Shakespeare
Bingo, Young Vic TheatreSaturday, 25 February 2012
Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death is the misleading, jokey title of a play about Shakespeare in his ignoble last years, unable to write further, isolated from his beloved London, and hemmed in by local politics. Shakespeare is invited to become a... Read more... |
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Lyric HammersmithMonday, 20 February 2012
Four people walked out of Filter’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream last night. The rest stayed to cheer an hour and 20 minutes of fast and furious filleted Shakespeare from a company which has made its name merging visual and musical forms, reinventing... Read more... |
Roméo et Juliette: Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Elder, Royal Festival HallSunday, 19 February 2012
It's one of the fundamental rules of concert-going that in any given season there will be one piece that trips you up. And that piece will always be by Berlioz. No matter what new alchemical concoctions Boulez, Lachenmann, Ferneyhough or Rihm will... Read more... |
King Lear, Tobacco Factory, BristolThursday, 16 February 2012
King Lear was the play that launched Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory 12 years ago. The company, under the inspired artistic direction of Andrew Hilton, opened its 2012 season with a brand new production that displays all the qualities that have... Read more... |
The Dream/ Song of the Earth, Royal BalletThursday, 02 February 2012
Oberon in Frederick Ashton’s The Dream was the hurdle at which the ferociously promising young Sergei Polunin refused when he quit the Royal Ballet last week, and whether it was the deceptive complexity and difficulty of it that caused his sudden... Read more... |
Actress Lisa Dillon on taming the ShrewTuesday, 24 January 2012
I have never seen another Kate so I didn’t have any preconceived ideas about the role. I was incredibly excited to play this woman in a play which is regarded as so heavily misogynistic and very much a battle of the sexes - to make this Kate very... Read more... |
CoriolanusSaturday, 21 January 2012
Ralph Fiennes' commitment to the theatre, not least the classical repertoire, has long been a source of wonder, bringing legions of Voldemort followers to see him live, most recently as a movingly hirsute, brooding Prospero in an otherwise heavy-... Read more... |
DVD: TempestFriday, 30 December 2011
That’s Tempest, not The Tempest. It’s not the only thing askew with Julie Taymor’s visit to Shakespeare’s island of exile. Prospero has become Prospera, the banished Duchess – rather than Duke – of Milan. Taymor has transfigurative form, so much so... Read more... |
2011: King Lear, Breaking Bad and Afro-FuturismThursday, 29 December 2011
The Mayans say 2012 is The End, so this may be the very last round-up of the year. I saw possibly the best Shakespeare I’ve ever seen – a chamber version of King Lear at the Donmar Theatre directed by Michael Grandage with Derek Jacobi as the mad... Read more... |
2011: We Need To Talk About Grandage and GuvnorsTuesday, 27 December 2011
And what a year it was! Comedy was king on stages around town, while a variety of Shakespeare royals -- Richard III à deux courtesy Kevin Spacey and the lesser-known but far more electrifying Richard Clothier, Richard II in the memorably tremulous... Read more... |
Richard II, Donmar WarehouseWednesday, 07 December 2011
A recent newspaper article championed the topicality of Richard II, laboriously rewriting it from camp conservatism to a politically current meditation on the “sad stories” we still tell of the deaths of kings. Heads may have rolled and states... Read more... |
Hamlet, Schaubühne Berlin, Barbican TheatreFriday, 02 December 2011
Ken Russell is, it seems, alive and well and directing Germans in Shakespeare. Actually, no, it's outgrown theatrical terrorist Thomas Ostermeier, but it might as well be our Ken to judge from the fitfully imaginative but repetitive images and the... Read more... |
