RSC
aleks.sierz
Hanif Kureishi’s 1990 novel The Buddha of Suburbia begins like this: “My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost”. Almost. Yes, that's good. We are in 1970s south-east London, and this immediately introduces, despite its tentative tone, the protagonist as a young man trying to define his identity.Like the original book, this stage adaptation — by director Emma Rice with help from Kureishi — explores the tensions between East and West, Buddhism and Islam, suburb and city, glam rock and punk, gay and straight, with some of the characters adopting fake identities as well Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The RSC apparently has a hit on its hands with its West End transfer of Hamnet. Box office demand has already prompted an extension of the run by six weeks, until February 2024.The draw is presumably the bestselling 2020 novel by Maggie O’Farrell on which the play is based, which is a commandingly and inventively written unfolding of the Shakespeare family’s poignant story over almost two decades, at the heart of which is Agnes Hathaway’s relationship with Will Shakespeare and their three children, who include the Hamnet of the title.O’Farrell maps out this story in chronological zigzags, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Life is full of coincidences and contradictions. As I was walking to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was on his feet in the House of Commons delivering yet another rebalancing of individual and collective resources. On reading a couple of fine essays in the excellent programme, I saw the acknowledgement of the production’s sponsor, Pragnell.The first item that appears on the jeweller’s website is a pair of earrings retailing at an eye-watering £71,500. Which is to say that the inequalities that fired Charles Dickens’ anger in the 1840s are still with us in the Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“The bands came in 1933.” So begins C P Taylor’s Good, a play that tries its hardest to resist being Googled. It was first performed by the RSC in 1981; this production, starring David Tennant as a mild-mannered German professor who gradually becomes a paid-up Nazi, has been delayed several times by the pandemic. Director Dominic Cooke has crafted a punchy first act, but he can’t save the second from Taylor’s stodgy script.“The bands” play constantly in the head of Tennant's John Halder, their repertoire ranging from Bavarian oompah to American jazz. Halder is a professor of literature in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The energy of Antony Sher, who has died at the age of 72, was prodigious. He not only acted like a fizzing firecracker. He wrote books about his most celebrated roles, and several novels set in his native South Africa. He also wrote plays, and he painted. It was as if the stage could not contain him. The screen certainly couldn’t: Sher's acting style was so volatile, so expansive, so technically adapted for the theatrical space that aside from his well-remembered turn as Howard Kirk (pictured below), the voraciously heterosexual lecturer in Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man (1981), his Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Am I myself?” At the tangled centre of Shakespeare’s comedy of two pairs of identical twins, servant Dromio asks the question on which everything else hangs. The delivery is exasperated, the context bantering, but the words are the flimsy door onto an existential void this early play constantly threatens to tumble into.How can we know ourselves if others do not? Is it enough to be ourselves, or must we also enact and perform those roles? What if society casts us in another?Rubber-legged contortions; slow-mo exaggeration; sight gags and sound-effects; everything but the banana-skinIn the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Trigger warnings have become commonplace in theatres these days, but few chill the blood like the description "a new musical" on a playbill. There are so many things to go wrong, so few ways to get things right and, never far away, the dissenters who caught ten minutes of the Sound of Music during its annual Christmas TV airing and won’t stop telling you exactly how they feel about musicals.So, while the National Theatre gears up for its new musical, Hex, the RSC is commendably returning to its lockdown-postponed The Magician’s Elephant, both productions given the stages and Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The cherry orchard in Anton Chekhov’s eponymous play is a classic MacGuffin, its existence a reason to stir the sorts of resentments, fancies and identity causes that start wars and revolutions. The orchard’s beautiful, and that’s all – a cultivated but natural ornament upon the great land of Russia, where need and want hold sway over millions of wretched and enslaved people.Have those breathtaking horizons of white blossoms any use other than that? Is there a greater importance to existence than being beautiful? Nearly 120 years on, the conundrum is just as vital, and the play is Read more ...
Maria Aberg
When theatres in the UK closed last March, I found myself in a vacuum. Having been a freelance theatre director for over 15 years, I was used to busy – juggling a hectic schedule of directing shows with the reality of being a mum to two toddlers. Inspiration was something I might find in between opening nights, meetings and nursery runs – if I was lucky.In the middle of that first interminable lockdown, I found myself sitting in a small room in the Suffolk countryside, staring at a computer screen. On a whim, I had signed up to a genealogy website and was stumbling head-first down the time- Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It has been a hard coming for this RSC Winter’s Tale. Erica Whyman’s production was cancelled by the virus days before its premiere last spring, with plans to stage it in the autumn frustrated by the second lockdown. This broadcast version, retaining that original cast in full, is the first time that a RSC production has gone first to screen, scheduled as part of the BBC's Lights Up season.Needs must, perhaps, and what a frustrating on-again, off-again process it must have been, but there’s little sign of any resulting radical disruption – in a play that itself revolves around radical Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Which of Shakespeare’s plays is most plagued by misperception? For my money, I would argue A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Most people encounter it at school age because of the ease with which it can be dressed up as a light comedy involving fairies. Yet at heart this is a deeply primal work which draws upon the raw power of the elements to look at the arbitrary nature of desire and how radically it can rewrite any individual’s life.This aspect of the play has informed the RSC’s latest interpretation, though it is rightly the high-tech nature of its Dream that has dominated all the preview Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
At just under five hours, Troy Story, the RSC’s adaptation of as many tales from Greek myth, takes about a third as long as it does to recite the whole of the Iliad. It feels like longer. Gregory Doran’s production is ambitious in its starkness, but never quite manages to break out of the plodding rhythm of its lines – or to bring the stories into the 21st century. (The venture, undertaken without sets or costumes, was livestreamed this past weekend and is available through Saturday to ticket-holders via catch-up.) Unlike Homer, Doran and dramaturges Cathleen McCarron and Anna McSweeney Read more ...