Globe
Jenny Gilbert
This show feels like an end-of-the-exams party, and in a way that’s exactly what it is. If the fruits of Emma Rice’s short tenure as Artistic Director at the Globe were a series of tests that she is deemed to have failed, then Tristan & Yseult, a revival of an early hit devised for the company Kneehigh, is her parting two-fingered salute. For here writ-large are the rowdiness and irreverence and – heavens above – microphones and electric guitar that so offended a certain faction of the board that it was persuaded to terminate Rice’s contract, despite having hired her precisely because of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The Globe’s artistic director Emma Rice has made no secret of her desire to go out with a bang, in this, the final season of her brutally truncated tenure at the company. With this Twelfth Night she stages a departure with bells (and whistles, and disco-balls, electric guitars, congas, Sister Sledge, and yes, a whole rig of lighting) on – a neon-bright, two-fingered salute to the board that forced her out.The trouble is that, for all its zany energy, its charm and its humour (and there is plenty of each), the show also ends up giving two fingers to Shakespeare, which rather makes the board’s Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Everything in extremity”. That announcement that the Capulet party is about to begin could just as well serve to describe Daniel Kramer’s Romeo and Juliet as a whole. Opening the Globe's new season, it will provoke reactions as conflicting as the play’s warring families. Purists will pan it, that’s for sure, while fans may welcome a fiery energy that melds in considerable comedy. There’s precious little room for any in-between.The party scene says it all. It’s played out to Village People’s “YMCA”. Capulet is clad in a dinosaur suit (he’s accompanied through most of the action by a human dog Read more ...
Heather Neill
In a few days' time, Ellen McDougall will become artistic director of the dynamic little Gate Theatre in Notting Hill where she is already an associate artist. She's not taking it easy in the run-up to her new responsibilities though: her production of Othello in the Globe's bijou indoor theatre, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, opens this week with Kurt Egyiawan in the title role, Natalie Klamar as Desdemona and a female Cassio, Joanna Horton.McDougall had considerable success with her playful production of Idomeneus at the Gate in 2014 and was associate director there for two years from 2012. Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It's no accident that when the Globe's Sam Wanamaker Playhouse opened in 2014 it was with The Duchess of Malfi. This wooden womb, with its thick darkness and close-pressed audience is made for the stifling, claustrophobic horror of revenge tragedy. Not since that original Malfi have we seen a production that has taken full advantage of the theatre, played with atmosphere to such horrible effect as Annie Ryan’s White Devil.Corrupt authority, sexual scandal, political intrigue: not a Trump White House, but Webster’s satire, dark as the ink in which it was written. This tale of the sexually Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For anyone disposed to treat the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse as hallowed ground – and such issues have gained much currency at the Globe recently following the announced early departure of artistic director Emma Rice – The Little Matchgirl may seem like a wanton deconstruction of its space, which is cheeked into a knowing update that comes close to Edwardian music hall, and with aperçus stingingly relevant to the venue’s recent backstory (“Candles are much more atmospheric than electricity” is one such textual quip). For those less reverentially inclined, this adaptation of Hans Christian Read more ...
Heather Neill
There is nothing more depressing than seeing people you like and admire lining up on opposing sides. Emma Rice’s parting from the Globe has resulted in some unedifying comment, often based more on prejudice than fact. I see value in the arguments of both “sides” but am dismayed at the tone of the debate. Depending on the writer’s point of view, one is likely to be misleadingly characterised as either a joyless old fogey stuck in the past or a mindless iconoclast intent only on vulgar entertainment.The Globe is, first and foremost, a working theatre; it has never been a museum. Emma Rice is a Read more ...
james.woodall
Theatre was not Lucy Bailey’s first target. At school she was a flautist, headed probably for music. Then, in her gap year, she took a job as a telephonist at Glyndebourne, and noticed a vigorous man with a beard – name of Peter Hall – moving people around on stage. She asked what he was doing. Directing, she was told. That changed her.At Oxford, she staged the first-ever dramatisation of a short prose text titled "Lessness" by Samuel Beckett, whom she’d visited in Paris. In her early 20s she assisted Hall at the National Theatre, and directors such as Terry Hands and Adrian Noble at the Read more ...
David Nice
What's in a name? Imogen has a softer music to it than Cymbeline, the only one of Shakespeare's plays in which the title character is marginal, and the daughter certainly dominates in a way that her regal father doesn't. So Cymbeline Renamed, as half the subheading of Matthew Dunster's bold production puts it, is fine.Reclaimed, though, from what? There's no need to shift any of Shakespeare's centres of gravity, and Dunster doesn't. True, this "heavenly Imogen" is more earth than air, and Maddy Hill compels from the start – a good but tough girl in a harsh environment, in a new riff on the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Part Biblical melodrama, part Carry On Up The Colosseum, with a bit of Horrible Histories thrown in for good measure, it’s hard to see how John Wolfson’s wildly uneven The Inn at Lydda graduated from a rehearsed reading last season to a full-blown production. Director Andy Jordan does what he can with this historical mishmash, but there’s no disguising the fundamental flaws in the play’s construction.Wolfson, curator of rare books at the Globe, has taken the New Testament Apocrypha as a starting point for a Classical counter-factual fantasy. The dying emperor Tiberius Caesar (he of “Render Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Becca Stevens’ limpid, luscious and artful fusion of Appalachian folk, jazz and indie rock found a perfectly empathetic setting in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, in an inspired choice for Lauren Laverne’s Wonder Women series of summer gigs. Stevens’ band began honing their connoisseur's stylistic melting pot more than a decade ago, and has been a fixture on the New York scene for some years. As she begins to make a name over here, British audiences are due for a treat. Stevens blends original compositions with covers of a broad range of sympathetic writers, from Usher to Joni Mitchell. Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s a problem with The Taming of the Shrew, and it isn’t the one of Shakespeare’s making. So legendary are the work’s difficulties, so notorious its potential misogyny, that each new production can feel like a proffered solution, a defence of an attack that has yet to be made, rather than a free dialogue with a set of characters and a story.The joy of Caroline Byrne’s new production for the Globe is precisely its ease. She doesn’t so much wrestle with the text as surrender herself to its flow, whether that carries her to dark places or light. The result is a show that’s half comedy and Read more ...