Phyllida Lloyd’s production of Macbeth has been in rep at the Royal Opera since 2002, and it is a solid performer. The setting is slick and vaguely period, with lots of iron weaponry, smart, pony-tailed warriors, but not a kilt in sight. The set (designer Anthony Ward) is a foreshortened metallic box, from which the back often rises to reveal a stormy sky (for the witches) or to introduce large scale props. The most memorable of these is a gilded cubic cage for the throne of Scotland, a symbol for the how power imprisons. There are a few other symbolic ideas throw in along the way, but Lloyd Read more ...

Remembering the months of lockdown, I can’t be the only person to thrill to this play’s opening lines, “When shall we three meet again?”, a phrase evocative enough to be borrowed as the first line of this year’s Wolf Alice album, Blue Weekend. Luckily, I didn’t have to brave thunder, lightning or indeed rain to see Oscar-nominated screen star Saoirse Ronan make her UK stage debut, opposite James McArdle, in this production of my favourite Scottish tragedy, directed by the equally award-laden Yaël Farber. But then the Almeida theatre, led by Rupert Goold, is a magnet for stars.It has to be Read more ...

It is a truism that every Hamlet is different, depending more than any other play on the casting of the lead. Each production moulds itself around the personality of the actor playing the prince. In Cush Jumbo, working here with Greg Hersov, who successfully directed her in As You Like It and A Doll's House at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, we have an accomplished actor of wit and intelligence, relishing Shakespeare's language and expressing the complex emotions and intellectual challenges of Hamlet, sometimes street-cool, sometimes febrile, always modern.A woman in the role is nothing new Read more ...

The best version of Twelfth Night I’ve seen is not called Twelfth Night. For sheer knockabout entertainment, nothing beats the 2006 film She’s the Man. But Sean Holmes’ production for the Globe’s summer season, brimming with song and physical comedy, comes a worthy second.Michelle Terry (pictured below) is endlessly charismatic, drawing us into caring about Viola from the moment she darts out of the groundlings dressed as Elizabeth I. Not many people can pull off enormous green and yellow breeches; Terry makes it look easy. (And she’s the Globe’s Artistic Director, so she’s running the whole Read more ...

So it wasn’t Cinderella but Hamlet who was first out of the post-lockdown starting blocks – Andrew Lloyd Webber’s much trumpeted musical premiere being foiled by a ping at the weekend. Instead the historic first curtain-up was 20 miles up the River Thames in Windsor, on a Shakespeare production that itself has been disrupted over and over during the past 16 months – possibly with even more urgent, unspoken worries, as the star is Ian McKellen, who was 80 when rehearsal began, and Covid began devastating the older generation, and is now 82.Pingless so far, Sean Mathias’s production, on a plain Read more ...

Much has been made of the raison d’etre for this King Lear as the slowly gestated, Covid-delayed brainchild of the director Keith Warner, assembling a company of acting singers who have made their names on the opera stage. How this played out on the first night, in the first half of a fairly full text, was a reluctance to hold the stage on the part of everyone except John Tomlinson’s Lear, a tendency to rush lines without the bridle and support of a musical texture, and an excessive mindfulness of others around them as though plotting their way through a Mozartian act finale.Music is shrewdly Read more ...

"It is dangerous for women to go outside alone," blares the electronic sign above the stage of the new Romeo and Juliet at Shakespeare's Globe. This disquieting sentiment obviously takes some of its resonance from the Sarah Everard case, yet it also begs such questions as, really, always? When popping out to get milk? Does the time of day or the neighbourhood make any difference? And how should a modern woman interpret this; by staying in, or, like the production’s gutsy Juliet, Rebekah Murrell, investing in kick-boxing lessons?Ola Ince’s abrasively modern interpretation, complete with guns Read more ...

A little less than two years after Sean Holmes’s kick-ass Latin American carnival-style A Midsummer Night’s Dream erupted at the side of the Thames, it has returned to a very different world. It’s no longer a natural expression of the kind of exuberance we take for granted, but a reminder of what we might be again – a blast of colour from our post-vaccine future.The Globe is, for obvious reasons, one of the best ventilated theatres in London, but full social-distancing measures are in place and the cast reminds us that if evenings like this are to remain possible we must keep our masks on. Read more ...

There is a promising production struggling to get out of this muddled concept. Creation Theatre (here partnered with Watford Palace) is well known for innovative, site-specific pieces, one of which –The Tempest – was adapted for the screen, including interactive elements, last year. I missed this, but reviews suggest it worked well.That is not the case here. This may be because of the nature of the play: is it really possible to subvert the tragedy and bring about a happy ending? Or make any meaningful contribution to it? Promised a choose-your-own-adventure, I did make some decisions, but Read more ...

It has been a hard coming for this RSC Winter’s Tale. Erica Whyman’s production was cancelled by the virus days before its premiere last spring, with plans to stage it in the autumn frustrated by the second lockdown. This broadcast version, retaining that original cast in full, is the first time that a RSC production has gone first to screen, scheduled as part of the BBC's Lights Up season.Needs must, perhaps, and what a frustrating on-again, off-again process it must have been, but there’s little sign of any resulting radical disruption – in a play that itself revolves around radical Read more ...

Shakespeare's enduring tale of star-crossed lovers is especially pertinent in a pandemic. The fatal plot twist depends on failed communication during an outbreak of pestilence, and one of the most famous lines is Mercutio's heartfelt, "A plague on both your houses" – clearly no idle curse. Written a couple of years after plague had closed theatres in 1593 (when Shakespeare turned to writing poetry) that undercurrent must have been all too real for the first audiences. It resonates still.After the technical panache of the recent Manchester Palace version and before the Globe presents its Read more ...

Just what the Zoom era has brought to theatre – to performers and audiences alike – is something we will no doubt be pondering for some while yet, certainly still in the much-anticipated eventual hereafter when stages in their “traditional” multifariousness are once again standard. Watching director Jenny Caron Hall’s livestream rehearsed reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, an offshoot of the Suffolk-based SHAKE Festival and a loose follow-on from her December Tempest, raised some such questions rather intriguingly.Following one of the best-known phrases from this early Shakespeare comedy, Read more ...