Hamlet (Royal Exchange) @ The Broadway, Nottingham
March 28, 2015
Watching the Royal Exchange production of Hamlet on the big screen, in a specially recorded film version (still performed in front of an audience, but with a certain amount of editing work to make the most of key images), brought home to me the significance of much of the production’s work. While I enjoyed the …
The Revenger’s Tragedy (Lazarus Theatre Company) @ The Brockley Jack Studio Theatre
March 23, 2015
At ninety minutes long, Lazarus Theatre’s take on Middleton’s seminal revenge tragedy still felt leaden and ponderous, a dull take on a sparkling play. While the production was full of ideas and some striking performances, the eclectic cutting and rigid spatial organisation rendered the play frequently unintelligible and confusingly abrupt, obfuscating rather than clarifying the …
The Broken Heart (Shakespeare’s Globe) @ The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
March 22, 2015
My complaint about tragedies at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse so far has been the productions’ frustrating collective failure to realise that this is a space in which less can be more. In what seems to me to be a lack of confidence in the work of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, the tendency has been to ramp up …
Love’s Labour’s Won [Much Ado about Nothing] (RSC/Live from Stratford) @ The Broadway, Nottingham
March 6, 2015
Where Christopher Luscombe’s Love’s Labour’s Lost was a pleasant surprise, its self-parodic wit trumping the pull towards nostalgia and self-indulgence that the period setting might have implied, Love’s Labour’s Won had the opposite effect on me. Here, a series of uncomfortable decisions underwritten by unpleasant assumptions marred a production that had a great deal of …
The Troublesome Reign of King John (Shakespeare’s Globe / Read not Dead) @ Inner Temple
March 2, 2015
At a hair under four hours (including stalling around the interval), the Globe’s Read not Dead reading of The Troublesome Reign of King John was one of the costliest productions I’ve been to for a long time, causing me to miss my carefully planned coach home from London and buy a new train ticket for …
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