World Shakespeare Festival
sheila.johnston
Never quite at the top of the Shakespearean canon, Much Ado About Nothing now seems more vital and adaptable than ever – and vastly darker than, say, Kenneth Branagh’s sun-kissed screen romp acknowledged back in 1993. The cult director Joss Whedon unveiled his low-budget, film noir version earlier this month at the Toronto Film Festival to rave reviews.Meanwhile Iqbal Khan’s new stage production set in contemporary Delhi underlines the sexual anxiety coursing through the play beneath the frothy surface: the obsessive references to cuckoldry, the fear of female infidelity and the fine line Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Forget the ages-old talk of London buses arranging their schedules so that they all arrive at once. The capital's patterns of public transport have nothing on the rapidity with which Henry V has hoved into view of late, whether at Shakespeare's Globe, on tour from the all-male Propeller company, in repertory at Islington's Old Red Lion pub theatre or as a baleful conclusion to the BBC's impressive Hollow Crown series of the Bard-on-film. And one thing seems certain after this most recent version: a play often renowned for its braying jingoism has rarely seemed so mournful, as if the " Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Where on earth do you begin if all the world’s a stage? When not sifting through the entrails of dynastic English history or sunning themselves in Italy, the plays of Shakespeare really do put a girdle round the known globe. They send postcards from the exotic neverlands of Illyria and Bohemia, wander deep into Asia, set foot as far south as Africa, trespass up to the chilly north of Scandinavia and Scotland, and even make reference to Muscovy. And of course there are the Anthropophagi (wherever they're from). To map this world is something only the British Museum, that most capacious cabinet Read more ...
judith.flanders
As the much-loved Arthur Marshall so profoundly noted, Ibsen is “not a fun one”. One could, with as much truth, say the same about Shakespeare’s rarely staged Timon of Athens: its misanthropy, missing motivations and mercurial shifts in temper do not spell a fun night out to most. It is greatly to the credit of director Nicholas Hytner and his team, therefore, that the evening, if it doesn’t exactly fly by, is consistently engaging, thought-provoking and downright intelligent.Hytner and his designer, Tim Hatley, have created a world that mirrors our own. Timon is officially “of Athens”, but Read more ...
Matt Wolf
One intends no discredit to the keenly judged monarch-to-be that is Tom Hiddleston's Prince Hal, who will reappear on the small screen next weekend carrying the story forward in Henry V, to point out that Richard Eyre's terrific BBC adaptation of Henry IV Part 2 was stolen by dad. Playing the ailing King Henry who will not go gently into the good night, Jeremy Irons gave a performance of equal parts fury and passion that ranks with this actor's very best. Can someone not accommodate Irons once more on the classical stage, and soon?It's tempting to think of both halves of the Henry IV duo Read more ...
David Nice
Pardon the anomaly of a lightly browned-up Latvian Moor married to a German-Greek beauty. This, after all, is not Shakespeare’s play but Verdi’s opera, for which all too few are born to sing heroic tenor Otello and lyric-dramatic soprano Desdemona. Great singing from Aleksandrs Antonenko and great everything from Anja Harteros vindicate Royal Opera music director Antonio Pappano’s decision to give Elijah Moshinsky’s 25-year-old production a proud place in the World Shakespeare Festival and to mix finesse with power in realizing every facet of this astonishing score.The framework still holds Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Now we're talking! Following on from a small-screen Richard II of greater aural than visual interest, along comes Richard Eyre's TV adaptation of both Henry IV plays, and the first thing that seems evident about Part One is how well it would hold up in the cinema. (Indeed, I saw it in just such a setting at a preview screening with the director in attendance.) Lustrously shot in all manner of rusts, ochres, and browns that can drain away where needed, primarily during the battle scenes, Eyre's diptych in its first half makes a ravishing case for Shakespeare on film even as it whets the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“Let slip the dogs of war.” Somewhere in the bowels of Kiev’s Olympic Stadium, a football coach will have said something along these lines around the half seven mark. Meanwhile, over on the clever-clever channel, an alternative meeting between England and Italy took place.Shakespeare set any number of plays in the Italy he encountered in his source material, but with the possible exception of Romeo and Juliet, none feels quite so much of a statement about the Italian state of mind as Julius Caesar. It’s no coincidence that this was the play given to an Italian company for the recent Globe to Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Henry V is a play with so many layers, and such ambivalence, that it can suit a multitude of purposes. When Laurence Olivier made his film version in 1944, it was as a propagandist rallying cry, a reminder of what was at stake in a war that was far from won; 60 years later, Nicholas Hytner’s modern-dress production at the National Theatre was a bullish anti-war statement, lent potency by the country’s then current excursion into Iraq.Dominic Dromgoole’s new production at The Globe, which completes the theatre’s extraordinary Globe to Globe season, highlights another facet of the play, namely Read more ...
Tim Crouch
It has been nearly 10 years since I started writing for theatre. The second thing I wrote was a commission for the Brighton Festival who offered me the opportunity to make and perform a piece for young audiences inspired by a Shakespeare play. That was I, Caliban – a separate production of which is currently touring with Bristol Old Vic/Company of Angels alongside their version of I, Peaseblossom, the second of my Brighton commissions. After Peaseblossom came I, Banquo in 2005. And then I, Malvolio five years later – a show that is filling most of my touring commitments until the middle of Read more ...
Tom Bird
Over the past six weeks, we at the Globe have put on a festival called Globe to Globe. The concept (an idea of Dominic Dromgoole’s) was always very simple to explain: all of Shakespeare’s plays, each in a different language. But the reality of that, of course, was unprecedented, unwieldy and just plain large. It’s impossible, particularly with hangovers literal and metaphorical, to sum up what it meant to the hundreds of actors, the tens of thousands of audience members (the vast majority of whom had never been to the Globe before), or the hardy souls who stood through every single play. All Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We’re fresh out of superlatives. The Globe to Globe season has put a girdle around the earth in 37 languages, and the visiting companies have now left the building. You have to high-five the Globe’s chutzpah for mounting this wondrous contribution to London 2012’s World Shakespeare Festival in the first place. But in quite properly keeping the biggest till last, it surely took extra testicles to stage the famous play about a royal family in turmoil on this of all weekends. Either side of the matinee and the climactic evening performance, another royal family processed down the adjacent Read more ...