Shakespeare
David Kettle
You’d hardly call a director particularly perceptive for highlighting Lady Macbeth as the true power behind the throne, scheming and cajoling her husband’s bloody ascent to the crown. In her audacious, provocative and thoroughly compelling Macbeth (an undoing), however, writer/director Zinnie Harris goes much, much further – so far, in fact, that a couple of her characters seem confused as to whether Lady Macbeth is herself the King.Harris modestly subtitles her rethink "after Shakespeare" – it’s the latest in her ongoing collection of rethinks of classic texts that have included This Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida have earned the sobriquet "‘problem plays", what price Titus Andronicus? Does a director seek out a Saw vibe for the horror? Do they go for a deadpan Spinal Tap’s disappearing drummers for the demises? Do you go hard and locate the murders within the atrocities being committed on European soil right now? In her radical interpretation, Jude Christian never quite finds the consistency of tone that the three-hour long evening requires – we get the discomfort intended, but it’s distracting not disturbing.We open on Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Frantic Assembly’s Othello, originally co-developed with the Lyric in 2008, is back in its third iteration, and it’s still not exactly the play you studied at school or saw other companies perform. In some ways, that’s all to the good.Frantic’s strength is its use of co-opting high-energy dance moves into the action. In the 1990s, the company typically performed bespoke pieces, often exploring social issues, where dance added a thrilling layer to the narrative. When the company’s Steven Hoggett and Scott Graham (who directs at the Lyric) decided to move on to Shakespeare, they had to adapt Read more ...
Heather Neill
The scene is set onstage in the first minutes. And it remains a stage throughout this harmonious production. The action takes place in a severe court and a more liberal forest, but really the setting is always a place of imagination, a theatre. Jaques' most anthologised speech, "All the world's a stage ... " is its keynote: all the actors are players, in both senses of the word.Before a line is spoken, pianist (and composer) Michael Bruce takes his place at a piano which becomes a grassy hillock on which actors jump or rest and a hiding place as well as a source of music to fit the mood of Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Clint Dyer is the first black director of Othello at the National Theatre, a venue that once staged the piece with its actor founder Laurence Olivier playing the lead role in blackface. We are reminded of this now-reviled practice before curtain up in a flickering montage of programme covers projected onto the set going back to 1634, and stopping at 2022. An actor arrives with a broom and cart to sweep the stage area clean. So are we going to be seeing a new take on the tragedy? Yes and no. This Is a laudably ambitious production, but one that has jettisoned some of the play's key Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Alexei Sayle, in his angry young man phase, once said that you can always tell when you’re watching a Shakespeare comedy, because NOBODY'S LAUGHING. That’s not entirely true, of course, but sometimes a director has to go looking for the LOLs and make a few sacrifices along the way in their pursuit. And, boy, oh boy, does Sean Holmes go looking for the laughs in this production of The Tempest – and don’t we suffer a few sacrifices as a consequence.The storm itself is a bit of water sprayed on The Globe’s famous groundlings, with our aristocrats boozing and partying like superannuated Club 18- Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
After gender-flipping the National’s Malvolio, the director Simon Godwin might have been expected to be equally bold with Much Ado About Nothing at the same address. A same-sex Beatrice and Benedick romance? Dogberry in bondage gear, zonked out on poppers? True, Godwin has been free with the text, cutting freely and turning Governor Leonato into a hotel owner with a wife instead of a brother, but this production is still unexpectedly trad. It’s set in Sicily in “an imagined past”, though looking a lot like Golden Age Hollywood, where Don Pedro and his officers are checking into the Hotel Read more ...
mark.kidel
The Tempest, a rich and profound late work, is probably Shakespeare’s most complex and layered play: the combination of power politics, philosophy, magic and romance is dizzying and a challenge to any director who attempts to encompass the complexity of the work.The opening production from Theatre Royal, Bath’s Ustinov Studio’s new artistic director Deborah Warner offers dazzling theatre at times, and comparatively disappointing moments of flatness at others. Could the small space, providing intimacy one moment and a feeling of being cramped at others have something to do with it?The set by Read more ...
Richard Wilson
In today’s near-normal times it is easy to forget how hard COVID-19 had hit the music industry, especially for touring orchestras like the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. Masked, socially-distanced performances; streamed concerts from empty venues; and an outpouring of home-made YouTube films helped to keep musicians working and audiences culturally fed. However, there was a feeling across the industry that something more inspiring was needed.At the end of November 2020, a month into the second lockdown, the Academy asked us at One31Studio to make a film inspired by Mendelssohn’s Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Kathryn Hunter’s performance as Lear forges its heat from contradictions. She is as frail as she is strong, as detestable as she is loveable, as powerfully charismatic as she is physically diminutive. That she is a woman playing a man is the least extraordinary aspect of what she achieves in this production. This is a Lear that eviscerates emotionally at the same time as it illuminates the fragility of a society rotten with corruption and lies.Hunter famously first played Lear in 1997 at a moment when discussions about gender and identity were at a very different level to where we are now. Read more ...
Gary Naylor
With tyrants licking their lips around the world and the question of how to respond to their threat growing ever more immediate, Julius Caesar director Diane Page eyes an open goal – and misses. A statue stands alone on the stage (this touring production has no set and barely any props) as Caesar struts about, feigning humility, scoffing at a soothsayer’s warning to beware the Ides of March. Cassius, clever but consumed by her distaste for Caesar’s ever-growing threat to the republic with the inevitable demotion of senators like her, plots his murder. Brutus is the people’s favourite, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The Merchant of Venice is a comedy, you say? Shakespeare, as ever, refuses to be confined to convenient boxes, his best plays’ extraordinary pliability and longevity a testament to the piercing eye he cast towards the slings and arrows that assail humankind. More than most of his works, The Merchant of Venice requires a director to take a stance, especially these days, so as to send the audience in a chosen direction. This is not unique - no text can. nor should, be sacred - but those decisions bubble closer to the surface in The Merchant than perhaps any other play in the canon. Read more ...