Globe
Rachel Halliburton
Kathryn Hunter’s performance as Lear forges its heat from contradictions. She is as frail as she is strong, as detestable as she is loveable, as powerfully charismatic as she is physically diminutive. That she is a woman playing a man is the least extraordinary aspect of what she achieves in this production. This is a Lear that eviscerates emotionally at the same time as it illuminates the fragility of a society rotten with corruption and lies.Hunter famously first played Lear in 1997 at a moment when discussions about gender and identity were at a very different level to where we are now. Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Boris Johnson was of course not the first British leader to engineer a split with Europe for personal gain. This strikes you with full force halfway through this production. While there are no photos of Johnson rushing around at a Downing Street party wearing an erect golden phallus, we are living in a world where – as Peter Pomerantsev has said of another leader – "nothing is true and everything is possible". In this play the leader with the gilded willy happens to be Henry VIII, but as the female chorus sings "He has everything an honest man should not" to a guitar accompaniment, the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
With tyrants licking their lips around the world and the question of how to respond to their threat growing ever more immediate, Julius Caesar director Diane Page eyes an open goal – and misses. A statue stands alone on the stage (this touring production has no set and barely any props) as Caesar struts about, feigning humility, scoffing at a soothsayer’s warning to beware the Ides of March. Cassius, clever but consumed by her distaste for Caesar’s ever-growing threat to the republic with the inevitable demotion of senators like her, plots his murder. Brutus is the people’s favourite, Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Lucy Bailey’s joyous, visually ravishing Much Ado About Nothing opens on a sombre note. On stage there is laughter and merriment as people prepare for a party in the sprawling grounds of an Italian estate, but then a lone soldier enters the auditorium, his head wrapped in a bandage, and the tension becomes palpable.He is carrying a letter, and it suddenly becomes clear that the people watching his approach are all worried that it will bring news of the death of a loved one. Singing mournfully he hands the missive over; Leonata peruses it anxiously before her face lightens as she announces Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The Merchant of Venice is a comedy, you say? Shakespeare, as ever, refuses to be confined to convenient boxes, his best plays’ extraordinary pliability and longevity a testament to the piercing eye he cast towards the slings and arrows that assail humankind. More than most of his works, The Merchant of Venice requires a director to take a stance, especially these days, so as to send the audience in a chosen direction. This is not unique - no text can. nor should, be sacred - but those decisions bubble closer to the surface in The Merchant than perhaps any other play in the canon. Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Hamlet isn’t often played for laughs. When David Tennant took the comedic approach in the RSC’s 2008 production, it was testament to his mercurial genius that his performance brilliantly conveyed the manic grief of a young man whose world was disintegrating around him.In Sean Holmes’s new production, by contrast, the humour is used not just to shed light on Hamlet’s psychological state, but as a wrecking ball for every preconception about how the text should be played. The result veers between inspired anarchy and a mire of nihilism.George Fouracres – one third of the Daphne comedy trio – at Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Measure for Measure may be the quintessential Shakespeare “problem” play, but just what has earned it that epithet remains a puzzle. Each generation approaches the matter from its own perspective. The developments of recent years, #MeToo most of all, have given new resonance to one of its central themes, the imbalance of law over nature and the quality of justice, but the play’s “resolution”, if it can even be called that, leaves the questions open.Or is it the imbalance – “balance”, as the title itself makes clear, being a key concept – between tragedy and comedy, between the deathly serious Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Ovid was exiled – or to put it in twenty-first century terms, "no-platformed" – by an indignant Emperor Augustus for the scandal caused by his three-book elegy on love, Ars Amatoria. Most scholars believe the intrigue behind his banishment to be more complex, but as this vibrant, dark and witty version of Metamorphoses demonstrates, his poetry continues to push at the edges of what society finds acceptable. Sean Holmes and Holly Race Roughan’s production has itself been forced through several changes because of the shapeshifting tricks of the pandemic (Covid's Metamorphoses?!). At one Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
The best version of Twelfth Night I’ve seen is not called Twelfth Night. For sheer knockabout entertainment, nothing beats the 2006 film She’s the Man. But Sean Holmes’ production for the Globe’s summer season, brimming with song and physical comedy, comes a worthy second.Michelle Terry (pictured below) is endlessly charismatic, drawing us into caring about Viola from the moment she darts out of the groundlings dressed as Elizabeth I. Not many people can pull off enormous green and yellow breeches; Terry makes it look easy. (And she’s the Globe’s Artistic Director, so she’s running the whole Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
"It is dangerous for women to go outside alone," blares the electronic sign above the stage of the new Romeo and Juliet at Shakespeare's Globe. This disquieting sentiment obviously takes some of its resonance from the Sarah Everard case, yet it also begs such questions as, really, always? When popping out to get milk? Does the time of day or the neighbourhood make any difference? And how should a modern woman interpret this; by staying in, or, like the production’s gutsy Juliet, Rebekah Murrell, investing in kick-boxing lessons?Ola Ince’s abrasively modern interpretation, complete with guns Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
A little less than two years after Sean Holmes’s kick-ass Latin American carnival-style A Midsummer Night’s Dream erupted at the side of the Thames, it has returned to a very different world. It’s no longer a natural expression of the kind of exuberance we take for granted, but a reminder of what we might be again – a blast of colour from our post-vaccine future.The Globe is, for obvious reasons, one of the best ventilated theatres in London, but full social-distancing measures are in place and the cast reminds us that if evenings like this are to remain possible we must keep our masks on. Read more ...
Heather Neill
What could be better for a lockdown summer night "out" than a virtual visit to Shakespeare's Globe? Simultaneously in a theatre and the open air, we can share the visible enjoyment of hundreds of others, the very opposite of self-isolation and social distancing. And this Elizabethan-dress production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by Dominic Dromgoole in 2013, exploits the unique qualities of the Globe to the full. The cast, led by its present artistic director, Michelle Terry, as Titania/Hippolyta and John Light as Oberon/Theseus with Pearce Quigley as a hilariously bossy, attention- Read more ...