Globe
Gary Naylor
The Globe’s authenticity is its USP, so don’t expect the air-conditioning, the plush seats and the expectant hush of the National Theatre some 20 minutes walk away along the Thames. There’s not quite Elizabethan levels of discomfort to endure, so no plague – well, not if you’ve had your jabs. It’s quite fun to roll with the open air vibe and wooden benches with poles in your eyeline like a Victorian football stadium or stand in the pit, looking up, like Baldrick in Season One. But does it need to be quite as much of an ordeal as my visit to the Troilus and Cressida Thursday matinee Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Shakespeare’s Prince Hal may have rejected Sir John Falstaff as a symbol of his misspent youth, but the real-life monarch Queen Elizabeth I couldn’t get enough of him. Accounts vary of who precisely commissioned The Merry Wives of Windsor – or as some might call it, Falstaff III – but a key factor was known to be Elizabeth’s desire to see him in love.Shakespeare’s response to the commission was as fresh and frothy as a tankard of ale on a summer’s evening, short on soul and heavy on slapstick. Director Sean Holmes – who rousingly kicked off the Globe’s summer season with his Wild West-style Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
A society ruled by hysteria. Lurid lies that carry more currency than reality. There’s no shortage of reasons that Arthur Miller’s 1953 drama about witchcraft and revenge resonates so strongly today.In an article in the New Yorker he described how he wrote the play as an “act of desperation” that was “motivated in some great part by the paralysis that had set in among many liberals”. Back then, the paralysis was in response to the tyranny of McCarthyism – now it’s the result of more complex forces that many of us are still trying to decode.Ola Ince’s blistering, humane production paints the Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Holsters, Stetsons and bluegrass music bring a distinctive flavour to this Wild West riff on Romeo and Juliet that flings us into a vortex of frontier-town politics where men are men and bad girls wear gingham. Sean Holmes’ vigorous production stirs up the original to prove that cowboys can be zombies and that you should always bring a gun to a knife-fight.There are many bold innovations in this interpretation of the play, but one of the best is the clear indication that Lola Shalam’s bolshy Juliet is far more the daughter of Jamie-Rose Monk’s nurse than of her rigidly elegant mother. Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Russia.It’s impossible to be ambivalent towards that word, that country, indeed that idea, one so very similar to our own, yet so very different. You feel it in Moscow, where I spent a week exactly 40 years ago. Like London, it is a vast city, imperial in ambition, a true believer in its past and present, but then, as now, uncertain of its future. It is also not like London at all, crowded with strange buildings, cold beyond description, peopled by frightened men and women. There’s an irony in the fact that I learned more about my own home in seven days spent 1800 miles away than I did in Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There’s not much point in having three hours worth of Shakespearean text to craft and the gorgeous Sam Wanamaker Playhouse as a canvas if you merely intend to go through the motions, ticking off one of the canon’s less performed works. The question for Jennifer Tang, making her Globe directorial debut, is what to do with this beautifully wrapped gift. The question for us is does it work. Not for the first time down by the Thames, genders are flipped, Cymbeline the Queen of a matriarchal Britain, resisting the demands for tribute from a machismo-sodden Italy. Her daughter, Innogen, is Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Growing up within a few hundred yards of a major dock, I hardly knew darkness or quiet – the first time I properly felt their terrible beauty was on the Isle of Man ferry in the middle of the Irish Sea, its voids still vivid half a century on. Only a couple of years or so later, I was alone (friends must have left early) and had miscalculated the time required to walk back from the sandhills of Freshfield Beach to the railway station, 20 minutes or so away. Within the briefest of windows, the familiar woods – friendly with the smell of pine and the cuddly toy-like red squirrels Read more ...
Gary Naylor
"All’s well that ends well". Sounds like the kind of phrase a guilty parent says to a disappointed child after they’ve been caught in a white lie and bought them a bag of sweets to smooth things over. It’s a saying that betokens bad behaviour, a need to sweep things under the carpet, portending a fresh start. There’s an edge of power in it too, implying that the speaker can now define their interlocutor’s feelings. In short, it’s ugly.So too is the play of the same name, a soi disant "problem play", Shakespeare at his more mean-spirited, sometimes giving the impression of indulging in a bit Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
More surely than any other London stage, the Globe has opened up our theatrical perspective on different languages. Its triumphant “Globe to Globe” 2012 season presented the Shakespeare canon in 37 different linguistic interpretations.Among those varied treats from, literally, across the globe, the British Sign Language (BSL) production of Love’s Labour’s Lost, from London’s Deafinitely Theatre, was the only one that did not cross national borders; instead, it crossed the boundaries of theatre itself.It’s a direction that the Globe has continued to explore over the years, with the opening Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
A recent Crime Survey for England and Wales estimated that 2.1 million people in the UK had been victims of domestic abuse in the year ending March 2023. So it makes sense that director Jude Christian has addressed this tricky, troubling Shakespeare play by amplifying the genuine trauma caused by Petruchio’s “taming” of his wife Katharina.What makes less sense is her simultaneous playing up of the script’s pantomime aspects, so that the stage is filled with everything from a giant teddy bear to a costume that makes Petruchio look like the Cookie Monster (pictured below). Often The Taming of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a fierce, dark energy to the Globe’s new Richard III that I don’t recall at that venue for a fair while. The drilled cast dances seemed more frenzied, and there are more of them, and for once let’s start with a shout-out for James Maloney’s musical score. It’s a thing of some wonder, ranging from jazz palpitations and wiry strings to the throbbing beats of intrigue that riff on the rapid action of the “troublous world” unfolding beneath the musicians’ balcony.Elle While’s production fair speeds along, too, cutting a play that comes in the top five for length in the Shakespeare Read more ...
David Nice
“All discord without this circumference,” the Duchess of Malfi tells the good man she’s just asked to be her husband, “is only to be pitied and not feared”. Perhaps the villains should be more feared and less pitied in the imbalanced casting of Rachel Bagshaw’s clear and yet still atmospheric new production of Webster’s supposed shocker.It’s to Bagshaw’s credit and the riveting performances of Francesca Mills as the Duchess, Oliver Huband as her beloved Antonio and Shazia Nicholls as her faithful Cariola that good resonates more powerfully than evil here, even if two of them end up strangled Read more ...