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, …
The Witch of Edmonton (RSC) @ The Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
October 26, 2014
(note – this review is of a preview performance) The Roaring Girls season, discussed in previous posts on this blog, ended with an entirely untypical coda. Directed by a man (Gregory Doran), given an early modern setting and appearing divorced from the statements about feminism and gender roles within the RSC that had characterised the …
The Roaring Girl (RSC) @ The Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon
August 15, 2014
The Roaring Girl is a much better idea than it is a play. The idea of the ‘Roaring Girl’ (the title, of course, of the current Swan season) is a fantastic crucible for exploring ideas of gender identity and sexual performance, and the involved plot of shopkeepers’ wives and rakes about town taking advantage of …
The Bloody Banquet (Blood and Thunder Theatre Company) @ The Shakespeare Institute
June 10, 2012
Writing about web page http://bloodandthundertheatre.org.uk/#/productions/4560980158 Thomas Dekker’s The Bloody Banquet (possibly written in collaboration with Thomas Middleton) has not been performed, to my knowledge, since the seventeenth century. It was a pleasure, therefore, to be involved in a major new revival of the play in the form of a one-off staged reading in Stratford-upon-Avon, as …
The Bloody Banquet
May 18, 2012
I feel I should probably confess now that I’ll be making a rare journey to the other side of the footlights next month. I’ll be performing a couple of minor roles in Blood and Thunder Theatre Company’s production of Dekker and Middleton’s The Bloody Banquet. Thoroughly looking forward to this – there’s a great cast …
The Shoemaker’s Holiday (Black Sun) @ The Dell, Stratford–upon–Avon
August 9, 2010
Writing about web page http://www.blacksuntheatre.com/ Since its institution during the Complete Works Festival, the Stratford open air festival at the Dell has become an annual event, offering free theatre to Stratford passers-by. While it’s now relocated slightly further along the river, the spirit of the outdoor performances has remained the same: accessible, entertaining and pleasantly …