Globe
Matthew Romain
A few days after two Taliban rockets had quivered in the Afghan skies above us, I found myself looking up at an altogether different set of heavens in the Sistine Chapel. Moments of reflection on this tour were, out of necessity, brief; our schedule, out of necessity, hectic. Contrasts were commonplace. Vatican City was our 191st country, and our two-year tour to play Hamlet to every nation in the world was rolling rapidly to its conclusion.A friendly priest who'd enjoyed our performance the night before had been showing us round, jumping queues and hopping barriers and peeking into closed- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In his last minutes as the artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, Dominic Dromgoole took to the stage to reflect on his years at the helm. Behind him was the cast of Hamlet, home after two years on the road playing to audiences from every country on the planet. He acknowledged his predecessor Mark Rylance, who waved a hat from the throng of groundlings, and then pointed up to the circle where his successor Emma Rice was greeted with gales of welcoming applause.Rice has made clear her intention to stir things up. Her opening production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream recasts Helena as Helenus Read more ...
Marianka Swain
In this 400th anniversary year, amid what feels like 400 million shows and tributes, it’s increasingly difficult for a Shakespeare production to stand out. No such problem for Emma Rice’s opening salvo, which responds to those critical of her appointment in resolute fashion. Never thought you’d see fireman’s poles, amplification, Indian sitar and disco lights at the Globe? Think again.Rice’s Dream honours the spirit of the building without feeling bound by its period-perfect architecture. Rather than Athens, we are in the here and now, with Hippolyta a leopard print-clad Russian bride, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A prevailing sense of farewell ripples through this closing production in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse's hugely welcome season of Shakespeare's final quartet of plays. That valedictory feel is traditionally true of The Tempest, a text commonly regarded as Shakespeare's own leave-taking and one that here also marks the final staging after a decade at the helm of the venue's sure-to-be-missed artistic director Dominic Dromgoole, who now hands over the reins to Emma Rice.It's tempting, of course, at such moments to view the staging itself as some sort of summary achievement whereby a director's Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
For a play about silence – its uncanny ability to tell the truth, to “persuade when speaking fails” – The Winter’s Tale is remarkably wordy. Of the sequence of late romances only Cymbeline comes close to the dense and elliptical verbal patterning we find ourselves tangled in here. But Michael Longhurst’s new production for the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is so richly cast, its verse-speaking so expressive that we see straight through the often opaque text to the humanity and the humour beneath.After a riotous Pericles and troubled Cymbeline, this third play in Dominic Dromgoole’s farewell quartet Read more ...
Matthew Romain
Za’atari set a precedent. Our performance in the Syrian refugee camp in Jordan became a template for how to perform Hamlet in every nation in the world – in a world that rendered travel to Syria, Yemen, Libya and Central African Republic out of the question. And it paved the way for our most ad hoc and unconventional performance yet.The terrible fighting in Central African Republic (C.A.R.) meant that even towns along Cameroon’s eastern border were too volatile for us to visit. But in the small Cameroonian village of Mandjou, a couple of hours’ drive from C.A.R., a large portion of Central Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Music for a while, shall all your cares beguile.” So promise Dryden and Purcell in their hypnotic song, a high-stakes closer for Andreas Scholl and Tamar Halperin’s "Exquisite Love" recital. But beguiling away cares on the eve of a national return to work is a big ask, even in the other-worldly surroundings of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, and something that, on this occasion, the countertenor himself couldn’t quite deliver.Scholl’s has never been the biggest of voices – it simply hasn’t needed to be. Where others use vibrato and volume to project, Scholl has always relied on the bladed Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s a happy, cyclical logic to this first production of Cymbeline – Shakespeare’s late tragicomedy of love and jealousy – at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. The first play Shakespeare wrote for the candle-lit, indoor Blackfriars Playhouse, Cymbeline was quite literally made for this space. How disappointing, then, that director Sam Yates proves so wilfully blind to the theatre’s unique spatial and dramatic possibilities, delivering a production that might charitably be called faithful, but which more often feels simply blank.Lighting is a crucial part of the dramatic rhetoric of the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Pericles is a play of voyages. Lands and landscapes crowd in, one after the other – Tyre, Tarsus, Ephesus, Antioch, Mitylene – until our dramatic sea-legs are decidedly unsteady. The demands are great for any theatre, but for the Globe’s tiny, candle-lit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse they are impossible, freeing director Dominic Dromgoole to ignore spectacle and visual dislocation in favour of an emotionally-driven, chamber take on this late romance.Designer Jonathan Fensom’s visuals may be coherent, and unity underlined in careful cast doublings, but tonally Dromgoole tosses us from mood to Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Jessica Swale’s Thomas Tallis is the first new play commissioned for the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse – the beginning, hopefully, of the same relationship the Globe itself has always had with new writing. In concept, it’s everything this unique space should be doing, exploiting the Wanamaker’s physical intimacy and its architecture, placing music on an equal footing with drama, celebrating stories from the age of the theatre itself. In practice, however, Thomas Tallis is neither a satisfying play nor a satisfying concert. Stuck somewhere between the two, it never quite works out what it wants to Read more ...
Matthew Romain
It would have been impossible to go to Syria. Our plan to perform Hamlet in every nation in the world faced its biggest obstacle to date and the Globe producers were left pondering a Plan B. We considered performing in a Syrian embassy - technically Syrian soil - but playing to an audience of delegates would have missed the point a little. More important than the patch of ground we played on was the people to whom we were playing.And so, waking early in Amman (after having performed in an inordinately beautiful, 2,000-year-old Roman theatre as our Jordanian stop the night before), we headed Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“Comedy, love and a bit with a dog,” counselled Henslowe in Stoppard’s Shakespeare in Love, and his populist advice is taken to heart in this broad, bawdy, big-hearted farce untroubled by nuanced characterisation or context. Jessica Swale’s modern-language Restoration romp ensures a lively end to the Globe’s season, but playing to the galleries does a disservice to her trailblazing heroine.Cinderella-like Nell Gwynn (a luminous Gugu Mbatha-Raw) made the astonishing journey from illiterate Cheapside commoner to Charles II’s bedchamber, via a celebrated stint as one of England's first Read more ...