Theatre
Demetrios Matheou
Life was altogether richer when Dennis Potter was around to provoke us, to make us look queasily at the corrupt, hypocritical or despairing aspects of our lives, ever entertainingly, with a wink and a song. Whenever a Potter play or serial was to air on television, one knew there would be plenty to talk about.The talking points of Brimstone and Treacle when it was made for the BBC in 1976 involved the devil, a rape, and the fact that we couldn’t actually watch the play – it having been banned by the Beeb’s director of television, who described it as “brilliantly written and made, but Read more ...
ash.smyth
This retelling of the Cymbeline story opened – or at least appeared to open – with the entire cast contributing their tuppenceworth on the issue of what the story of Cymbeline actually was. And fair dos. A “late” and abnormally tortuous Shakespearean number, Cymbeline seems not only to have been constructed out of the usual fragments of ancient British history and “borrowed” chunks of Italian literature, but also from itinerant bits of other Shakespeare plays! Romantic antics, warring dynasties, poison plots, nation-building myths, randy wagers, skulduggery in bedrooms, banishment, ill-gotten Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The best playwrights have an antenna-like ability to pick up, and respond to, the new conflicts and fault lines that appear in society. Over the past five or so years, the antagonism between the baby-boomer generation, who are now parents with everything, and their kids, who have nothing but debts, has increasingly intensified. And no play articulates this conflict better than Mike Bartlett’s latest, which opened last night, in a production starring Victoria Hamilton and Claire Foy.The curtain comes up on a pair of contrasting English brothers, one young and hippyish (Kenneth) and the other Read more ...
william.ward
There has long been a conviction in Italian drama circles that there exists a “Special Relationship” between themselves and il Bardo di Stratford: something to do with the complexities of Elizabethan English syntax and the unusual amount of words of Italian that Shakespeare appropriated from the dominant European language(s) of theatre of his day.Indeed, going to almost any contemporary production of Italian theatre (for anyone raised on the English language canon and its main schools of interpretation), is to hit a very hard wall of cultural dissonance. We go for grades of naturalism; our Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Things didn’t go well for Eva Perons past and present at this morning’s announcement from New York of the nominations for Broadway’s 2012 Tony Awards, honouring the best of the 2011/12 theatre season, and Richard Bean will surely be wondering how it is that critics’ darling One Man, Two Guvnors failed to get a Best Play nod while nonetheless scooping up seven mentions in other categories – among the highest for a non-musical. But there will be general rejoicing in the onward Broadway march of both James Corden and his wild-eyed colleague Tom Edden, who have been nominated for virtually Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A comedy of alienation, estrangement, and magical metamorphosis – if ever there was a Shakespeare play made for the linguistic transfigurations of the Globe to Globe season it’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Unmoored from the familiar English text and cast adrift in a forest of mischievous Korean spirits, you couldn’t wish for livelier or more bewitchingly colourful guides than the actors of the Yohangza Theatre Company.Shakespeare’s best-loved play gets a boldly South Korean re-write in the hands of Yohangza. Oberon and Titania become Gabi and Dot, king and queen of the Dokkebi (Korea’s own Read more ...
Angie Errigo
When Zhang Dongyu’s charismatic Richard III rose from the dead to take his bows for Sunday’s spellbinding afternoon performance by the National Theatre of China, the actor paused, remaining on his knees to kiss the stage of the Globe. It was a gesture both charming and wildly popular with the sodden but appreciative audience, affirming that, for the guest artists from afar, bringing their interpretations of the Bard to the Thames-side temple is a very big thrill and emotional experience.(One has to guess by the way at who had which part, since the programme didn't marry the actors to their Read more ...
David Nice
The rain it raineth every day this week, sometimes with monsoon-like persistence. Yet there’s no dousing the ardour of groundlings and thespian visitors to the global Shakespeare village within the wooden O. Comic exuberance reaches a sophisticated high watermark here with the Company Theatre of Mumbai unfurling Twelfth Night as a Hindi musical.Experienced director Atul Kumar makes sure that music is the food for surprisingly robust strains of romantic love and mourning as well as the expected japes in a seamless, multicoloured whirl of words, recitative, song and dance. With the perfect Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Something extraordinary is happening at Shakespeare’s Globe. However unlikely the appeal, audiences are flocking to every one of Globe to Globe’s visiting productions. But sometimes logic surely cannot be defied. A full house for Pericles, and an ecstatic ovation?In contrast to ancient Rome, classical Greece is responsible for the lamer ducks in the canon. By a neat twist – possibly deliberate – they are being staged by companies from Greece itself and the country’s current saviour. The German Timon of Athens arrives in the season’s final week. It fell to the National Theatre of Greece, back Read more ...
ash.smyth
There’s something in the water at the commissioning editors’ local, I think, resulting, of late, in a rash of rather good arts-n-culture biopics. This week, it was the turn of Roald Dahl, the Big Friendly Giant who made an absolute shit-load of cash telling really not-very-bedtime stories to young children.Our host for the evening – the channelling medium, more accurately – was David Walliams, comedian, campo supremo, and sometime quaffer of the Thames (oh, and he may have mentioned something about writing children’s books of his own). Walliams is not a world-beating comic talent, and Read more ...
David Nice
Of all Shakespeare’s plays, his reprise of Falstaffian humour to please Queen Bess is surely the most specific in its prosaic gallimaufry of earthy English vocabulary. Yet it’s also the most universal in its target-practice at the lecherous, traditionally overbuilt gentleman-hero. So it was easy enough to forego relish of words like "wittol", "frampold" and "drumble", not to mention the choicest fat-man insults, and just enjoy the broader brushstrokes of the fun had by independent-minded Nairobi wives at the expense of Mrisho Mpoto’s jolly Sir John throughout this exuberant production in Read more ...
David Benedict
It's amazing what working on a masterpiece can do. Commissioned to write a companion piece to Terence Rattigan's magnificent one-act drama The Browning Version, David Hare has abandoned his journalistic tendencies and written a gently oblique play of controlled emotional eloquence. Beautifully directed by Jeremy Herrin and Angus Jackson, the engrossing pairing is a marvel of quiet restraint brimming with fear, love, pain and the whole damn thing."From the very beginning I realised that I didn't possess the knack of making myself liked." As desiccated classics teacher Andrew Crocker- Read more ...