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 …
The Shoemaker’s Holiday (Royal Shakespeare Company) @ The Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon
February 26, 2015
The RSC’s Winter season, coming at the end of a year commemorating the centenary of the start of World War I, has been unified by its engagement with war. From new plays on Oppenheimer and the Christmas 1914 truce to the anchoring of Love’s Labour’s Lost and Love’s Labour’s Won on either side of WW1, …
Macbeth (Filter) @ Liverpool Everyman
February 22, 2015
Filter is one of my favourite theatre companies, whether for its wonderfully anarchic Shakespeare productions or for its thought-provoking new writing, so it is with no small regret that I have to confess to disappointment at Macbeth. The raw materials of Filter’s work – an exposed production of sound, musicians at the heart of action, …
Love’s Labour’s Lost (RSC/Live from Stratford) @ The Broadway Cinema, Nottingham
February 14, 2015
The pairing of Love’s Labour’s Lost with Much Ado about Nothing in the RSC’s current season has caused no small amount of comment. The controversial retitling of the latter play as Love’s Labour’s Won is a publicity stunt although not without merit – the implication that the two plays are narrative sequels is bunk, but …
The Changeling (Shakespeare’s Globe) @ The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
January 22, 2015
Note: This review is based on a preview performance. The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, as with its more established counterpart, works much better for comedy than tragedy, in my eyes at least. The one outstanding success of the theatre so far has been its side-splitting The Knight of the Burning Pestle, but even in its tragedies …
‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Shakespeare’s Globe) @ The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
December 6, 2014
The 2014 winter season at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse brings together a range of plays that exemplify what Susan Bennett and others refer to as the ‘Jacobean’ – less a specific historical period and more an aesthetic established as oppositional to Shakespeare, foregrounding sex, violence and abandon. This aesthetic usually updates the setting and cultural …
Measure for Measure (Cheek by Jowl) @ The Pushkin Theatre, Moscow
November 24, 2014
At a hair under two hours long, Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod’s Measure for Measure stripped the play back to its bare bones. Elbow’s subplot was gone, Pompey’s tenure as hangman reduced to a few fragmented lines, Lucio’s relationship with the disguised Duke barely alluded to. In place of the intersecting subplots, Donnellan’s direction asserted …
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