A Winter’s Tale (Scene Individible) @ The Door, Birmingham Repertory Theatre
June 10, 2022
It’s perhaps inevitable that a company based in Stratford-upon-Avon – a town plagued with living statues – would end up producing a play with two of them. Scene Individible’s company-devised A Winter’s Tale, created in response to a brief to talk back to Shakespeare, took advantage of the paradoxes of living statues: the stillness that …
Henry VIII @ Shakespeare’s Globe
May 21, 2022
This review is of a preview performance. Amy Hodge’s Henry VIII is the first major mounting of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play since Six: The Musical, in an era that has also seen a Black woman play Anne Boleyn on television, Thomas Cromwell become a leading figure in Hillary Mantel’s book/television/film juggernaut, and Shakespeare’s Globe stage …
As You Like It (Northern Broadsides) @ Leeds Playhouse
May 19, 2022
‘Time travels in diverse paces with diverse persons’, announced Rosalind (EM Williams), pausing pointedly on the word ‘diverse’. The emphasis on diversity in relation to time aligned with designer E. M. Parry’s interest in the programme note on queer time in the forest. Parry explains that their interest is in ‘disrupting the normative impositions of …
The Wars of the Roses (RSC) @ The Royal Shakespeare Theatre
April 29, 2022
In the foyers of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Jack Cade’s face stared out from wanted posters. As the production itself began, Aaron Sidwell’s rebel stumbled across the stage, followed by the roaring mob who Clifford and Buckingham had earlier sent after their erstwhile leader. They caught and tore apart Cade bodily on the stage, holding …
Henry VI: Rebellion (RSC) @ The Royal Shakespeare Theatre
April 28, 2022
The unique problem facing any stand-alone production of Henry VI, Part 2 is the suspended ending. Other plays that are part of a sequence – 3 Henry VI, 1 Henry IV, for instance – still manage to reach a point of conclusion or at least pause; 2 Henry VI, by contrast, spends its running time …
Henry V (Donmar Warehouse) @ Broadway Cinema via NT Live
April 23, 2022
In a pre-show interview that served as paratext to the NT Live broadcast of the Donmar’s Henry V, Kit Harington spoke candidly about his own experience of addiction and recovery. His substance use, at a time when his global fame was at a peak, reflected one response to the pressures and expectations of fame; his subsequent recovery allowed …
Much Ado About Nothing (RSC) @ BBC iPlayer
April 21, 2022
Roy Alexander Weise’s Much Ado about Nothing is a landmark RSC production in several respects. It’s the first full-scale main-stage production directed by a Black director at the RSC (in 2022!), and the first ‘repeat’ production to interrupt the RSC’s now eight-year project to stage the whole canon. The filmed version of the production also deviates from …
Romeo and Juliet (American Shakespeare Center) @ The Blackfriars Playhouse
February 27, 2022
This review is of a preview production, and may not reflect the production as of press night. In January 2022, Brandon Carter became the third artistic director of the American Shakespeare Center, and the first to be a core part of the acting company. As such, while he has already carried several major roles (including a …
Hamlet (Guildford Shakespeare Company) @ Holy Trinity Church, Guildford
February 9, 2022
This review is of a preview, after press night was delayed. A week or so ago, The Stage awarded its ‘Unsung Heroes’ honour to all understudies, in recognition of a year that has not only seen planned understudies and swings working overtime to keep productions going as casts have fallen prey to COVID, but even …
The Tragedy of Macbeth (dir. Joel Coen, A24 Films)
December 30, 2021
Films of Macbeth have a fraught relationship with space. It’s a play whose own spaces – psychic, architectural, geographic, emotional, supernatural – are particularly fluid, and whose tautness paradoxically combines abstraction with the impression of nuanced interiority. To capture the play’s juxtapositions within the conventions of mainstream screen naturalism isn’t an easy task, and thus …
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