Macbeth @ Hyde Park Cinema, Leeds
October 5, 2015
Justin Kurzel’s new film of Macbeth, one of the most frequently filmed of all Shakespeare’s plays, arrives carrying with it the threat of modishness. Capitalising on the success of the Game of Thrones ‘medieval’ aesthetic template, and starring the so-hot-right-now Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, themselves successful arthouse/mainstream crossover actors, the film’s formula for artistic …
Richard III @ The Quarry Theatre, West Yorkshire Playhouse
October 4, 2015
Given the spate of stand-alone Richard IIIs since the titular king’s corpse was exhumed in 2012, it’s a brave production that emphasises the wider cycle of otherwise unseen events. Mark Rosenblatt’s bold and spectacular production for West Yorkshire Playhouse began with a group of industrial cleaners scrubbing a white stage clean of the blood left …
Bill @ The Light, Leeds
October 3, 2015
Bill, the first big-screen venture from the team behind the phenomenally popular Horrible Histories television series, is perhaps the most British film since Paddington. Characters complain repeatedly about London house prices; aspiring artists are told to grow up and get a proper job (Anne Hathaway presumably running for Schools Minister…); foreigners landing on the English …
texts&beheadings/ElizabethR (Compagnia de’Colombari) @ Folger Theatre
September 24, 2015
Ahead of the opening of the Folger’s main 15/16 season, the theatre – a beautiful, paradoxical combination of Elizabethan outdoor and indoor theatre elements – plays host in September to a visiting production by Compagnia de’Colombari, Karin Conrood’s texts&beheadings/ElizabethR. Part of Washington’s Women’s Voices Festival, Conrood’s play is a combination of archival research, storytelling and …
Shakespeare’s Joan of Arc (Henry VI, Part 1) (American Shakespeare Center) @ the Blackfriars, Staunton VA
September 13, 2015
NB this review is of a preview performance, and does not reflect the play as of press night The resident company at the Blackfriars works exceptionally hard. Twelve actors are currently performing four Shakespeare plays in repertory six days of the week; not only that, but the whole company perform for fifteen minutes before the …
Antony and Cleopatra (American Shakespeare Center) @ The Blackfriars, Staunton VA
Although Staunton’s Blackfriars was constructed first, my experience of it comes through having seen several shows previously in the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Virginia’s theatre feels very like the Wanamaker, if the Wanamaker breathed out substantially and took itself a lot less seriously. The resident company (most of the current acting company have been in …
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare Theatre Company) @ Sidney Harman Hall
September 6, 2015
It’s been nine years since I saw the Shakespeare Theatre Company tour to the Swan in Stratford-upon-Avon with their wonderful production of Love’s Labour’s Lost, and I’m delighted to have been able to return the visit while I’m based at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC this month. I’m also fortunate that this September marks the twenty-fifth …
Othello (RSC/Live from Stratford) @ The Broadway, Nottingham
August 27, 2015
With the exception of the German production that played for four nights during the Complete Works Festival, it’s been well over a decade since Othello was last on the main stage at the RSC. Of all the plays deemed controversial, from The Taming of the Shrew to The Merchant of Venice, Othello is the one …
The Jew of Malta (RSC) @ The Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
July 26, 2015
Seeing The Jew of Malta immediately after seeing Volpone, with both performed by the same ensemble, brings out some surprising similarities between two very different plays. Both feature states with a severe – and arguably corrupt – rule of law; both feature a rich role-player as the morally deficient protagonist who deploys alternative personas as …
Volpone (RSC) @ The Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
If Trevor Nunn’s superlative production of Volpone established just one thing, it is that Jonson’s finest play (cue debate) demands a tour de force performance from its lead. In Henry Goodman, Nunn found the perfect shapeshifter. Goodman, a stage stalwart without the celebrity baggage that fixes the persona of some other leading actors, had the …
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