Shakespeare
Heather Neill
Robert Hastie is a little late for our meeting. Directing Shakespeare's darkest tragedy in London while also running Sheffield Theatres must sometimes cause a logjam of simultaneous demands, but whatever the morning's problem in the north of England, he remains smiling, relaxed, thoughtful and gracious during a break from rehearsals.Hastie (pictured below right © James Stewart) began as an actor. After reading English at Cambridge he won a scholarship to RADA, benefitting, he says, from a small window when the course led to a degree and there was still funding available. He was in the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s clear from the start – from a Prologue that quickly dissolves familiar rhythms and words into a Babel of clamour and sound. This RSC Romeo and Juliet, newly transferred to the Barbican, isn’t much interested in what is said. Actions not words are what count in Erica Whyman’s swift, youthful staging – a production that dances on the balls of its feet like a boxer, always braced for attack, and ready to lunge in its turn. Do its dramatic blows land? Often they do, though it lacks the knock-out punch that really should floor you by the end.Tom Piper’s set is an unprepossessing thing. A Read more ...
Heather Neill
It has been said before: Macbeth's reputation for bad luck has more to do with the difficulty of bringing off a successful production than the supernatural elements in the play. Even those of us who have seen dozens of interpretations can count the number which "worked" on the fingers of one hand, and veterans still recall Trevor Nunn's 1976 production for the RSC, starring Ian McKellen and Judi Dench, as a rare truly successful one.The challenges are clear enough. The Weird Sisters suggest a witchy power it is difficult for modern audiences to accept. The ghost of Banquo (do we see him or Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Shakespeare exists to be refracted and filtered through the age in which he is presented. So there's every good reason for the Donmar's artistic director Josie Rourke to approach the eternally problematic Measure for Measure as a twice-told tale that effects a startling shift in time period and gender politics at the interval. A characteristically ambitious venture, Rourke's penultimate Donmar production delivers best when most in period, and it's in fact the modern-day revisions and reversals that make one wish she had carried her vision through still further. The first half of the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What better way to celebrate a homecoming than with a party? That is the capacious-hearted thinking behind this new musical version of Twelfth Night, which additionally marks Kwame Kwei-Armah's debut production at the helm of that undeniable dynamo otherwise known as the Young Vic. Resident of late Stateside where he was running Baltimore's Center Stage, Kwei-Armah has posited as his opening production a show that celebrates London in a giddy spirit of inclusion that seems a necessary antidote to our mean-spirited times.And if Kwei-Armah's production, credited to him and the powerhouse Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You always wonder about those final scenes of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Are they really needed dramatically; do they work? We understand, of course, that a closing exhalation may add impact to high passions just witnessed. But is it just a romantic idea that tragedy might be better ending with the real bang of (multiple) death, rather than the relative whimper of a new order being established?In his new Antony and Cleopatra, Simon Godwin gives us a double whammy, playing the final scene – the closing tableau, at least, with its pronouncements over the dead heroine – as prelude to the action as Read more ...
David Kettle
“Well, that was really sweet,” one young audience member in front of me remarked on his way out of Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre. And yes, there’s no denying that director Wils Wilson’s colourful, psychedelic, summer-of-love-set Twelfth Night, the Lyceum’s season opener in a co-production with the Bristol Old Vic, is warm and generous, lovingly crafted, and – yes, touchingly sweet.More interestingly, perhaps, it’s enjoyably playful – and gently provocative, too – in its approach to gender. Shakespeare’s original sets the gender-fluid tone – with Duke Orsino falling for the aloof, recently Read more ...
mark.kidel
Henry V is a play shot through with martial energy and the terrible chaos of war. The almost overpowering violence and energy that characterise the story give the unfolding of the drama a permanently disrupted form, as if the unpredictability of history and the reality of bloodthirsty men going berserk on the field of battle had undermined Shakespeare’s usual formal strengths.Elizabeth Freestone’s very lively and intelligent modern-dress production for Shakespeare at Tobacco Factory, which has moved to the company’s home stage in Bristol, struggles at times with the play’s disjointed nature Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
If ever there was a play of “well bandied” words, it’s surely Love’s Labour’s Lost. The early Shakespearean comedy may once have hit a highpoint for verbal wit, but much of that context – the word play, the allusions, the sheer stylistic preening that must have had a certain in-joke quality for its initial courtly audience – has rather evaporated over the centuries.So it’s to the credit of Nick Bagnall’s new production that the Playhouse audience clearly comes away on an upbeat note. And that’s despite that perplexing final scene, one that disrupts the traditional marriage ending (“our wooing Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
A break-dancing mini Michael Jackson, a transvestite Neptune, and a hero who wears his hubris as proudly as his gold-tipped trainers, are unconventional even by Shakespeare’s standards, but they all play a key part in this joyful act of subversion. Emily Lim’s bold production – which marks the first time a community cast (of more than 200 everyday Londoners) appears on stage at the National – celebrates multicultural diversity with a zing that makes you want to dance in the aisles.Lim and the play’s adaptor Chris Bush have added to their immense challenge by taking on Pericles, a flawed work Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
It feels like Michelle Terry’s first summer season at the Globe has been building up to Emilia for a while now. The theme is Shakespeare and race, so Othello was something of a given. It's joined by The Winter’s Tale, as if the Emilias of these two plays have been waiting for their chance to step into the spotlight. This new work, written by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm and directed by Nicole Charles, has a lot of potential that it never quite realises.Eponymous heroine Emilia Bassano, who appears at three stages in her long life (Leah Harvey, Vinette Robinson and Clare Perkins), was the first woman Read more ...
Heather Neill
Jonathan Munby's production starring Ian McKellen, first seen last year in Chichester and now transferred to the West End, reflects our everyday anxieties, emphasising in the world of a Trump presidency, the dangers of childish, petulant authoritarianism. And while King James I was keen to promulgate the benefits of a united kingdom - having joined England and Scotland under his rule only three years before Shakespeare's tragedy was presented at court in 1606 - the corrosive nature of divisions within the state is equally clear now in the era of Brexit. The Union Flag features frequently in Read more ...