The Winter’s Tale (Renegade Theatre) @ Shakespeare’s Globe (via Globe Player)
September 4, 2020
The Winter’s Tale is structured, at roughly its mid-point, around a passage of time. It’s a play whose passage of sixteen years allows for an evocation of long regret and mourning, of aging and changing, of memory and forgiveness (or not). But in Ìtàn Ògìnìntìn, performed at the Globe as part of the 2012 Globe to …
What You Will (The Shakespeare Ensemble) @ online
August 25, 2020
Of the Shakespeare events produced during lockdown, The Shakespeare Ensemble’s What You Will is one of the ones to make the most of the affordances of digital media. Eschewing entirely the need for linear narration, the original live event hosted no fewer than nine separate streams occurring simultaneously, creating a virtual promenade performance that allowed audiences …
Ali Smith, ‘Summer’ (Hamish Hamilton)
August 16, 2020
In one of Ali Smith’s trademark dizzying verbal association games, an unnamed character in Summer explains that a load-bearing stone is often called a ‘summer’; at which another character, Grace, muses on why we load summer with so many expectations, much more than the other seasons. It’s framed as a time of renewal, of rest, …
The Merry Wives of Windsor @ Shakespeare’s Globe (webstream)
June 8, 2020
In releasing its 2019 The Merry Wives of Windsor as one of its free YouTube premieres, the Globe justly celebrates one of its finest ensembles (who later in the year went on to perform in Bartholomew Fair). Elle While’s thirties-set production is a jolly, entertaining farce that treats the play with the light touch it …
Macbeth (Berliner Ensemble) @ BE At Home
May 26, 2020
Michael Thalheimer’s 2018 production of Macbeth, as preserved in the Berliner Ensemble’s stream for its ‘BE At home’ programme during the Covid-19 lockdown, is immersed in corporeality. This is not a production in which bodies are aestheticised, but one in which they excrete, expel, merge and bloat. Macbeth (Sascha Nathan) describes himself as Duncan’s butcher, and that’s …
As You Like It (CtrlAltRepeat) @ YouTube
May 24, 2020
‘I like this place / And willingly could waste my time in it.’ Celia’s line in As You Like It rings interestingly in the middle of a pandemic, a momentary suggestion of peace and satisfaction in the idea of wasting time. Time is a luxury, even a superfluity, when so many in the theatre industry …
Coriolanus (Stratford Festival) @ Stratfest@Home (webcast)
May 20, 2020
There’s a near-perfect alignment between form and content in Barry Avrich’s film of Robert LePage’s Coriolanus, originally directed for the Stratford Festival, Ontario in 2018 and now broadcast live internationally via Stratfest@Home. Perhaps almost too perfect. LePage’s Coriolanus is fully committed to its formal conceit, even at the expense of rendering the production almost entirely …
Macbeth (Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank) @ Shakespeare’s Globe (webstream)
May 12, 2020
At a taut ninety minutes, the Playing Shakespeare production of Macbeth staged at Shakespeare’s Globe in early 2020 – just before the pandemic shut down theatres – converts well into a pacey film that preserves the raw energy of a production performed to thousands of schoolchildren (always a reliably vocal audience, especially at the Globe) …
The Winter’s Tale (Royal Ballet) @ The Royal Opera House (webstream)
May 6, 2020
While there is a long and proud history of dance adaptations of Shakespeare, Christopher Wheeldon’s retelling of The Winter’s Tale is apparently the first time this play has ever been rendered as ballet. It’s surprising, especially given the proto-musical trappings of the sheep-shearing festival, and the play’s interest in visual imagery, most notably in the statue of Hermione. …
Twelfth Night (National Theatre) @ National Theatre At Home
April 24, 2020
The choice of the National Theatre to broadcast Simon Godwin’s Twelfth Night to homes to mark Shakespeare’s deathday on 23 April was a canny one; a crowd-pleasing comedy, with known quantities (Oliver Chris as Orsino and the headlining Tamsin Greig as a regendered Malvolia, the actors reunited from Green Wing) and an elaborate set courtesy of Soutra Gilmour. On a …
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