Peter Kirwan
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1 Henry VI Open Rehearsal Run-through (RSC) @ online
June 25, 2021
The three weeks of the RSC 1 Henry VI Open Rehearsal Project – previously discussed on The Bardathon here – culminated on June 23rd with a full rehearsal run through in the Swan rehearsal rooms, as the midsummer light waned through the windows around the room. Running at a stripped-down two hours, this was still a …
Henry VI, Part One: Open Rehearsal Project (RSC) @ The RSC rehearsal rooms (online)
June 17, 2021
The RSC has been cautious about its reopening in summer 2021. Where other theatres are beginning to tentatively let socially distanced crowds back into their buildings, the RSC has committed instead to a different kind of programme and a different kind of co-presence. The upcoming The Comedy of Errors will make use of the theatre’s unique …
Volpone (Red Bull) @ YouTube
June 15, 2021
The Red Bull’s Zoom-based production of Volpone reprised a celebrated 2012 production (both directed by Jesse Berger) in a fast and funny version that entertainingly capitalised on the restrictions of performing in isolation. Volpone is a play that always seems to feel timely even if, as here, it leans into the period setting, and the play’s …
The Winter’s Tale (RSC) @ BBC4
April 26, 2021
It’s become customary to see theatre shows performed in empty auditoria over the last year, but perhaps none quite so grandly empty as the RSC’s new Winter’s Tale. This is a production that has skipped over its own ‘gap of time’ – fully rehearsed but pulled just before it was due to open back in …
Romeo and Juliet (National Theatre) @ Sky Arts
April 5, 2021
A group of actors gather in a rehearsal room, chatting and laughing; we cut to them sat in chairs, making up three sides of a large square. It looks like meet-and-greet day, only there’s no director, no box set to show. Instead, it’s one of the actors, Lucian Msamati, who speaks, and he’s speaking the Prologue. …
The Duchess of Malfi (Creation/TORCH) @ Zoom
March 27, 2021
The dynamics of looking within The Duchess of Malfi are subtle and complex. Whether in its moments of extraordinary spectacle, as dismembered bodies are revealed and cardinals are armed, or in the more quotidian business of spying, commenting, and observing from the sidelines, the play repeatedly triangulates the audience’s gaze and engages its onstage and offstage viewers …
Dream Online (Royal Shakespeare Company) @ online
March 20, 2021
In the post-show talk-back for the RSC’s online virtual-reality Dream, the creative team talked enthusiastically about the ‘potential’ of the medium for creating digital theatre productions with open-ended narrative and global interactivity with mass audiences. ‘Potential’ feels like the best word to describe this Dream: a diverting experiment with some beautiful visuals and music, but which felt …
Romeo and Juliet (National Theatre) @ The Dorfman, London (via Drama Online)
February 19, 2021
The National Theatre’s schools’ productions have developed in enormous sophistication over the last couple of decades, and it’s testament to their success as creative works in their own right that, not only are they getting runs at the National’s south bank base, but that two of them (Romeo and Juliet and The Winter’s Tale, which …
Romeo & Juliet (Metcalfe Gordon Productions)
February 14, 2021
For almost a year, now, there have been few opportunities to see new productions of Shakespeare inside a theatre; fewer still where actors are able to touch, to interact. Metcalfe Gordon Productions’ new theatre-film hybrid production of Romeo and Juliet is an experiment in using technology to reproduce what has been lost, filming the actors (mostly) …
Ophelia (Covert Media) (DVD)
January 3, 2021
John Everett Millais’s ‘Ophelia’ is a defining pre-Raphaelite work, and a profound interpretive influence on Hamlet, on stage and on screen. It’s the starting point for Claire McCarthy’s film of the same name, as Daisy Ridley’s Ophelia spreads her arms and flowers in a lake and slowly sinks beneath the water. The painting renders Ophelia passive, a victim, a portrait of …
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