Richard II (National Theatre/Illuminations) on DVD
December 11, 2016
We owe Illuminations a huge debt of gratitude. Its ongoing ‘Screen Plays’ series, reviving and making available classic television productions, has already brought us An Age of Kings and The Wars of the Roses, and now it delivers a beautifully transferred recording of Deborah Warner’s seminal Richard II, the 1997 television version of the 1995 …
Lear/Cordelia (1623 Theatre Company) @ Derby Theatres Studio
November 20, 2016
1623 Theatre’s latest production was one of their most ambitious to date: a one-act adaptation of King Lear followed by a new response play, Farrah Chaudhry’s Cordelia, with an accompanying set of workshops, talks and resources designed to link the play to dementia support and broader accessibility. On the evening I saw it, a huge …
Pericles (University College Cork/LittleShoes Productions) @ The Unitarian Church, Cork
I spent the first half of last week in Cork for the event ‘Celebrating Shakespeare 400: Performing Pericles, Prince of Tyre’. Part of the extensive Irish Shakespeare festival commemorating the 400 years since Shakespeare’s death, this event was billed as offering what appears to be only the second ever performance of Pericles in Ireland, coupled …
The Revenger’s Tragedy @ Nottingham Playhouse
November 2, 2016
NB This review is based on a preview performance. The most striking image of Fiona Buffini’s new production of The Revenger’s Tragedy was that of the opening, with a narrow shaft of light from on high illuminating a skull sat on a chair. Then, to the sound of T-Rex’s ‘Children of the Revolution’, the Duke, …
Iyalode of Eti (Utopia Theatre) @ Sheffield Theatres Studio
September 29, 2016
Utopia Theatre has been producing works rooted in the experience of the West African diaspora for a few years now, promoting the work of BAME actors and resituating classic texts in a Yoruban context. Perhaps predictably, the company’s first foray into early modern drama was the perennial Romeo and Juliet, adapted in Nigeria as This …
Mucedorus (Hull School of Drama, Music and Screen) @ The Donald Roy Theatre
September 12, 2016
Mucedorus (one of the very few ‘apocryphal’ plays I’ve not hitherto managed to see in the theatre, and yet the one on which I’ve spent most time) has perversely suffered from its reputation as the most ‘popular’ play of the early modern period (where ‘popularity’ is understood as a count of reprints, a measure with …
The Complete Deaths (Spymonkey) @ Hull Truck
September 10, 2016
It’s almost thirty years since the Reduced Shakespeare Company launched its mission of comprehensive compression, culminating in a repeated, increasingly speedy depiction of all of the deaths in Hamlet. Spymonkey, in their first Shakespeare-themed show, have now taken up their mantle with a full show devoted entirely to staging all of the onstage deaths in …
Black (dir. Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah) @ Broadway Cinema
September 7, 2016
Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah’s Black is painful and upsetting. It’s hardly the first film to reimagine Romeo and Juliet as an urban gang war, a setting that reappears from West Side Story to Romeo and Juliet in Harlem, and canonised as a reading by Baz Luhrmann’s inescapable film (quoted visually here in a …
Hamlet (RSC) @ The Royal Shakespeare Theatre
August 4, 2016
Seeing the same ensemble of actors take on Hamlet two days after Cymbeline, I was struck by the demands placed on a company performing these two long plays together – the mercifully shorter Hamlet still ran to an energetic three hours and fifteen minutes. And this is one of the consistently strongest ensembles I remember …
Cymbeline (RSC) @ The Royal Shakespeare Theatre
August 2, 2016
A couple of months ago, before the UK jumped the proverbial shark in the EU referendum, a line from Cymbeline was doing the rounds on social media as Brexiteers leapt on Shakespeare’s comment that Britain is A world by itself; and we will nothing pay For wearing our own noses. Deploying the time-honoured logic of …
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