Globe
Marianka Swain
For those who believe spin is if not a modern invention, then at least a modern fascination, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar offers a sharp rejoinder. Interpretation, manipulation and persuasion pervade this incisive drama about the assassination of the Roman ruler, with the company donning layers of pretence as actors playing politicians whose lives unspool upon a stage; those who do not choose their lines with care are doomed to failure. Dominic Dromgoole’s traditional production, with Elizabethan dress and straightforward staging, is a tad unadventurous, but by eschewing gimmicks, it places Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Jordi Savall has spent half a century combining instrumental performance on the viola da gamba with being the leader of ensembles of pioneering scholarship. Now in his early 70s, he has certainly had the recognition he deserves: a Grammy (he has made over a hundred albums), an honorary professorship (he has taught since 1974), and the Légion d'Honneur. These days he is also a prominent public figure supporting the “Catalunya should have the right to vote” campaign. His solo recital at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse last night showed what a lifetime of patient endeavour can achieve.In Savall's Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Lucy Bailey’s Titus Andronicus doesn’t pull any punches (or stabbings, smotherings and throat-slittings, for that matter). Bursting into a Globe smoky with incense, with shouts and drums, forcing itself at us and on us, this is a production whose physicality is its true language. But while anyone going for the gore will get their money’s worth – the opening night added a few more to the tally of fainting audience members – they’ll also get something better: a show that’s shocking, certainly, but whose provocations are never empty.Much is made of Titus as an early play. Criticism has Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If it's possible to have rather too much of a frolicsome thing, consider by way of example The Knight of the Burning Pestle, a giddily self-conscious 1607 romp from Francis Beaumont that would be more fun if it were at least a full scene or two shorter. Following on from The Duchess of Malfi as the second proper production to occupy the newly built Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (Eileen Atkins's sublime solo essay in Shakespeare came in between), Pestle proves that the candlelit venue can accommodate knockabout theatrics just as fully as it can sotto voce villainy.The problem lies not in the space Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A candlelit theatre is one thing. A theatre when those candles are so close you could lean in and blow them out, where a good line sets them flickering in gusts of audience laughter is quite another. We’ve been spoilt by the Globe for almost 20 years now, and the novelty of its open-air theatre still feels fresh. With the new, Jacobean-inspired Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (capacity just 340), they have done it again.While the rest of Wanamaker’s opening season gets more experimental and exploratory, the new theatre was launched last night with a classic Jacobean revenge tragedy (and the closest Read more ...
kate.bassett
Having boundaries actually sets us free. So Neil Armstrong's wife argues. She is dogmatically keen to stop her husband rocketing off to the moon in the first scene of The Lightning Child – a groundbreaking show in so far as it's the first musical to premiere at Shakespeare's reconstructed wooden "O", opening last night. Armstrong (Harry Hepple in a space suit) does not agree with his spouse's imposed limits, however. A lunar voyage is, he says, his chance to become sublime.Next thing you know, the 1960s astronaut of Apollo 11 fame has gone peculiarly spacey. Climbing a steel ladder, he Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
Could you choose between love and knowledge? Between a life of acceptance and affection, and one of self-improvement and learning? These are the questions that Jessica Swale's new play Blue Stockings poses again and again.For the women who provided the inspiration for this play – the students of Girton College, living on the cusp of the twentieth century – this is not a hypothetical question. To choose to study at Cambridge is, for them, to choose the life of an outcast over the possibility of marriage and a family. In 1896, when the action takes place, a campaign is underway to attempt to Read more ...
David Nice
If there’s a more thinly written, loosely structured and hammily acted play than Samuel Adamson’s panorama of Purcell’s London, then I have yet to endure it. Baffling, because this is the writer who brought us Southwark Fair, a lively depiction of the local scene which never so much as hinted as the village-institute clichés and banalities piled high here in a production by Dominic Dromgoole which does little to finesse the sorry situation.Who could have resisted top-league trumpeter Alison Balsom’s proposal to put on a show at the Globe? It must have seemed like a good idea: Purcell: The Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This is the directorial debut of Eve Best, better known as a talented classical and comedic actress, who was last at Shakespeare's Globe appearing as Beatrice in a superb Much Ado About Nothing opposite Charles Edwards's Benedick.Best's reading of the Scottish play - her favourite Shakespeare - is pleasingly straightforward and she introduces few thrills and spills (and there's a minimalist Birnam Wood in Mike Britton's simple but elegant design), nor a big idea that imposes itself on the text without illuminating it. This is a production that allows the actors to breathe – and pleasant Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Midsummer’s Eve may still be a month away and the evenings more bracing than balmy, but despite a serious chill still in the air the Globe Theatre yesterday proved yet again that it exists in its own microclimate. It’s a theatre and a company made for comedy. Such is the laughter, the sense of occasion, the energy of the crowd, that you find yourself swept up in the joy of it all – enjoying a summer holiday, if only for the evening.Dominic Dromgoole’s new A Midsummer Night’s Dream offers no interruption to the Globe’s sequence of hit comedies. Who couldn’t love a production that comes with Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A thunder sheet booms, a didgeridoo hums distantly, a model ship rears and pitches its way forward through the waves of groundlings and suddenly we find ourselves washed up on the shores of the Globe for another season. All eyes may be on the newly launched Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, but just when we were all at risk of getting too distracted by its novelty, Jeremy Herrin and his new production of The Tempest are here to remind us what the original Globe Theatre does best.We’ve not been short on Tempests in London of late, but if there is any space and company that should be able to make sense Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Would you enforce me to a world of cares?” croons Rylance’s Richard III, lingering tremulously over his question, the picture of world-sick piety and reluctance. As the groundlings cheer an ecstatic affirmative, Shakespeare’s most compelling villain once again claims the dramatic victory. History may have him as the vanquished, but in Tim Carroll’s new Globe production, even death cannot strip the crown of the vanquisher from Mark Rylance’s brow.Any persistent memories of the strutting Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron are banished within moments. Shrunken and hobbling, withered arm clutched uselessly Read more ...