Shakespeare
Jasper Rees
When Shakespeare visits the bearpit of the West End, it is usually in the company of a big name: Judi Dench, Sheridan Smith, Martin Freeman. This Christmas the bard enters the Theatre Royal, Haymarket without any such support. And there is a further hurdle to clear: Love’s Labour’s Lost is barely ever been seen outside the subsidised sector. It forms part of a pair which audiences might take a moment to get their head around: Much Ado About Nothing is presented as its Shakespearean twin called Love’s Labour’s Won.The double bill began at Stratford in 2014. The shows, set either Read more ...
Kelly Hunter
“I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, Were it not that I have bad dreams…” 2016, with all its protectionist voting, has been the year I’ve taken my production of Hamlet – with just six actors, a sofa and a drum-kit – around Europe. Having visited everything from a thunderstruck Kronborg Castle in Elsinore to an ancient Spanish bullring beset with fireworks, we will land at the Trafalgar Studios at the beginning of December with the roar and encouragement of our continental neighbours ringing in our ears.I began writing this adaptation of Hamlet three Read more ...
james.woodall
If you are new to the Donmar Warehouse all-female stagings of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Henry IV – 2012 and 2014 respectively – the biggest surprise is not so much that these highly masculine dramas are performed entirely by women. It is their being set in a prison. With the long-planned trilogy now rounded off with The Tempest, which has premiered in the Donmar’s purpose-built 420-seater just north of King’s Cross, the device has attained lock-stock-and-barrel totality.The acting space is a square, with steeply raked seating on each side. Behind the last row runs prison caging, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
At the conclusion of a year in which Britishness has come so resoundingly to the fore of the national debate – and with a play that at the time of its writing, 1605-6, was engaging with that concept no less urgently – the first impression made by Gregory Doran’s King Lear is how far removed it looks from any traditional sense of "British".That's the case not least in Niki Turner’s design, which moves from an introductory tableau of hunched figures and a noise like the rumbling of a ship’s engine room to reveal a minimalist, brick wall-backed space. Black dominates – Cordelia’s virgin white Read more ...
Heather Neill
David Troughton (b.1950), a familiar face on television and a Royal Shakespeare Company veteran, is a versatile actor. His most recent RSC appearance before Gloucester displayed his talent for comedy: he was a funny and energetic Simon Eyre in Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday in his favourite theatre, the Swan at Stratford. Previous roles for the company have included Kent in an earlier Lear with John Wood as the king, Bolingbrooke in Richard II and the title roles in Richard III and Henry IV, parts 1 and 2.Earlier this year, in the West End and on tour, he played the eccentric, reclusive Tom Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Britain is a world by itself.” It could be the slogan of the year – and rather longer, probably – but the phrase comes from Shakespeare’s late romance Cymbeline. Its Act III scene, in which Britain announces that it is breaking its allegiances to the Roman Empire, surely can’t ever have played before with quite the nuance that Melly Still’s RSC production gives it. It premiered at Stratford in May, when the big Brexit question was still open, and now reaches the Barbican with redoubled relevance.Back in 1609, Britishness was the issue, too, but coming from the opposite direction: James Read more ...
Heather Neill
The signs were there early in Glenda Jackson's career that she would one day have what it takes to "ascend the Everest" (as the cliché has it) of Lear. So powerful was her performance as Ophelia in Peter Hall's production of Hamlet in 1965 that there was talk afterwards of her being cast as the prince himself. Two years later she was another disturbed woman playing Charlotte Corday unforgettably whipping Marat with her hair in The Marat/Sade. Uncompromising directness, a febrile, earthy authority and a strong, resonant, slightly nasal voice characterised these performances.She went on to 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 ...
Harriet Walter
A part we have played is like a person we once met, grew to know, became intimately enmeshed with and finally moved away from. Some of these characters remain friends, others are like ex-lovers with whom we no longer have anything in common. All of them bring something out in us that will never go back in the box.In my new book, Brutus and Other Heroines, I write about the major Shakespeare characters I have played. This sometimes involved revisiting pieces I had written much earlier in my life and my career, and doing this was a bit like looking back through old diaries with a mixture of Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Shakespeare has always been a fertile source of inspiration for story ballets. Plays which exist in multiple dance versions include Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Taming of the Shrew and Hamlet, while Shakespeare sources have often moved choreographers to their best work: Ashton's Dream, MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet, and Christopher Wheeldon's recent Winter's Tale for the Royal Ballet are all highlights of their respective creators' oeuvres. Birmingham Royal Ballet has done the obvious thing in this anniversary year by mounting several of these story ballets, Read more ...
stephen.walsh
There are two ways of reacting to an opera company like WNO staging a musical like Kiss Me, Kate. You can ask yourself whether this is work that an opera house should concern itself with at all. Or you can take Confucius’s advice, and just lie back and enjoy it. Of course you could say the same if WNO put on an air display or a cricket tournament. But at least Cole Porter is sung drama of a kind, which is one definition of opera, and it’s also on the whole enjoyable, though that naturally depends on the how as much as the what.WNO’s Kiss Me, Kate is a revival of a co-production originally 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 ...