Shakespeare
Kieron Tyler
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 she could be written into Shakespeare. She transmuted The Lion King into a stage show. She brought Spider-Man to Broadway, turning her book into a musical with songs by U2’s The Edge and Bono. Whatever level of adept she is, the alchemy hasn’t worked with Tempest.She’s got form with Shakespeare, having already brought Titus Andronicus onto screens Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
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 old King, presenting a perfectly credible mix of vanity, vulnerability, craziness and tenderness. The final scenes with Lear and Cordelia were among the most affecting I’ve seen in a theatre.I don't actually have a TV at the moment and I'm not really missing it. The television I watch these days tends to be either news viewed on a computer – Al Read more ...
Matt Wolf
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 figure of Eddie Redmayne (pictured above) - kept the Bard alive, and how. That was literally so in the case of Michael Sheen's astonishing Hamlet at the Young Vic, a life force that wouldn't go quickly or gently into the good night, as the final image of Ian Rickson's production asserted to controversial effect: no problems in this corner whatsoever Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
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 collapsed this year, but thank goodness Michael Grandage felt no need to underline Shakespeare’s fragile lecture on kingship with gaudy contemporary markers. Uncluttered, direct, and tense with the energy of political unrest, this Richard II is a fitting farewell from the director to the theatre he has led for the past nine years.Everything in Read more ...
David Nice
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 misappropriation of possibly fine actors. It seems old hat to us, but perhaps in two respects Londoners may strike Berliners as conservative. We still like our Hamlet in sequence - cut, usually, but with the expected beginning, middle and end. And we're still inclined to talk about Michael Sheen's Hamlet, or Rory Kinnear's, or Simon Russell Beale's Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Sex, spending, violence and debt: life in the city is lived raw in this caustic interpretation of Shakespeare’s comedy by Dominic Cooke. The setting is grimy, graffiti-daubed; shiny apartment blocks vie with sleazy strip joints and brothels, and the streets are stalked by gangsters, chancers, trophy wives and gypsy buskers. Shakespeare’s action takes place in Ephesus, a town “full of cozenage”; Cooke’s takes a tour of the urban Eurozone, with a flavour of Italy here, Greece there, winding up, for the maddest scene of all, in a location that looks uncannily like London’s own Harley Read more ...
David Nice
Many of Italy's artistic institutions may have tottered or crumbled during the Berlusconi years, and the more capable new man in the Palazzo Chigi can only offer painful sticking plaster, yet one major orchestra has never sounded better. Of the two elder statesmen among conductors returning to Rome this month, Riccardo Muti may bring a cosmetic gravitas to the tentative renaissance of Rome's beleaguered Opera House; but Claudio Abbado revisited the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia last Sunday after a 30-year absence to confirm perhaps the country's only blazing musical success story, an Read more ...
David Nice
Theatregoers may be disappointed to read on and discover I mean Otto Nicolai's Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor, the only 19th-century Shakespeare-based opera in the German language to hold the stage. Which it did, and not just in Germany, until the arrival of Verdi's infinitely superior Falstaff. Is this that rare thing, German comedy in music between Beethoven's Eighth Symphony and Richard Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel that's actually funny? Not really; Wagner's Die Meistersinger stands alone. But it's a piece which offers plenty of roles for student singers - with two leading sopranos, no Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
First come the strip-lit corridors, the stained breeze blocks, the locked doors; later there are restraints, drugs, needles. The time is out of joint, and we are all imprisoned in a nightmare of confusion, paranoia, guilt and despair. Who are the mad? Who the sane? In Ian Rickson’s thrilling production of Shakespeare’s great tragedy, it’s often frighteningly unclear.This is the director’s first Shakespearean staging and, electrifyingly, he approaches the text without careful reverence, but with the energy and inventive flair he has habitually brought to new plays. It is a distinctly personal Read more ...
David Nice
Forget Branagh and Mel Gibson, set aside thoughts of Olivier: Innokenti Smoktunovsky is the most original Hamlet you'll see on screen. As for King Lear, don't bother with Peter Brook's woeful attempts to be the British Eisenstein in a true cinedisaster; another master of the Russian cinema, Grigori Kozintsev, knew much better what to do in 1971.It's astonishing to see this great survivor of the Soviet cinema, so lively in his early collaborations with Leonid Trauberg as silent film switched to sound - The New Babylon, Alone, the Maxim trilogy - rise to his greatest challenges in the 1960s and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Memo to William Shakespeare: could we have more, please, in The Tempest of the anxious, angsty Prospero, the mortality-minded magus played in his most riveting theatre performance in years by Ralph Fiennes? As long as Fiennes is prowling the Haymarket stage, staff in hand, the West End's latest exercise in starry Shakespeare bristles with a quietly baleful urgency that erupts occasionally into a roar.When Fiennes vacates the action, this Tempest tells the altogether different story of a production so busy tending to visual and aural frills that it often seems, strangely, to bypass the play at Read more ...
David Nice
Your Macbeth opens in the round, tailored to a small studio theatre. In entrusting it to television, do you engage someone experienced in the medium to render faithfully the spaces and the talking heads, as Trevor Nunn did for the deservedly legendary McKellen-Dench double act? Or do you cry your own havoc and let slip the dogs of all your favourite film directors, as happens in Rupert Goold’s ambitious TV transfer?Either could work. But the only proof is in the end result. And while the 1970s film still chills my blood, I can’t help feeling that here so much tension and imagination flails Read more ...