Shakespeare
Tom Birchenough
There’s a fierce, dark energy to the Globe’s new Richard III that I don’t recall at that venue for a fair while. The drilled cast dances seemed more frenzied, and there are more of them, and for once let’s start with a shout-out for James Maloney’s musical score. It’s a thing of some wonder, ranging from jazz palpitations and wiry strings to the throbbing beats of intrigue that riff on the rapid action of the “troublous world” unfolding beneath the musicians’ balcony.Elle While’s production fair speeds along, too, cutting a play that comes in the top five for length in the Shakespeare Read more ...
Heather Neill
In Shakespeare's day theatre was regarded as "wanton" by those of a Puritan disposition who feared boys dressed as girls could engender wicked thoughts of same-sex love in players and audience. But such ideas are, of course, part of the story, especially in comedies such as As You Like It and Twelfth Night. Director Owen Horsley here celebrates the queerness rather than leaving it to the perception of the audience.There are pluses and minuses to this idea. The action now takes place in a queer café, designed by Basia Bińkowska and named for the diva who owns it, Olivia, and bearing her name Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It’s an unhappy time to be staging Shakespeare’s problematic play, given its antisemitic content, so hats off to adaptor-director Brigid Larmour and actor Tracy-Ann Oberman for persevering with this updated version, now in the West End. Their ambition to make Shylock a female anti-fascist has been hard won, though.The choice of location (not Venice) and date for the update is crucial here – the eruption of violence in the East End occasioned by the rise of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), led by Oswald Mosley. Oberman’s Shylock lives on this frontline, a gutsy widow running a moneylending Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Detective Chief Inspector Othello leads a quasi-paramilitary team of Metropolitan Police officers investigating gang activity in Docklands. With a chequered past now behind him, he has reformed and has the respect of both the team he leads and his superior officers. But his secret marriage to Commander Brabantio’s daughter, Desdemona, unleashes a stream of racist invective from her father, triggering memories of abuse that are never far from the surface. Meanwhile his Detective Sergeant, Iago, lurks in the shadows, plotting revenge for his slight in being overlooked for promotion. Ola Ince’s Read more ...
Lia Rockey
Richard Schoch, in the subtitle of his new book on Shakespeare’s House, promises something big: “a window onto his life and legacy.” To the disgruntled reader – pushed to the brink by one too many new books on Shakespeare, each nervously proclaiming truly never-before-seen revelations – I suggest patience. Schoch is aware of the balance that writing this kind of book demands. He also has the sort of well-oiled experience that reassures us of a pair of safe hands. There’s a sweet spot that must be struck when writing a Shakespeare book, one between nicheness and accessibility, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
There’s a thread of bright magic running through British cinema, from Powell and Pressburger through Nic Roeg, Derek Jarman and Lynne Ramsay, and it’s wrapped around Jarman’s last home like fisherman’s rope.His friend and collaborator Tilda Swinton called Prospect Cottage a charged place, acting as a battery for artists. It is particularly so this weekend, as the BFI’s Powell and Pressburger season sparks the first art made here since Jarman’s death in 1994. Powell + Pressburger: In Prospero’s Room draws on an obscure but profound connection. Jarman adapted Shakespeare’s The Tempest in 1979, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Next door to the beautiful Art Deco Littlewoods Pools Building, nearly 30 years standing derelict, a set of grey sheds stand, a seat of potential for Liverpool’s nascent film industry. Nearly a century ago, the long, white, towered construction in which the next "Spend! Spend! Spend!" millionaires were plucked from the old terraces and new housing estates of post-war Britain, spoke to the confidence that still suffused a great city in the 1930s. The drab utility of today's metal monoliths speaks to the accountants and administrators whose funding bids must squeeze every penny out of Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Four centuries on from the publication of the First Folio, is there anything new to be said about William Shakespeare? Well, the fact that there is nothing old to be said about him (very little is known about the life of the glover’s son from Stratford) means that there’s always something new, as the evidence to gainsay any claim is minimal. Tedious conspiracy theories aside, it’s the kind of paradox the man himself might have appreciated.That’s the jumping off point for 72 Films’ lavish production for BBC Arts, a three-hour series that sits somewhere between the "clips and talking heads" Read more ...
Mert Dilek
Few would have imagined that Kenneth Branagh’s return to the West End would see him garbed in fur-lined, prehistoric clothes. But this is how he takes on the gargantuan role of King Lear, in a compact, fast-paced production of Shakespeare’s great tragedy featuring a cast of RADA graduates and directed by himself.Branagh not only distils the play to an intermissionless two hours, but also sets it in a neolithic period of sticks, stones, and spears, where Lear’s tale of psychic and political dispossession gains a timeless aura. Jon Bausor’s set is surrounded by a Stonehenge-like series of Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The RSC apparently has a hit on its hands with its West End transfer of Hamnet. Box office demand has already prompted an extension of the run by six weeks, until February 2024.The draw is presumably the bestselling 2020 novel by Maggie O’Farrell on which the play is based, which is a commandingly and inventively written unfolding of the Shakespeare family’s poignant story over almost two decades, at the heart of which is Agnes Hathaway’s relationship with Will Shakespeare and their three children, who include the Hamnet of the title.O’Farrell maps out this story in chronological zigzags, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Shakespeare gives Iago over 1000 lines to implant the jealous rage in Othello, so there’s plenty to of raw material to work with. The director Sinéad Rushe has had the idea to split these weaselly words between three actors, a device that seems so natural, so revealing, so obvious that one wonders why it hasn’t been done before (or, perhaps, more often).Cut to 100 minutes all-through, this production does not just re-invent the wicked ensign, but forces us to reconsider the Iagos we have met in the past and the Othellos he has driven to dreadful murder. Michael C Fox, Orlando James and Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
To proclaim that you’re playing gender games with Shakespeare’s As You Like It seems a little like announcing that you have a bicycle with two wheels, or indeed that you’re doing something interesting with rhythms in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.Let’s face it, this is a plot in which the female love interest doesn’t just disguise herself as a man but names herself after Ganymede, famed in mythology as Zeus’s gay lover. The idea that this might be heteronormative in any way sounds like a spurious idea on some emotionally constipated academic’s bookshelf. There’s not just sauce for the goose Read more ...