The Revenger’s Tragedy (Cheek by Jowl/Piccolo) @ The Barbican Theatre
March 6, 2020
In producing a play that turns repeatedly on deceitful appearances, both in the spectacles of power and in staged tricks played on the unsuspecting, Cheek by Jowl’s Revenger’s Tragedy turned theatre itself into the grand metaphor. At the production’s opening, with a stage manager in a headset watching, Fausto Cabra’s Vindice clicked his fingers to …
Women Beware Women (Shakespeare’s Globe) @ The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
February 29, 2020
For a play of dark corners, shadowy deeds and masque-like spectacle, the Sam Wanamaker is surely the perfect playhouse. In Amy Hodge’s debut production for the Globe, and in collaboration with designer Joanna Scotcher, the SWP was darkened further than usual, with black tiling on floor and tiring house wall, and covers over the lanterns, …
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 …
Timon of Athens (RSC) @ The Swan Theatre
January 17, 2019
It’s impossible to get away from Simon Godwin at the moment. His RSC Hamlet has only just finished touring; his Antony and Cleopatra at the National has been winning awards, and he’s just about to take up the artistic directorship of the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington DC, as well as directing a production in …
Macbeth (Shakespeare’s Globe) @ The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
December 16, 2018
Macbeth – which of course, may well have been adapted for the King’s Men after the company’s acquisition of the Blackfriars – seems ideally suited to the chiaroscuro potential of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. More so than any production I’ve seen there since The Duchess of Malfi, Robert Hastie’s production played with the sounds that …
The Revenger’s Tragedy @ Nottingham Playhouse
November 2, 2016
NB This review is based on a preview performance. The most striking image of Fiona Buffini’s new production of The Revenger’s Tragedy was that of the opening, with a narrow shaft of light from on high illuminating a skull sat on a chair. Then, to the sound of T-Rex’s ‘Children of the Revolution’, the Duke, …
Women Beware Women (American Shakespeare Center) @ The Blackfriars, Staunton, VA
February 28, 2016
After the previous day’s sprint-to-the-finish The Sea Voyage, it was pleasing to see the ASC ensemble shift the pace for Middleton’s Women Beware Women. This perfectly cast production drew on the established relationships and good humour that have characterised all the shows I’ve seen at the Blackfriars, but also lingered on soliloquies and set-pieces to …
Macbeth @ The Young Vic
December 10, 2015
The idea of a Macbeth co-directed by a director with classical experience (Carrie Cracknell) and a choreographer (Lucy Guerin) is an intriguing one, especially when this team has had prior success with a provocative Medea at the National. Yet the overall effect of the Young Vic’s new Macbeth was something less than the sum of …
Measure for Measure @ The Young Vic
October 14, 2015
One key moment in Measure for Measure exemplified the difference between Dominic Dromgoole’s production at the Globe and this, Joe Hill-Gibbins’s very different take at the Young Vic. In Dromgoole’s production, when Mariah Gale’s Isabella promised to claw out Angelo’s eyes, she simply and quietly removed her cap, revealing for the first time her long …
Measure for Measure @ Shakespeare’s Globe
The Globe has two key advantages in staging Measure for Measure. The first, to which I’ll return, is that everyone is always watching. In a play so concerned with surveillance, overhearing, manipulating events from behind the scene, the absolute exposure of the Globe stage breaks down any illusion of privacy, forcing every character to account …
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