Shakespeare
Jenny Gilbert
There may never have been a time when Shakespeare’s Richard III did not have contemporary relevance, but surely never more than it does right now. And it’s to the credit of director Mehmet Ergen that this production doesn’t go to town on it, but instead leaves the audience to make its own connections. From the start, Richard of York is shown to be a misogynist and a sociopath who is prepared to say anything, do anything to attain the seat of power. To borrow the words of a New Yorker profile of a certain presidential hopeful, his is “an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul”.Greg Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Everything in extremity”. That announcement that the Capulet party is about to begin could just as well serve to describe Daniel Kramer’s Romeo and Juliet as a whole. Opening the Globe's new season, it will provoke reactions as conflicting as the play’s warring families. Purists will pan it, that’s for sure, while fans may welcome a fiery energy that melds in considerable comedy. There’s precious little room for any in-between.The party scene says it all. It’s played out to Village People’s “YMCA”. Capulet is clad in a dinosaur suit (he’s accompanied through most of the action by a human dog Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Scottish play’s traces are faint in this bloody, steamy tale of feminist psychosis. Based on Nikolai Leskov’s Dostoevsky-commissioned novel Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, its 1865 setting is transferred from Tsarist Russia to Northumberland. Little of the isolated, feudal oppression is lost in translation, as teenage Katherine (Florence Pugh) finds herself chattel to the sullen, impotent, older Alexander (Paul Hilton), till lust for a servant sparks her to life, and consumes everything around.Though Katherine is lady of the manor, this is a tale of gilt-edged slave days from a female Read more ...
Robert Beale
The opening of a new concert hall offers two options for opinionizing: the venue itself – or the performances in it? Review the acoustics – or the music? It has to be a mixture of the two, in the end. Chetham’s School of Music, in Manchester, has just celebrated (and seen opened by HRH Prince Edward) its £8.7m Stoller Hall – a state-of-the-art, 482-seat performance venue in the heart of Manchester, right next to Victoria Station.It’s been constructed, "box in box" style for perfect sound insulation, inside the main new Chetham’s building erected in 2012. The missing ingredient on that Read more ...
Julian Curry
Much of the brilliance of Shakespeare lies in the openness, or ambiguity, of his texts. Whereas a novelist will often describe a character, an action or a scene in the most minute detail, Shakespeare knew that his scenarios would only be fully fleshed out when actors perform them. He was the first writer to create character out of language. Falstaff has an idiosyncratic way of speaking that is quite distinct from Juliet, as she does from Shylock, and he from Lady Macbeth. An actor receives subliminal clues about their character, merely by the way they express themselves.George Bernard Shaw Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This is a well-travelled Winter’s Tale. Declan Donnellan has long been a director who's as much at home abroad as he is in the UK, and with co-production support here coming pronouncedly from Europe (there's American backing, too), Cheek by Jowl have made it abundantly clear where they stand on the issue of the day. Their version of Shakespeare's greatest romance reaches the Barbican’s Silk Street Theatre after a frenetic touring schedule that began in Paris more than a year ago, with further voyages beckoning. When it comes to travelling light, Nick Ormerod’s spare design must have been of Read more ...
David Nice
It felt good to be encountering Shakespeare at his most political with a world event to smile about, for once (hailing, of course, from this brilliant Dutch company's homeland). It felt even better to emerge six hours later spellbound and deeply moved by the triumph of the personal, albeit in a kind of love-death, after so many power-games. Thrust voluntarily onstage to witness some of those conferences, even at close quarters you couldn't see the joins in the performances of Ivo van Hove's ensemble. This is not so much acting as being, or so it seems.Those who'd seen the first Barbican Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Amy Leach’s energetic Romeo and Juliet is fast, furious and a little breathless, the setting transposed from Verona to a fairly grim contemporary Leeds. Think West Yorkshire Side Story. Leach’s starting point was hearing about conflict resolution in a local high school created by merging a pair of formerly rival institutions, and her programme note also explicitly links the production to a divided post-Brexit Britain, a place where long-buried differences have fractured previously stable relationships. And the energy is specific to modern Leeds, which each summer hosts a hedonistic music Read more ...
Matt Wolf
To the list of abiding theatrical partnerships one must surely add Tom Stoppard and the director David Leveaux. From his Tony-winning revival of The Real Thing onwards to Jumpers and Arcadia, all of which played both London and Broadway, Leveaux has proved a particularly dab hand at mining this playwright in all his near-infinite variety. And if Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead as a play doesn't, in my view, rank with much of its author's extraordinary subsequent output, Leveaux's 50th anniversary revival nonetheless does the text's unbridled energy proud. How lovely, too, to encounter Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Intimacy is a mixed blessing: Richard Twyman’s close-up exploration of sex and violence in his production of Othello for Bristol’s Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory takes the audience on a gripping emotional journey, but one that is at times almost beyond close for comfort.This is theatre in the round with a vengeance: the low-ceilinged space, with the audience seated within feet of the stage, in a 360-degree embrace, leaves no room for escape. Twyman has accentuated the sense of claustrophobia – because yes, intimacy can feel stifling – with a mixture of one-directional vertical top Read more ...
David Nice
There's no reason why ruffs and candles shouldn't mesh with bursts of contemporary speech, song and lighting, given a defter hand than director Ellen McDougall's. Shakespeare's timeless issues of racism and sexism have plenty of mileage in them, though in less skewed proportions than they find here. Many of this production's components are promising, but the whole is a strident mess.None of this is the fault of the admirable Othello, Kurt Egyiawan. Noble and low-voiced in fine speech for the opening Venice act, he also makes us aware of a man on edge and alert to slights about his skin, which Read more ...
Heather Neill
In a few days' time, Ellen McDougall will become artistic director of the dynamic little Gate Theatre in Notting Hill where she is already an associate artist. She's not taking it easy in the run-up to her new responsibilities though: her production of Othello in the Globe's bijou indoor theatre, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, opens this week with Kurt Egyiawan in the title role, Natalie Klamar as Desdemona and a female Cassio, Joanna Horton.McDougall had considerable success with her playful production of Idomeneus at the Gate in 2014 and was associate director there for two years from 2012. Read more ...