Shakespeare
Angie Errigo
When Zhang Dongyu’s charismatic Richard III rose from the dead to take his bows for Sunday’s spellbinding afternoon performance by the National Theatre of China, the actor paused, remaining on his knees to kiss the stage of the Globe. It was a gesture both charming and wildly popular with the sodden but appreciative audience, affirming that, for the guest artists from afar, bringing their interpretations of the Bard to the Thames-side temple is a very big thrill and emotional experience.(One has to guess by the way at who had which part, since the programme didn't marry the actors to their Read more ...
David Nice
The rain it raineth every day this week, sometimes with monsoon-like persistence. Yet there’s no dousing the ardour of groundlings and thespian visitors to the global Shakespeare village within the wooden O. Comic exuberance reaches a sophisticated high watermark here with the Company Theatre of Mumbai unfurling Twelfth Night as a Hindi musical.Experienced director Atul Kumar makes sure that music is the food for surprisingly robust strains of romantic love and mourning as well as the expected japes in a seamless, multicoloured whirl of words, recitative, song and dance. With the perfect Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Something extraordinary is happening at Shakespeare’s Globe. However unlikely the appeal, audiences are flocking to every one of Globe to Globe’s visiting productions. But sometimes logic surely cannot be defied. A full house for Pericles, and an ecstatic ovation?In contrast to ancient Rome, classical Greece is responsible for the lamer ducks in the canon. By a neat twist – possibly deliberate – they are being staged by companies from Greece itself and the country’s current saviour. The German Timon of Athens arrives in the season’s final week. It fell to the National Theatre of Greece, back Read more ...
David Nice
Of all Shakespeare’s plays, his reprise of Falstaffian humour to please Queen Bess is surely the most specific in its prosaic gallimaufry of earthy English vocabulary. Yet it’s also the most universal in its target-practice at the lecherous, traditionally overbuilt gentleman-hero. So it was easy enough to forego relish of words like "wittol", "frampold" and "drumble", not to mention the choicest fat-man insults, and just enjoy the broader brushstrokes of the fun had by independent-minded Nairobi wives at the expense of Mrisho Mpoto’s jolly Sir John throughout this exuberant production in Read more ...
Matt Wolf
So, what's the "problem"? All is right with the world - or the theatre at least - in the Maori-language staging of Troilus and Cressida from the Auckland-based Ngakau Toa troupe that pierces right to the troubling heart of this first of Shakespeare's three so-called "problem plays". (The next, Measure For Measure, follows Troilus in the Globe to Globe line-up, a scheduling decision sure to be balm for scholars.) Inaugurating an epoch-defining sequence of blink-and-you-miss-'em Shakespeare productions from across the, um, globe, director Rachel House and her company of New Zealanders have Read more ...
Jasper Rees
"Shakespeare’s Coming Home," boasts the strapline of a highly ambitious strand of London 2012’s Cultural Olympiad. Between now and 9 June, 37 productions of the complete canon by Shakespeare (with apologies to Two Noble Kinsmen fans) will be seen at Shakespeare’s Globe by 37 different theatre companies from all over the world. Hence the catchy title, Globe to Globe, which forms only a part of a World Shakespeare Festival continuing until September and taking place all over England and Wales, from Stratford-upon-Avon to the National Eisteddfod.But the whole thing is starting this weekend at Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Better late than never. It took till Act 3 for a new Juliet to fledge her wings and shed the nervous caution, but Melissa Hamilton, debuting yesterday afternoon in probably the Royal Ballet’s most coveted ballerina role, suddenly did what we all knew she could, and after a subdued first act seized the drama and the story. And, in Romeo’s phrase, light broke - the sun in the east. A fair new Juliet.Hamilton, a blonde beauty of 23, is the most interesting performer of young-generation girls at Covent Garden, an Irish child and late starter rejected by the Royal Ballet School, who refused to be Read more ...
Ismene Brown
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 town councillor! To take sides in a dispute about land enclosures! It’s a cracking re-visioning of the genius whom films and myth have preserved in the aspic of lusty, piratic eloquence.In Edward Bond's creation of 1974, Shakespeare is a middle-class capitalist literary squire, who sits in his big Stratford garden, rich, lionised and 52 (old, in those Read more ...
carole.woddis
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 classics and creating new devised pieces.Their previous brush with the bard, the RSC collaboration Twelfth Night, was a gas: refreshing, funky, playful – all you would wish for in a revisionist production. Thinking of them as a pocket-sized British version of the Wooster Group is perhaps overdoing it, but what's certain is that with Sean Holmes again Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
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 throw at you, someone will programme something by the 19th-century French composer - usually something with a perfectly benign-sounding title like King Lear Overture or Roméo et Juliette - that will in fact sound more modern, more outlandish, more baffling than anything written before or since. So it was again last night.The first riddle was Read more ...
Mark Kidel
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 made this remarkable company unique in Britain.The strength of all the shows has always drawn on the special atmosphere and architecture of the building. The theatre space at the Tobacco Factory is not just in the round. It is so small and relatively low-ceilinged that actors and audience are drawn into an alchemical vessel which Andrew Hilton has, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
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 exit, last night’s opening gave his replacement, the brilliant Steven McRae, such a run for his money that it wouldn’t be surprising if the role had indeed left Polunin in a blue funk.Ashton’s balletic reduction of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is almost 50 years old now and its charms and nimble wit seem enhanced every time one sees it. So Read more ...