Theatre
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 ...
Veronica Lee
What a joy this once-in-a-generation season is. From Moscow comes this free-wheeling production of Shakespeare's great morality play, and one that also makes remarkably free with the text too. Even those familiar with Measure For Measure will be thankful for the surtitles, particularly in the second act when director Yury Butusov dispenses with whole scenes, including the denouement.It starts with the familiar story; we are in Vienna, a city that has fallen into dissoluteness, where the Duke hands over power to his stern deputy Angelo, only to disguise himself as a monk to see how Angelo will Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“It’s easy for me to talk to you; we don’t know each other”. Robert Holman’s Making Noise Quietly is a work that, like its title, lives in the delicate push-pull of contradiction: intimate strangers; bloodless wars; silent screams. Not one play at all but three short pieces – panels in an inscrutable triptych – its process is oblique, its emotional momentum cumulative, the impact devastating.The clamour of war may provide the background hum through all three dramas, but this thematic pedal point scarcely anchors the dissonant roamings of Holman’s theatrical melodies. When Holman writes of war Read more ...
Matt Wolf
So, what's the "problem"? All is right with the world - or the theatre at least - in the Maori-language staging of Troilus and Cressida from the Auckland-based Ngakau Toa troupe that pierces right to the troubling heart of this first of Shakespeare's three so-called "problem plays". (The next, Measure For Measure, follows Troilus in the Globe to Globe line-up, a scheduling decision sure to be balm for scholars.) Inaugurating an epoch-defining sequence of blink-and-you-miss-'em Shakespeare productions from across the, um, globe, director Rachel House and her company of New Zealanders have Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Unlike the National, the RSC has not had a good record of producing exciting new plays in the past 20 years or so. But one exception to this rule is the theatre’s support for the work of David Edgar, whose masterpiece Pentecost was put on by them in 1994. Now, with his latest, Written on the Heart, arriving in the West End, where it opened last night in a production directed by Gregory Doran (the RSC’s newly appointed artistic director), audiences will have a chance to travel back in time to explore a crucial event in the creation of English culture and national identity.But they will need to Read more ...