Shakespeare
Heather Neill
It's been raining in Regent's Park. On a balmy summer evening during a prolonged dry spell – perfect for outdoor theatrics – it seems ironic to tempt fate by creating artificial downpours and thunderstorms. But this music-filled, modern-dress production of Shakespeare's 1599 gender-bending comedy opens with a version of the usurping Duke Frederick's court which is not only brutal but also careless about the environment. Even Rosalind and Celia casually toss bits of rubbish into the lake (already bobbing with plastic bottles) that fronts the bleak metal-framed stage. The miserable weather Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Gender-bending, confused identities, and hedonistic anarchy go together as naturally in summer Shakespeare as strawberries and cucumbers in Pimms, and in Tatty Hennessy’s exuberant alfresco version of As You Like It, touring to squares across the capital, the mix proves an appropriately heady combination. It’s the Summer of Love in the Forest of Arden, and Joni Mitchell or Jimi Hendrix are as likely to appear as any of the traditional characters, so get your flares and your yellow-tinted sunnies on and prepare to party.The production opens with the entire cast delivering a rousing Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“A sad tale’s best for winter,” Leontes’ young son Mamillius tells us. By that logic the current summer heatwave should be bringing us a Winter’s Tale overflowing with joy – the songs of Bohemia drowning out the shouted accusations and desperate howls of Sicilia. But that’s not what director Blanche McIntyre has in mind.From Will Keen’s Leontes, twitching and ticking with violence, to the bare stage and makeshift revels of Bohemia, this is a decidedly chilly take on Shakespeare’s mercurial late play. Even the bear is an austerity predator – nothing more than a painted banner, barely enough Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The Faction’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a production in which women are more likely to kick ass than sleep with one – a muscular, mischievous take on the Bard’s most light-hearted play about forbidden love. As might be expected, this boldly dynamic theatre company takes all that is most sinister and subversive about the work, and spins a stereotype-smashing evening of pagan delights.Allusions to the moon weave themselves like a silver thread through A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s text, as both a harbinger of change and of the lunatic merriment that prevails. How apt, then, that Eleanor Field’ Read more ...
David Nice
Who would have thought, when Phyllida Lloyd's Donmar Julius Caesar opened to justified fanfare, that two more Shakespeare masterpieces would be sustained no less powerfully within the women's-prison context over the following years? Faced with the "which of the three did you like best?" question – and I saw them all on a single day at the King's Cross makeshift theatre – the answer would have to be "each one at the time I saw it". So it's good to relive the first as screened on BBC Four – Henry IV and The Tempest are already available on the BBC iPlayer – which is as compelling, keenly paced Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
All those pranks, set-ups, fake letters and disguises, they just keep coming thick and fast in Verdi’s Falstaff. The score has irresistible energy and momentum. The composer made sure in his last opera that when the fantasies, schemes and hopes of Shakespeare's Sir John Falstaff are given apparent encouragement, only to be systematically unpicked and nixed, it all happens with allegro markings like vivace, brioso and brillante. And this was a musical performance led by Richard Farnes with exactly the right kind of verve about it.And yet the dreamy setting, the Wormsley estate Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Those who find the Bard tough going – wasn't that one of Emma Rice's admissions back in the day? – should beat a path to The Two Noble Kinsmen, a late-career collaboration with John Fletcher that emerges as Shakespeare lite. Remembered (dimly) as the play that opened the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1986, the play tells of a bromance gone awry when competition for a woman gets in the way. Throw in Morris dancing, some colourful costumes and a burst of musicals-worthy vocals from Olivier Award-winner Matt Henry (Kinky Boots), and you've got a production that feels as if it will try Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Some have contended that King Lear is unstageable, and perhaps it’s unfilmable too. Richard Eyre‘s new version for the BBC sets Shakespeare’s most remorselessly bleak tragedy in a pseudo-modern Britain where historic stately homes co-exist with urban squalor and a ruthlessly militaristic nobility, but despite its strength-in-depth cast it ends up as less than the sum of its parts.Although it’s unusual to find King Lear opening with nighttime scenes of a glittering, contemporary City of London, including the Tower thereof, it’s difficult to feel that this setting helps us to better understand Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
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 concentration prevails. This first presentation – two plays written around 1599, the year in which Shakespeare's original Globe opened: As You Like It was staged that year, Hamlet a little later – is built on a new approach to ensemble that draws on a broader casting base than usual.That involved a gender-neutral approach (with a 50:50 gender ratio Read more ...
Matt Wolf
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 takes to Simon Godwin's characteristically acute, alert production with the palpable affection that was afforded the staging closer to home one recent evening. Of Paapa Essiedu's occupancy of the title role, one thing seems clear: were the play's States-side sightings continuing westward to LA, this charismatic actor might risk being lost to the Read more ...
Antony Sher
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 Actor.Sher kept a record of his performance in Year of the King. Other Shakespearean memoirs have followed, including Year of the Fat Knight about playing Falstaff and, with Gregory Doran, Woza Shakespeare!, about staging Titus Andronicus in South Africa.In 2016 Sher returned to Lear, this time in the title role, for the RSC production, directed by Read more ...
Ismene Brown
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 intended as a joke is hard to work out. Lovely Rory Kinnear plays Macbeth like a third Mitchell brother from EastEnders, bullheaded and thick-necked, all short jabbing breaths, strapped into his jerkin with parcel tape. His castle is a pile of old backpacks and broken chairs in a grotty shed reigned over by a starved-looking Lady M.Eyes and ears are Read more ...