Shakespeare
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 ...
graham.rickson
The jokes come thick and fast in this debut feature from the team behind the BBC’s Horrible Histories. Released theatrically to little fanfare last autumn, Richard Bracewell’s Bill is a delight – a joyously funny film which wears its erudition lightly. An examination of Shakespeare’s lost early years, it follows the young writer’s unwitting embroilment in a fiendish Spanish plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth. Matthew Baynton’s Shakespeare is a likeable doofus, kicked out of his boy band Mortal Coil (yes, they do shuffle off) after one too many extended lute solos. He decides to become a Read more ...
David Nice
Risk-taking is what gives so many of Vladimir Jurowski's concerts with the London Philharmonic Orchestra their special savour. But did two risks for last night's programme pay off? I was as excited as many Russians and hardcore Russophiles at the rare visit of legendary 73-year-old cellist Natalia Gutman, and it could only be interesting to hear the little-heard, hour-long first version of Bruckner's Third Symphony. But interesting, with a few flashes of inspiration, was as far as it went in both cases.Gutman's recording of the two Shostakovich Cello Concertos is up there with the Read more ...
David Nice
It was another Davis, the late Colin rather than the very alive Andrew, who used to be master of Berlioz's phenomenally inventive opera for orchestra with its novel explanatory prologue and epilogue. I like to think he'd have been looking down fascinated by last night's very different miracle of pace, clarity and ideal blend of instrumental and vocal song.Shakespeare might have approved of what he'd inspired, too, though like rather a lot due to happen in the 400th anniversary year, hardly any of his words are to be found here; this is Berlioz's "What I feel about Romeo and Juliet". Once past 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 ...
Marianka Swain
Events have overtaken this Macbeth, dramatically heightening its queasy topicality. Not just brutal beheadings and torture, but the cost and collateral damage of conflict without end, and the scourge of a tyrant slaughtering his own people, strike one anew in the wake of recent debate. Carrie Cracknell’s interpretative, modern-dress production traps us in a military underground bunker, drained of light and colour – a Hell as acutely psychological as it is physical. Not for nothing does the doomed Macbeth fear the “diseased mind”.Cracknell is not in thrall to the text, briskly stripping it 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 ...
Ellie Nunn
West Side Story, Kiss Me Kate, even The Lion King – all have shown us how Shakespeare’s stories can translate into musical form. It’s not hard to see why: the plots provide strong frameworks for adaptation, with central problems to be resolved, protagonists for us to root for, villains to charm us, lovers to pity – they're all there. Although Measure for Measure is often referred to as Shakespeare’s problem play, its translation into a musical set in Soho in the 1960s feels – perhaps surprisingly – right.Desperate Measures looks at a time in our history when censorship regulations Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Pro patria mori. Now there’s the test for Henry V - perform it on Remembrance Day. The “band of brothers” shtick relies on an idea of patriotism from an age when there was no need to define something so heartfelt, and an idea that kings and commoners were all in it together when fighting the enemy. After all, Henry orders the good English soldiers to rape French girls, smash the heads of French grandfathers, and skewer their babies on pikes, no questions asked. The bonuses of patriotism, if you like.But Royal Shakespeare Company artistic director Gregory Doran presents a handwringing, post- Read more ...
Marianka Swain
What exactly is the level of Kenneth Branagh’s self-awareness? He’s certainly conscious of inviting comparison with Olivier once again by presenting a year-long season of plays at the refurbished Garrick under the auspices of the Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company – and by taking on Olivier’s famous title role in The Entertainer. But what should we make of his choice of Rattigan’s backstage company Harlequinade, which blithely skewers an egotistical actor/manager and his rep company’s luvvie excesses?One might read it as Branagh and co-director Rob Ashford’s canny attempt to ward off Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Rosalind’s “working-day world” takes an unexpectedly literal turn in Polly Findlay’s sparky new As You Like It for the National Theatre. An opening sequence, set in a windowless trading-floor, opens out in one of the year’s most bewitching set transformations into a brown and scrubby Forest of Arden, whose flowers bloom all the brighter for their delayed appearance. The action too, stilted at first, blossoms as Arden works its magic, delaying but not ultimately denying us the pastoral comedy we signed up for.Findlay’s thoughtful production refuses to take Shakespeare’s magical forest at face Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The prospect of Ian McKellen and Anthony Hopkins acting together for the first time in their storied careers in Richard Eyre's BBC adaptation of The Dresser was one of those mouth-watering propositions to sit alongside DeNiro and Pacino on screen in Heat and the stage reunion of Dames Maggie Smith and Judi Dench in The Breath of Life.And if the rather lopsided result of this latest version of a Ronald Harwood play, already made into an Oscar-nominated film in 1983, saw to it that McKellen came up trumps, that may be in the nature of the piece itself: McKellen's Norman (pictured Read more ...