The Revenger’s Tragedy (Lazarus Theatre Company) @ The Brockley Jack Studio Theatre
March 23, 2015
At ninety minutes long, Lazarus Theatre’s take on Middleton’s seminal revenge tragedy still felt leaden and ponderous, a dull take on a sparkling play. While the production was full of ideas and some striking performances, the eclectic cutting and rigid spatial organisation rendered the play frequently unintelligible and confusingly abrupt, obfuscating rather than clarifying the …
The Changeling (Shakespeare’s Globe) @ The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
January 22, 2015
Note: This review is based on a preview performance. The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, as with its more established counterpart, works much better for comedy than tragedy, in my eyes at least. The one outstanding success of the theatre so far has been its side-splitting The Knight of the Burning Pestle, but even in its tragedies …
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 …
A Mad World, My Masters (RSC) @ The Swan Theatre
August 8, 2013
Unusually for the RSC, the poster to Sean Foley’s new production of A Mad World, My Masters (the second I’ve seen, the first professional) advertises itself prominently as ‘edited by Sean Foley and Phil Porter). This is a frustrating statement to read, partly as it implies on some level that the RSC’s other productions aren’t …
Macbeth (Manchester International Festival) @ NT Live
July 21, 2013
The camerawork for the NT Live screenings has developed extraordinarily since the project’s early days. Covering Kenneth Branagh and Rob Ashford’s Macbeth, cameras swooped over the action, fast editing gave a kinetic and chaotic insight into the battle scenes, extreme close-ups caught beads of sweat and tears on Macduff’s face, and the slow pans to …
A Yorkshire Tragedy (Shakespeare Institute Players) @ The Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon
May 4, 2013
Sixty years ago the postgraduate students of the Shakespeare Institute of Stratford-upon-Avon launched its new dramatic society with a production of the apocryphal A Yorkshire Tragedy, attributed on its first publication to Shakespeare. Sixty years later, and with the play now confidently attributed to Thomas Middleton, the Players celebrated their anniversary with a fresh imagining …
Performing Early Modern Drama Today (Pascale Aebischer and Kathryn Prince)
November 27, 2012
This post is a prelude to a full review of Pascale Aebischer and Kathryn Prince’s new edited collection, Performing Early Modern Drama Today (Cambridge, 2012), which is forthcoming in a future issue of Cahiers Elisabethains. I trump the book on this blog because it is, I will be arguing, one of the most important collections …
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 …
2008: Macbeth (TR Warszawa) @ Guardian Online
August 13, 2012
By a bizarre quirk of international programming, this is the fourth Polish production of Macbeth I’ve seen. The most recent, by Teatr Piesn Kozla, remains one of the finest Shakespeare productions I’ve ever seen, while Teatro Buiro Podrozy’s Macbeth: Who is that Bloodied Man? created a wild and hugely experimental aesthetic featuring stilts and a …
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