as in this gorgeous shadow-painted production that marks Globe artistic director Michelle Terry’s first production in the Sam Wanamaker theatre. Even in a play that walks the tightrope between its anti-hero’s fear and his ambition, it’s a daring, occasionally counterintuitive ploy – yet after a precarious start, it proves a rich and rewarding reading of one of Shakespeare’s more problematic texts.That’s down in no small part to the smouldering on-stage chemistry between Paul Ready’s empathetic, emotionally mercurial Macbeth and Terry herself Read more ...
Heather Neill
Robert Hastie is a little late for our meeting. Directing Shakespeare's darkest tragedy in London while also running Sheffield Theatres must sometimes cause a logjam of simultaneous demands, but whatever the morning's problem in the north of England, he remains smiling, relaxed, thoughtful and gracious during a break from rehearsals.Hastie (pictured below right © James Stewart) began as an actor. After reading English at Cambridge he won a scholarship to RADA, benefitting, he says, from a small window when the course led to a degree and there was still funding available. He was in the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The end-of-season contemporary writing slot at the Globe must be a proposal as full of promise for playwrights as it is perhaps intimidating. There’s the sheer scale of the space and the chance to write for a large cast; a historical subject seems to be part of the brief, so a chance to experiment for many writers, while despite a run that’s rarely more than a dozen performances, it brings an investment in rehearsal time and other support that commercial theatre couldn’t offer.The challenge, of course, is living up to the rest of the repertoire, as well as finding material that somehow also Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
If ever there was a play of “well bandied” words, it’s surely Love’s Labour’s Lost. The early Shakespearean comedy may once have hit a highpoint for verbal wit, but much of that context – the word play, the allusions, the sheer stylistic preening that must have had a certain in-joke quality for its initial courtly audience – has rather evaporated over the centuries.So it’s to the credit of Nick Bagnall’s new production that the Playhouse audience clearly comes away on an upbeat note. And that’s despite that perplexing final scene, one that disrupts the traditional marriage ending (“our wooing Read more ...