Shakespeare
As You Like It / Hamlet, Shakespeare’s Globe review - ensemble emphasis sets a leaner styleFriday, 18 May 2018
There’s a distinct feeling of back to basics to this opening double bill at the Globe under the theatre’s new Artistic Director Michelle Terry. The elaborations (some would say gimmickry) of Emma Rice’s short tenure have been reined back, and a new... Read more... |
Hamlet, RSC, Hackney Empire review - Paapa Essiedu's winning DaneMonday, 19 March 2018
Shakespeare's death-laden play is alive and well and breathing with renewed force in Hackney, the last British stop for an RSC touring Hamlet that moves on from London to the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC in May. Let's hope the American capital... Read more... |
Antony Sher: Year of the Mad King - extractTuesday, 13 March 2018
In 1982 Antony Sher played the Fool to Michael Gambon’s King in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of King Lear. Shortly after, he came back to Stratford to play Richard III, for which he won the Olivier and Evening Standard Awards for Best... Read more... |
Macbeth, National Theatre - Rufus Norris goes for drab, gory and tricksyThursday, 08 March 2018
Fair is foul and foul is drab, gory and tricksy in Rufus Norris’s first stab at Shakespeare direction at the National Theatre, Macbeth. It embodies the play's most clichéd quotation (the one about sound, fury, and nada), though whether that's... Read more... |
A Midsummer Night's Dream, ENO review - shiveringly beautiful BrittenFriday, 02 March 2018
“What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?” Hang on a minute, Tytania, there are no flowers. Instead, as Britten’s ominously low strings slither and tremble up and down the scale, the curtain rises on a huge, near-acidic emerald green hilly slope... Read more... |
All's Well That Ends Well, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse review - feisty, prickly and topical, as wellThursday, 18 January 2018
It's the people who are problematic, not the play. That's one take-away sentiment afforded by Caroline Byrne's sparky and provocative take on All's Well That Ends Well, that ever-peculiar Shakespeare "comedy" (really?) whose title is in ironic... Read more... |
Judi Dench: My Passion for Trees, BBC One review - an arboreal delightThursday, 21 December 2017
“I am going to find out how much my trees live, breath, and even communicate. I am Judi Dench, and I have been an actor for 60 years – but I have had another passion ever since I was a little girl: I have adored trees. My six acres are a secret... Read more... |
Titus Andronicus, RSC, Barbican review - blood will outWednesday, 20 December 2017
Live theatre, eh? It had to happen. On press night a sound of what seemed to be snoring (the production’s really not dull) revealed, in the Barbican stalls, a collapse. About an hour in, a huge amount of blood is smeared over Titus Andronicus’s... Read more... |
Julius Caesar, RSC, Barbican review - Roman bromance plays straightThursday, 14 December 2017
Even more than some of Shakespeare’s other histories, Julius Caesar inevitably offers itself to “topical interpretation”, a Rorschach test of a play which directors short of an original idea can extrapolate to project their own political aperçus... Read more... |
Antony and Cleopatra, RSC, Barbican review - rising grandeurWednesday, 13 December 2017
Is there a key to “infinite variety”? The challenge of Cleopatra is to convey the sheer fullness of the role, the sense that it defines, and is defined by only itself: there’s no saying that the glorious tragedy of the closing plays itself out, of... Read more... |
Falstaff, RLPO, Petrenko, Liverpool Philharmonic Hall review - Bryn Terfel leads a merry danceMonday, 27 November 2017
Even seemingly immortal singers grow old. Sir Bryn is closer to the "Martinmas summer" of Shakespeare's and Verdi's Sir John than when first he put on the fat suit at the Royal Opera 18 years ago. Even if he walks the gouty walk that matches the... Read more... |
Coriolanus, Barbican review - great, late Shakespeare compels but doesn't stunMonday, 13 November 2017
Coriolanus is post-tragic. It never horrifies like Macbeth or appals like King Lear, though its self-damaging protagonist is disconcerting enough. Shakespeare had written the signature dark dramas by 1606, including the most magnificent of the four... Read more... |
