Teenage Dick @ The Donmar Warehouse
January 25, 2020
The best high-school Shakespeare adaptations don’t simply look for one-on-one equivalences in their new milieu for the Shakespearean text, but engage deeply with the concerns, clichés, and stakes of their environment. To translate wars and intrigues to basketball courts or class president elections does not require matters to be trivialised simply because they are no …
Christmas at the (Snow)Globe @ Shakespeare’s Globe
December 21, 2019
Is it a Christmas show or a Shakespeare show? At the heart of Sandi Toksvig and Jennifer Toksvig’s joyful festive residency at the Globe lay an irreverent contestation over the space, whether reserved for ‘serious acting’ or opened up for community celebration. As a site-specific and original holiday entertainment, it spoke to the unique power …
Richard III (Shakespeare’s Globe) @ The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
December 5, 2019
It may now have been a new play, with a new king (Sarah Amankwah’s Edward IV) and his courtiers standing for a family portrait, but the stage of Richard III bore all the scars of the Wars of the Roses. Edward and his wife Elizabeth (Nina Bowers) stood centrally in the family group, atop the …
Henry VI (Shakespeare’s Globe) @ The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
November 16, 2019
NB: This review is based on a preview performance. Henry VI, the fifth entry in the Globe’s 2019 Histories Cycle, was a production of compromises, if not a compromised production. Reuniting the ensemble that performed 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV and Henry V over the summer (with a couple of replacement members), the decision …
Matthew Bourne’s Romeo and Juliet (New Adventures) @ Sadler’s Wells/Nottingham Broadway
October 23, 2019
Illuminations’ new film of Matthew Bourne’s reimagining of Romeo and Juliet is a thrilling addition to the canon of dance adaptations of the play. Taking the classic Sergei Prokofiev score, but setting the ballet in a near-future ‘Verona Institute’ for the incarceration of young people, Bourne’s Romeo and Juliet is a raw and moving piece that fascinatingly …
Macbeth @ Manchester Royal Exchange
October 10, 2019
For about half an hour before the Royal Exchange’s Macbeth started, the atrium of the Royal Exchange was rocked by rumbles and explosions, which became increasingly unsettling as the start time drew near. Christopher Haydon’s production – especially in Elena Peña’s sound design – sought to set up a world rent asunder by war long …
A Midsummer Night’s Dream @ The Bridge Theatre
August 28, 2019
‘Not for my fairy kingdom’ roared Oliver Chris’s Oberon during his big fight with Gwendoline Christie’s Titania, early in the Bridge Theatre’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. The subtle textual change was part of an extensive series of adjustments designed to allow Oberon to remain King of the Forest while putting him on the receiving end of the love potion trick, in a …
Bartholomew Fair (Shakespeare’s Globe) @ The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
August 26, 2019
Please note – this review is of a preview performance. The sprawling Bartholomew Fair is an enormous play, a cast of seemingly thousands jostling shoulders in one of London’s most notorious fairs. Hosting it in the relatively bijou Sam Wanamaker was a bold choice, but Blanche McIntyre (with designer Ti Green) transformed it to maximise …
Venice Preserved (RSC) @ The Swan Theatre
August 7, 2019
Thomas Otway’s 1682 tragedy, part of a mini-season of Restoration plays in the Swan, is a depressing affair. Despite the large scale of its political plot, as a group of conspirators led by an ambassador band together to overthrow the Venetian state, its focus is on a three-way relationship between a man, his secret wife, …
Measure for Measure (RSC/Live from Stratford-upon-Avon) @ The Broadway, Nottingham
August 1, 2019
Gregory Doran’s new Measure for Measure seemed, at times, to be almost defiantly setting itself against ‘relevance’. Eschewing the contemporary settings of several recent productions that have more explicitly responded to the #MeToo moment and the abuses of power in the highest offices (whether political, entertainment, sports), Doran returned to the text’s setting of Vienna, but updated …
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