Shakespeare
Laura de Lisle
Like an asp eating its own tail, the National Theatre's 2018 production of Antony and Cleopatra, streaming on YouTube until 14 May, begins as it will end. Director Simon Godwin's first tableau is the play's finale: Cleopatra (Sophie Okonedo) lies in queenly repose, a snakebite on her neck; her servants, Charmian (Gloria Obianyo) and Iras (Georgia Landers), slump around her. How did this triple suicide come to pass, ask thwarted Caesar (Tunji Kasim) and Agrippa (Katy Stephens), before answering their own question: behold, and see.It's a neat trick for Godwin, a National semi-regular since 2013 Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Time is moving in mysterious ways at the moment. It's been possible over the last month or so to mark out the beginning of each week with the arrival online of a different production streaming from the Hampstead Theatre archives. The National, meanwhile, does its change-over of offerings on a Thursday (Frankenstein, see below, begins tonight), while the RSC and Shakespeare's Globe have enough material between them to satisfy the most ardent Shakespearean and newbies to the Bard alike. What's fun is when these stalwarts are joined by more unpredictable offerings, several of which are itemised Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As lockdown continues, so does the ability of the theatre community to find new ways to tantalise and entertain. The urge to create and perform surely isn't going to be reined-in by a virus, which explains the explosion of creatives lending their gifts to song cycles, readings, or even the odd quiz night. At the same time, venues and theatre companies the world over continue to unlock cupboards full of goodies, almost too many to absorb. Below are five events worth tending to during the week ahead: some will linger online for a while, others are here and gone again in the blink of an eyelid Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The lockdown has been extended, but here's the good news: each week whereby we are shut inside seems to bring with it ever-enticing arrays of theatre from across the spectrum, from online cabarets to freshly conceived podcasts and all manner of archival offerings of tites both familiar and not. Below is an unscientific sampling of items of interest to look out for either at the moment or during the week ahead. Some theatres change over programming on Mondays or even midweek, so if the current link you have to hand seems to be to something else, hold fire and the title in question should be Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What joy it is to welcome this offshoot of the television series to the West End stage – complete with several of that show's cast, plus a few new additions. Ben Elton has fashioned an original story that picks up in 1605, a decade after where the third series left off (with the death of William Shakespeare's son, Hamnet), and two years into the reign of King James.Will (David Mitchell, on great form as the prolix and self-obsessed playwright) has had a run of duds and now is under pressure to write a hit to save his company of actors from disbandment. His landlady's niece, Kate (the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Say what you will about The Taming of the Shrew (and you’ll be in good company), but it is one of Shakespeare’s clearest plays. Asked to summarise the action of, say, Richard II or Love’s Labours Lost and you might lose your way somewhere between rival Dukes or intrigues within intrigues, but the marital tussle between Petruchio and his “shrew” of a wife Katherina is –for good or ill – secure. Whatever else director Maria Gaitanidi has done with Shakespeare’s most provocative play here, the overriding impression here is one of confusion. Wrapping unpalatable clarity in abstraction doesn’t Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
John Kani’s Kunene and the King is history in microcosm. Its premiere at the RSC last year, in this co-production with Cape Town’s Fugard Theatre, coincided with the 25th anniversary of the end of apartheid, offering a chance to assess the momentous changes in South African society over that time. But if that makes you expect any sort of public action on a grand scale, think again: this two-hander is a character study of two men, one white, one black, both in their own ways alone and pondering death, the details of whose lives gradually come to speak something, sotto-voce, about where Read more ...
Owen Richards
Ophelia is one of Shakespeare’s most iconic yet underdeveloped dramatic roles. A sweet and naïve girl, she’s driven mad by Hamlet’s wavering affections and her father’s death. She was often the subject of paintings, yet rarely of novels until the 21st century. Ophelia, starring Daisy Ridley, is an adaptation of Lisa Klein’s 2006 book of the same name, and does a valiant job at not only filling in the blanks but bringing some flair of its own.Ophelia is a precocious child of the Danish court, handpicked by Queen Gertrude (Naomi Watts, pictured below right) to join her ladies-in-waiting. She Read more ...
David Nice
No Joan of Arc means no Henry VI Part One. France, where we left the victorious Henry V - the superb Sarah Amankwah, a shining light of this company - in the Globe's summer history plays, only figures briefly in the last act of a candelelit, intimate stepping-back to the more problematic saga. It's earlier in terms of composition - though it seems strange that people used to reject Shakespeare's authorship - but in terms of historic kingship actually shows how everything about England and its French posessions fell apart with the advent of the introverted Henry VI. Concentrating on the second Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
It’s bright, it’s brash, it’s a gazillion times camper than Christmas: but is it such stuff as theatrical hits are made on? If that misquotation is already making you cringe, then this glittery pop juggernaut probably isn’t for you – but it is, unashamedly, Shakespeare for the generation that grew up on TV talent shows. Created around the back catalogue of Swedish songwriter Max Martin, it’s a reworking of Romeo and Juliet that gives the tragic teenage heroine’s story an irreverent, 21st-century spin.The result is a jukebox musical with the broad humour and feelgood fairytale sentiment of a Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Because he dramatised power, Shakespeare never really goes out of fashion. Treatments of his plays do though, and the RSC’s Measure for Measure, a transfer from Stratford set in turn-of-the-century Vienna, feels distinctly slack. The backdrop is supposedly a city filled with refugees, artists, political movers and shakers and members of the upper-class and demimonde. The arts and psychoanalysis are flourishing and social grey areas abound. But aside from design touches, little of this combustive social mix makes its way into the production. Psychological complexity already abounds and this Read more ...
Owen Richards
Ophelia is one of Shakespeare's most enduring characters in both literature and art, and yet her part in Hamlet is limited to few lines and fewer motivations. Based on Lisa Klein's novel, the new film Ophelia challenges this interpretation. Daisy Ridley stars as the iconic maiden raising above the petty squabbles of flawed men. Director Claire McCarthy talks about bringing this new adaptation to screen.OWEN RICHARDS: How did you first become involved with Ophelia?CLAIRE MCCARTHY: The job came to me off the back of a film I made called The Turning, which has Rose Byrne in it, a wonderful Read more ...