Globe
Julius Caesar, Shakespeare's Globe review - the Bard buried in bad choicesSaturday, 14 May 2022
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... Read more... |
Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare's Globe review – a perfect piece of escapism for our uncertain summerTuesday, 03 May 2022
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... Read more... |
The Merchant of Venice, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse review - enormous empathyThursday, 10 March 2022
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... Read more... |
Hamlet, Shakespeare's Globe review - melancholy mash-up lacks chemistryTuesday, 08 February 2022
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... Read more... |
Measure for Measure, Sam Wanamaker Theatre review - this problem play is a delightMonday, 06 December 2021
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... Read more... |
Metamorphoses, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse review - punchy, cleverly reworked classicThursday, 07 October 2021
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... Read more... |
Twelfth Night, Shakespeare's Globe review - foot-stompingly good funWednesday, 11 August 2021
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... Read more... |
Romeo & Juliet, Shakespeare's Globe review - unsatisfactory mix of clumsy and edgySaturday, 10 July 2021
"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... Read more... |
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare's Globe review - a blast of colour from our post-vaccine futureSaturday, 29 May 2021
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... Read more... |
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare's Globe online review - a seasonal treatTuesday, 16 June 2020
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... Read more... |
Theatre Lockdown Special 7: Party politics and a Broadway titan or twoThursday, 28 May 2020
The live-ness of theatre seems further away with every passing week, but at least the art form itself lives on to tantalise and entertain, whetting the appetite until such day as we are sharing an auditorium once again. National Theatre at Home... Read more... |
Theatre Lockdown Special 3: Mary Shelley twice over, Europe writ large, and one day more for a mega-musicalThursday, 30 April 2020
Time is moving in mysterious ways at the moment. It's been possible over the last month or so to mark out the beginning of each week with the arrival online of a different production streaming from the Hampstead Theatre archives. The National,... Read more... |
