The Winter’s Tale (RSC) @ The Theatre Royal, Nottingham
March 29, 2013
In my pre-show lecture for this production of The Winter’s Tale, I talked about the notion that this is a play of two halves, reflected through the distorting mirror of the bear, which asks us to consider ideas of rebirth and circles (though the question of whether these are redemptive or vicious remains open). Lucy …
Richard III (SATTF) @ The Tobacco Factory, Bristol
March 24, 2013
I’m on record (well, Twitter) as being relatively sceptical about the recent finds in Leicester. The convenience of the archaeological team setting out to find Richard and discovering the trench and skeleton more or less on the first day of digging strikes me as being rather convenient, and I’m inclined to exercise a healthy caution. …
Henry V (Edward’s Boys) @ The Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon
March 18, 2013
When I first saw Edward’s Boys, they were a group of mostly eleven year olds performing extracts of John Lyly’s Endymion in a campus drama studio. Last night, the same company (indeed, with many of the same actors) filled the Swan Theatre to bursting with an audience including knights of the realm, RSC actors and …
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Custom/Practice) @ Nottingham Playhouse
March 1, 2013
Rae McKen’s new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream opened with a framing device that left no doubt as to the production’s intended audience. Set in a modern detention room, a group of assorted school stereotypes assembled, bickering over mobile phones and classroom politics. After a short while, their velvet-jacketed teacher ‘Mr Goodfellow’ entered the …
The Knight of the Burning Pestle (Read not Dead) @ Sackler Studios, Shakespeare’s Globe
February 20, 2013
‘Post-modern before the term was even invented’. So runs the blurb on Shakespeare’s Globe’s ‘Read not Dead‘ webpage, and it’s a fitting description of Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle. A failure when first performed, and an often difficult play in modern revival, the Read not Dead team here excelled themselves with an …
Fair Em (Steam Industry) @ The Union Theatre
February 5, 2013
Long-time readers will know that my scholarly research is based primarily on the group of anonymous or misattributed plays best known collectively as ‘The Shakespeare Apocrypha’, of which Fair Em is perhaps the most obscure, to scholars as well as theatregoers. Seemingly one never to shy away from a challenge, director Phil Willmott continued his run of …
Twelfth Night (Shakespeare Aloud!) @ The Shakespeare Centre, Stratford
January 6, 2013
Shakespeare Aloud! is the in-house acting team at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, offering what they refer to as a ‘jukebox Shakespeare’ for tourists, where bitesize segments, songs, speeches are delivered on demand to the visitors at the houses. It offers added value for visitors and seems to fit in with the casual engagement with Shakespeare …
The Changeling @ The Young Vic
November 26, 2012
With the bulk of the audience divided from the main stage by a net barrier, it quickly became clear that Joe Hill-Gibbins’s celebrated production of Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling was deeply concerned with the question of who, exactly, was being watched. While the floor-level stage surrounded by tiers and galleries of spectators cast the …
Timon of Athens (National Theatre/NT Live) @ The Broadway Cinema, Nottingham
November 2, 2012
As has been the case for certain previous NT Live productions, tonight’s broadcast of Timon of Athens marked the end of a lengthy and critically acclaimed run for a major National Theatre production. The use of the live broadcast format as valediction as well as product extension was explicitly referred to by the ever-present Emma …
A Tender Thing (RSC) @ The Swan Theatre, Stratford
October 14, 2012
Unlike the Olympics, the World Shakespeare Festival doesn’t have a Closing Ceremony. There is no grand climax, no image of Prospero/Shakespeare drowning his books and asking for our applause, not even a celebrity-studded event production. Instead, the last officially badged World Shakespeare Festival production to open was this: a two-hander played (on this occasion) to …
Find, follow, join us
