Shakespeare
Matt Wolf
The battle of the sexes took on a bright and breezy tone in Pakistan's contribution to the Globe's ongoing Bardathon, the Theatre Wallay-Kashf's rumbustious production of The Taming of the Shrew. It's been more customary of late to treat this most vexatious of comedies as sustainedly ironic or as a far-from-funny exercise in domestic degradation. But the director Hassaim Hussain and his agile company were having none of that. If anything their production in its tone often suggested a dry run for The Comedy of Errors, which the Globe will host later this week.Ed Hall and his all-male Propeller Read more ...
mark.hudson
The Winter’s Tale may not be one of the best loved of Shakespeare’s plays – not quite a comedy, not quite a full-blown drama – but the Globe was packed on the hottest night of the year for this vibrant Yoruba version direct from Lagos. South-East London has the largest Yoruba population outside Nigeria. The audience was maybe 40 per cent Yoruba-speaking (my daughter thought 70 per cent), and their gusts of laughter and murmurs of affirmation set the tone for the rest of the crowd’s responses.Swinging drum rhythms and the sung narration of a majestic turbaned woman in the role of Time Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's both easy and fashionable to render ironic, or scoff at, the title of All's Well That Ends Well. This is the Shakespeare "comedy" in which the rabidly obsessed Helena finally ensnares her none-too-doting Bertram in a putative happy ending that tends to be played as if the pair are advancing toward the gallows. But it's in the way of Shakespeare's Globe in general and the miraculous Globe to Globe season in particular that, as served up by the Arpana theatre company from Mumbai, one of the Bard's three problem plays emerges as both jubilant and touching. And also every bit as colourful as Read more ...
Angie Errigo
Had one listened to the Chiten company from Kyoto performing Coriolanus with one’s eyes closed, it would have seemed as if the stage were teeming with performers. And without understanding a word of Japanese, a theatregoer could respond to the gamut of moods and rhetoric of the play, from mob fury met with autocratic disdain to political conniving and on to maternal grief and horror: all were audibly evident in a collective tour de force of verbal dexterity, range and expression.In fact, a nimble ensemble of just five - two men and three women accompanied by a pair of musicians Read more ...
fisun.guner
The Globe to Globe season has enjoyed tremendous goodwill from audiences and critics alike. And this has been largely repaid, for it’s been a joy and a wonder to learn just how much contemporary relevance can be mined and brought into sharp relief, and with such audacious wit, when stripped of the plays’ native tongue. So one wishes one could keep up the momentum of goodwill for every production.And why not? If one can be convinced by a South Sudanese production of Cymbeline and an Armenian King John (neither plays are highlights of the Shakespearean repertoire, whatever case can be made in Read more ...
josh.spero
Like a post-Soviet Oedipal X-Factor, the Belarus Free Theatre on Friday night gave one of the greatest productions of King Lear London has ever seen. Forget our local Lears, with naked theatrical knights and casts in emotional straitjackets: this was as cruel, as beautiful, as you could want. It shook the Globe from the yard to the rafters.Part of Globe to Globe, it is a poignant play for a company of dissidents. Lear (Aleh Sidorchik) wore a radiant gauntlet, which he broke Cordelia’s nose with when she refused to sing the songs her sisters had. Goneril’s was an orgasmic version of "My Heart Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You might have wondered if, when Armenia was offered King John as part of the Globe to Globe season, they felt they’d drawn the short straw. Not a bit of it. Shakespeare’s early history play, the action of which pre-dates those for which he is better known by a century, may be rarely performed, but here, in what I suspect is a judiciously trimmed version, it brings out so much that genuinely crosses international lines, speaking Shakespeare’s story with the local accent of the producing nation.And Armenia and the Caucasus in general provide such fertile ground for pondering the same kinds of Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
I didn't know whether to sigh or to yawn. Another opera. Another 50s set. At least it started well. In an obsessively wood-panelled hunting lodge, fat Falstaff (Ambrogio Maestri) lies in his bed in filthy long johns amid a sea of empty silver platters, working out a way to pay his bills and satisfy his lust. Not a 50s cliché in sight - yet. The banter between him and his helpers - Pistol and Bardolph - is focused and easy. And the singing from Maestri is effortless and clear and delivered in a parlando manner of exquisite style and grace. My, you could almost see beyond the grime and the gut Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There was always going to be one Borat moment in this festival. And it came courtesy of the Albanians, who, for comic effect, in the middle of their Henry VI, Part 2 indulged in the gratuitous harassment of a mentally handicapped person. It got the biggest laugh of the show from the expats, suggesting it's still quite a rib-tickler, disabled-bashing, in Albanian culture. It was an instructive reminder that you invite the globe to the Globe at your moral peril.The other parts of the warring Henry VI trilogy were being presented by two other Balkan countries: a Serbian Part 1 and Macedonian Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This music crept by me on the waters. Bangladesh’s Dhaka Theatre’s version of The Tempest took the musical route, and why not? It was always Shakespeare’s most musical play (with extant music for “Full Fathom Five” and other songs written by Robert Johnson). Four centuries after its premiere, probably over the river in Blackfriars, the play has been done in myriad incarnations around the world, including numerous sci-fi accounts, and bounced back to London last night courtesy of Rubayet Ahmed’s version.The adaptation included snippets of well-known Bengali folk tunes – drinking songs for Read more ...
josh.spero
The demands of Titus Andronicus are probably at odds with the constraints of the Globe to Globe season: a travelling troupe would find it hard to get 80 gallons of fake blood through Customs. Nor are they likely to be furnished with the sort of special effects – removable hands, slittable throats – which the play needs.The solution the Tang Shu-wing Theatre Studio, a company from Hong Kong performing in Cantonese, initially seemed to have to devised was perfect. For the first act, in which Roman general Titus demands that a son of the captured Tamora, Queen of the Goths, be killed, and the Read more ...