Shakespeare
Kiss Me, Kate, Opera NorthSunday, 04 October 2015
Opera North have an excellent track record when it comes to staging musicals, and Jo Davies’s Kiss Me, Kate is among the best things they’ve done. Cole Porter’s score and lyrics are flawless, though the book (by husband and wife team Bella and... Read more... |
MacbethFriday, 02 October 2015
The question of the Macbeths’ dead child is one of those Shakespearean quandaries, like Hamlet’s age, Iago’s cuckolding and Beatrice and Benedick’s earlier dalliance. How much do they really matter? In this new film version of the Scottish play, it’... Read more... |
10 Questions for Actress Jane LapotaireMonday, 28 September 2015
Jane Lapotaire's distinguished career on stage and screen was cut short in 2000 when she collapsed in Paris with a massive brain haemorrhage. She was giving a Shakespeare masterclass at the time and now, 15 years later, at the age of 70, she is once... Read more... |
McGregor/Spuck, Ballett Zürich, Edinburgh PlayhouseFriday, 28 August 2015
New Edinburgh Festival director Fergus Linehan has made it clear he wants to offer things people actually want to see. So including Wayne McGregor - prolific, popular, energetically self-promoting doyen of contemporary dance - in the dance... Read more... |
Hamlet, BarbicanWednesday, 26 August 2015
The set turns out to be the thing now that Benedict Cumberbatch's star turn in Hamlet has finally arrived, trailing in its wake a level of expectation, hysteria and scrutiny that might well have made many a lesser actor head for the hills. None... Read more... |
Richard II, Shakespeare's GlobeFriday, 24 July 2015
The earthy contact with groundlings that Shakespeare’s Globe offers in its stagings makes a comical but telling context for Richard II, a play largely about political point-scoring between kings. The people whose interests lie so remote, in reality... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Actor Roger ReesSunday, 12 July 2015
Roger Rees, whose death at the age of 71 was announced yesterday, never intended to act. He trained at the Slade and made extra money painting theatrical scenery. One day a director asked if he’d like to act, and he laid down his brush. The second... Read more... |
Falstaff, Royal OperaTuesday, 07 July 2015
It may only be a revival, but this is what the Royal Opera does best, above all in fielding a living legend of a Falstaff for Verdi's last masterpiece who’d probably be beyond the pockets of many other houses. Italian baritone, masterchef and... Read more... |
Measure for Measure, Shakespeare's GlobeFriday, 03 July 2015
If Simon McBurney’s Measure for Measure for the National Theatre and Declan Donnellan’s recent Cheek By Jowl production mined deep for darkness, Dominic Dromgoole’s for the Globe is content to skim the play’s sunny surface – the comedy manqué that... Read more... |
NYCC, NYJO, Southwark CathedralFriday, 03 July 2015
Cleopatra in her barge gliding down the nave of Southwark Cathedral? Only figuratively, in the hypnotic “Half the Fun” movement of Duke Ellington’s constantly surprising Shakespeare compendium Such Sweet Thunder. Still, it wouldn’t be that much... Read more... |
King Lear, Northern Broadsides, TouringMonday, 25 May 2015
Jonathan Miller’s new King Lear is rustic to its core, spoken in broad Northern accents, and the whole production could be packed onto a travelling theatre’s wagon and taken around Britain pulled by a couple of shire horses.Yet rather than cost the... Read more... |
As You Like It, Shakespeare's GlobeThursday, 21 May 2015
The Forest of Arden takes many forms, but in Blanche McIntyre’s meticulously purist production, it’s strictly a state of mind – no leafy bowers in sight. Here, the unspoken can be voiced, the bounds of gender and class broken, and courtly... Read more... |
