Shakespeare
william.ward
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 upon. Over the last century, Ancient Rome’s most famous autocrat has been endlessly re-spun as a leery dictator of the modern totalitarian variety.Angus Jackson (overall director of the RSC’s Rome MMXVII season now at the Barbican), has wisely chosen to eschew such modish nonsense and concentrate instead on clarity, drawing out of the text itself all Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
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 course, but its impact surely soars only when the ludic engagements of the first half have drawn us in equally. Monarchs, in the words of Shakespeare’s contemporary John Webster, may “brook no contradiction”, but this Egyptian Queen practically demands it – including self-contradiction, most of all. In Antony and Cleopatra we have a heroine who is Read more ...
David Nice
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 belly, vocally he seems richer than ever. Maybe not quite the definitive operatic Falstaff of our era - that honour falls to Ambrogio Maestri - but a suitable planet for the variable young moons of Liverpool's European Opera Centre to revolve around, at least two of them shining bright. With the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra very much present Read more ...
james.woodall
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 (truly) Roman plays, Antony and Cleopatra. Along with Julius Caesar and Titus Andronicus, all are transferring from springtime premières in Stratford to the Barbican.The Royal Shakespeare Company has chosen an apt moment to stage these chilly explorations of power and of who wields it over the people. How, the plays ask, do we want to be ruled? Read more ...
Peter Brook
A long time ago when I was very young, a voice hidden deep within me whispered, "Don’t take anything for granted. Go and see for yourself." This little nagging murmur has led me to so many journeys, so many explorations, trying to live together multiple lives, from the sublime to the ridiculous. Always the need has been to stay in the concrete, the practical, the everyday, so as to find hints of the invisible through the visible. The infinite levels in Shakespeare, for instance, make his works a skyscraper.But what are levels, what is quality? What is shallow, what is deep? What changes, what Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Temple Church gained worldwide fame when Dan Brown included a major plot point there in his mega-selling novel The Da Vinci Code in 2003, but it has been standing, minding its own business, since the late 12th century. Now it’s home for a short run of Antic Disposition’s Richard III, following a tour of several UK cathedrals – including, controversially, Leicester, where the king's skeleton was reinterred in 2015 after being discovered in a nearby car park.The controversy, such that it was, concerned Shakespeare’s treatment of the king – who was either an evil child murderer or clever Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Every play is a Brexit play. This much we have learnt in the year since the referendum. But in Nancy Meckler’s hands the Globe’s new King Lear becomes the Brexit play – an unpicking of intergenerational responsibility and difference, of philosophies of power and governance, tackling above all that sticky question of what the old really owe the young.But the dramatic dice are loaded. The audience enters to a Globe covered in tarpaulins and chipboard, “KEEP OUT” scrawled across the boarded-up gallery. A cast of squatters surges onto the stage, all anoraks, unwashed hair and beanies, tearing Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
When I say that Matthew Dunster’s Much Ado is revolutionary I’m not talking about the many textual updatings and rewritings, not the lashings of PJ Harvey, nor even the gunfire – weaponised punchlines that cut through the colour and noise of the production. No, the revolution in question is in Mexico, 1914, home to Dunster’s exuberant, moustachioed, tequila-fuelled fiesta of a production that swaggers and stamps its way across the Globe’s stage this summer.Don Pedro (Steve John Shepherd) becomes a Pancho Villa-like revolutionary, leading a band of hot-blooded hangers-on from his headquarters Read more ...
james.woodall
Can The Tempest open on stage without a tempest – of crashing, shrieking and torment – and thus without what can become five minutes-plus of inaudibility? In Gregory Doran’s 2016 Stratford production for the RSC, revived at the Barbican Theatre, the answer is, as so often, no. Joe Shire, Darren Raymond and Caleb Frederick, playing mariners, have lines to deliver but against giant-wave effects and the supersonic demolition of a ship, they might as well stay mute. Not one bellowed word comes through, though Joseph Mydell as the kindly elder Gonzalo makes a good go of it.As a show starts, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Midway through Hamlet a troupe of actors arrives at Elsinore. Coaching them for his own ends, the prince turns director, delivering an impassioned critique: “O! it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters…it out-herods Herod: I pray you avoid it.” It’s a philosophy director Robert Icke takes as his own watchword. Out goes declaiming, along with anything demonstrative or self-consciously dramatic, and in its place we get a conversational Hamlet that allows its audience to eavesdrop, forces us to turn voyeur in a contemporary palace of CCTV Read more ...
David Nice
Nature’s germens tumble all together rather readily in more recent operatic Shakespeare. Following the overblown storm before the storm of Reimann’s Lear and the premature angst of Ryan Wigglesworth’s The Winter’s Tale, what's rotten in the state of Denmark rushes to the surface a little too quickly in Brett Dean's bold new take on the most challenging of all the tragedies. This is an impressive labour of love from all concerned at a level which only Glyndebourne at its best can manage, led with supreme authority by conductor Vladimir Jurowski and director Neil Armfield. Yet the score worries Read more ...
Iestyn Davies
Tomorrow Britten’s opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream will begin a short run at the Snape Maltings, Suffolk in a new production directed by Netia Jones and conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth. It will mark the high point of the Aldeburgh Festival’s summer celebrations half a century on from the opening of the Snape Maltings concert hall. It is therefore more than a happy coincidence that back in 1967 the "Dream" was aired as part of the hall’s maiden season.I shall be performing the countertenor role of Oberon. Alongside me will be soprano Sophie Bevan as Tytania, bass Matthew Rose as Bottom, a Read more ...