Shakespeare
Tom Birchenough
This is a well-travelled Winter’s Tale. Declan Donnellan has long been a director who's as much at home abroad as he is in the UK, and with co-production support here coming pronouncedly from Europe (there's American backing, too), Cheek by Jowl have made it abundantly clear where they stand on the issue of the day. Their version of Shakespeare's greatest romance reaches the Barbican’s Silk Street Theatre after a frenetic touring schedule that began in Paris more than a year ago, with further voyages beckoning. When it comes to travelling light, Nick Ormerod’s spare design must have been of Read more ...
David Nice
It felt good to be encountering Shakespeare at his most political with a world event to smile about, for once (hailing, of course, from this brilliant Dutch company's homeland). It felt even better to emerge six hours later spellbound and deeply moved by the triumph of the personal, albeit in a kind of love-death, after so many power-games. Thrust voluntarily onstage to witness some of those conferences, even at close quarters you couldn't see the joins in the performances of Ivo van Hove's ensemble. This is not so much acting as being, or so it seems.Those who'd seen the first Barbican Read more ...
graham.rickson
Amy Leach’s energetic Romeo and Juliet is fast, furious and a little breathless, the setting transposed from Verona to a fairly grim contemporary Leeds. Think West Yorkshire Side Story. Leach’s starting point was hearing about conflict resolution in a local high school created by merging a pair of formerly rival institutions, and her programme note also explicitly links the production to a divided post-Brexit Britain, a place where long-buried differences have fractured previously stable relationships. And the energy is specific to modern Leeds, which each summer hosts a hedonistic music Read more ...
Matt Wolf
To the list of abiding theatrical partnerships one must surely add Tom Stoppard and the director David Leveaux. From his Tony-winning revival of The Real Thing onwards to Jumpers and Arcadia, all of which played both London and Broadway, Leveaux has proved a particularly dab hand at mining this playwright in all his near-infinite variety. And if Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead as a play doesn't, in my view, rank with much of its author's extraordinary subsequent output, Leveaux's 50th anniversary revival nonetheless does the text's unbridled energy proud. How lovely, too, to encounter Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Intimacy is a mixed blessing: Richard Twyman’s close-up exploration of sex and violence in his production of Othello for Bristol’s Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory takes the audience on a gripping emotional journey, but one that is at times almost beyond close for comfort.This is theatre in the round with a vengeance: the low-ceilinged space, with the audience seated within feet of the stage, in a 360-degree embrace, leaves no room for escape. Twyman has accentuated the sense of claustrophobia – because yes, intimacy can feel stifling – with a mixture of one-directional vertical top Read more ...
David Nice
There's no reason why ruffs and candles shouldn't mesh with bursts of contemporary speech, song and lighting, given a defter hand than director Ellen McDougall's. Shakespeare's timeless issues of racism and sexism have plenty of mileage in them, though in less skewed proportions than they find here. Many of this production's components are promising, but the whole is a strident mess.None of this is the fault of the admirable Othello, Kurt Egyiawan. Noble and low-voiced in fine speech for the opening Venice act, he also makes us aware of a man on edge and alert to slights about his skin, which 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 ...
David Nice
How often do you leave a production of Shakespeare's most layered drama in tears, thinking "what an astonishing play!" even more than "what a fine Hamlet!" (or not)? Last night the Bard proved even greater than his Dane. Not that Andrew Scott was ever less than mesmerising and unpredictable. But it was Robert Icke, a director you might expect to play fast and loose with text and structure, who in giving us more Hamlet than most these days respected the slow burn and the long vision, with a few surprises but no gimmicks on the journey.Scott will not disappoint either his huge fan club or Read more ...
David Nice
After a Royal Opera performance of Birtwistle's The Minotaur, a friend spotted Hans Werner Henze in the foyer and had the temerity to ask that annoying question "What did you think?" "Very competent and extremely well performed," came the reply. Which is the measure of Ryan Wigglesworth's Shakespeare adaptation at ENO. Every UK premiere of a new British opera can be sure of one thing - a first-rate cast of English-speaking singers. Perhaps the real surprise here was the debut of that great actor Rory Kinnear as a director: clear and sure-footed throughout.Clarity is a quality, too, of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“The nine men’s morris is filled up with mud, and the quaint mazes in the wanton green for lack of tread are undistinguishable.” Titania may mourn the landscape withered by her conflict with Oberon, but games and mazes hold no interest for director Joe Hill-Gibbins. His A Midsummer Night’s Dream has put aside such childish things (along with fairies and clean trousers), burying them deep in a pit of mud that spans the entire breadth of the Young Vic – a slippery stage for a very messy exploration of love.After the jelly smearing of The Changeling and the sex dolls that dominated Measure for Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Everybody’s a little bit gay in Simon Godwin’s giddy new Twelfth Night at the National Theatre. From Andrew Aguecheek, vibrant in candy-coloured check, cuddling up to Sir Toby, and Antonio’s aggressive affection to Sebastian, to Orsino’s passionate snog with the wrong sibling after the big reveal and the lustful looks from Tamsin Greig's repressed Malvolia towards the lovely Olivia (who still can’t keep her eyes off Viola), all’s queer in love and war, it seems. The effect? A stylish sexual free-for-all, with plenty of laughs and just the occasional jarring note.Because while Godwin is busy Read more ...
David Nice
Hated the Schaubühne Hamlet (same lead actor, same director as this latest Shakespeare auf Deutsch); loved Ivo van Hove's Toneelgroep Kings of War, with Hans Kesting's Richard III on the highest level alongside the Henrys V and VI. Thomas Ostermeier's Berlin ensemble is nowhere near as vivid overall as van Hove's Dutch team, but everything that didn't work for me about Lars Eidinger's Prince of Denmark turns to fool's gold in his brilliant take on the bunch-back'd dissembler turned mass-murderer. It's a performance which takes you further than you thought possible.And the stage - in Jan Read more ...