Love’s Labour’s Lost (RSC/Live from Stratford) @ The Broadway Cinema, Nottingham
February 14, 2015
The pairing of Love’s Labour’s Lost with Much Ado about Nothing in the RSC’s current season has caused no small amount of comment. The controversial retitling of the latter play as Love’s Labour’s Won is a publicity stunt although not without merit – the implication that the two plays are narrative sequels is bunk, but …
Measure for Measure (Cheek by Jowl) @ The Pushkin Theatre, Moscow
November 24, 2014
At a hair under two hours long, Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod’s Measure for Measure stripped the play back to its bare bones. Elbow’s subplot was gone, Pompey’s tenure as hangman reduced to a few fragmented lines, Lucio’s relationship with the disguised Duke barely alluded to. In place of the intersecting subplots, Donnellan’s direction asserted …
Hamlet @ The Royal Exchange, Manchester
September 21, 2014
Despite the apparent novelty, Hamlet is perhaps the Shakespearean tragic hero most often played by a woman. As Tony Howard’s excellent book sets out, women have performed the role for more than two centuries, and indeed the finest of all Hamlet films features the superlative Asta Nielsen in the role. Nonetheless, Maxine Peake’s return to …
The Two Gentlemen of Verona (RSC/Live from Stratford) @ The Broadway, Nottingham
September 4, 2014
Much was made during last night’s live broadcast of the RSC’s Two Gentlemen of Verona of the fact that it has been in the region of forty-five years since the play last made it onto the main stage at Stratford. One of the great things about the current trundle through the canon is that it …
In the Footsteps of Hamlet @ Kronborg Slot, Helsingor, Denmark
September 2, 2014
Heaven forfend that I should go on holiday without having some light Shakespeare connection. However, even a normal person visiting Denmark would be the poorer for skipping Kronborg Slot in Helsingor – the Elsinore of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It’s a stunning, beautifully situated castle, its cannons facing Sweden across the narrowest part of the straits dividing …
Arden of Faversham (Royal Shakespeare Company) @ The Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon
August 13, 2014
In a year in which MacDonald P. Jackson’s new book has fairly definitively established the case for the place of Arden of Faversham in the Shakespeare canon, it’s rather refreshing to see a production of the play at the RSC that leans in no way upon Shakespeare, attributing the play to ‘Anonymous’ (much as Terry …
The Comedy of Errors (Pendley Shakespeare Festival) @ Pendley Manor
August 11, 2014
The Pendley Shakespeare Festival is one of the grandest exemplars of the British tradition for summer amateur Shakespeare performed outdoors. Now in its sixty-fifth year, the Festival boasts an extraordinarily beautiful setting in the grounds of a 4* hotel that also plays host to a flock of peacocks, covered seating stands for some 400 audience …
The Tempest (Gloucestershire Youth Players) @ The Tobacco Factory, Bristol
July 29, 2014
Gloucestershire Youth Players has been touring productions of Shakespeare for nine years, and its 2014 production of The Tempest marks the first time the ensemble has used a professional theatre, concluding its tour (which also took in the Dell in Stratford-upon-Avon) with two performances in Bristol’s Tobacco Factory. It’s a pleasure to see a youth …
Hamlet (Yohangza Theatre) @ The Peacock Theatre, London
July 13, 2014
A raised platform thrust upwards from a bed of fine gravel, while towering tapestries on three sides of the stage depicted ancient Korean men and women in formal postures and brightly coloured clothes. Onto this stage stepped a man in black, reading a Penguin edition of Hamlet, who began speaking words whose cadences, even if …
Titus Andronicus @ Shakespeare’s Globe
July 4, 2014
As with the 2006 original production, the current revival of Lucy Bailey’s Titus Andronicus has been making headlines for its experiential elements rather than for the performance itself. Specifically, yet again, the audience has been fainting in droves. There’s a culture of expectation around the fainting for this production fuelled by the media and Twittersphere, …
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