Shakespeare
Matthew Sharp
Shakespeare's ubiquitous “planetary influence” is well-documented. As Stephen Marche points out in How Shakespeare Changed Everything, not much from our sex lives to the assassination of Lincoln remains untouched. And, of course, there's the language. You may think that what you are reading has more rhyme than reason, be madness (though there is method in it) or amount to nothing more than a wild goose chase. It may be Greek to you, make your hair stand on end or set your teeth on edge. It goes without saying that brevity is the soul of wit and that comparisons are odious, so why does he lay Read more ...
Steven Berkoff
I hardly knew anything about Shakespeare as a schoolboy and it was only when attending my first acting classes, when we sallow and uncouth students were required to do a speech each week to be tested on, that I had my first awakenings. At the very first I found the dense text too complex and remote for my taste, but persevered, swallowed the language in great chunks and then heaved it out. But from the outset I felt that something had bit. The text, so sinuous, so entwined in metaphors, slowly but surely affected me. I was breathing a stronger air and a profoundly disturbing air. I was being Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Another week, another major British ballet company takes on a key cultural patrimony in a brand-new work. It might seem odd that the Royal Ballet’s new Winter’s Tale generates more critical reservations than English National Ballet’s take on the First World War, though the two evenings succeed and fail in almost equal measure. But that’s what you get for tackling Shakespeare, as well as for being the overdog: in a way, it is testament to the Royal Ballet’s tremendous track record with story ballets that we all go into a new one believing (or at least hoping) that we are about to be given Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Swedish director Maria Aberg, making her Royal Exchange debut, sets Shakespeare's comedy in 1945 post-war Britain and strives to play in the effects of war on the home front, where women are in charge and have taken on men’s roles. The same goes for some of the casting here. Gender-blind casting is apparently a mission of Aberg's, to redress a male bias. So Leonato, still listed as the Governor of Messina, becomes Leonata, while Constable Dogberry and his sidekick Verges are played by women.Aberg has previously concerned herself with Iraqi war veterans. War, military and civilian, being a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
I hadn’t heard the term “cultural cringe” until I went to live in Australia. Holiday encounters had been so full of sunshine, art, water and music that it hadn’t occurred to me to doubt the cultural confidence and energy of the nation that gave us Patrick White and Peter Carey, Baz Luhrmann and Brett Whiteley, Joan Sutherland and Robert Hughes. But once I did, the phrase was everywhere. Google it and you’ll find hundreds of recent articles all devoted to the same basic premise: when it comes to culture, Europe is just better than Australia.It was 1950 when AA Phillips first coined the term. Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
A collective shiver went round the arts community of Merseyside when the Liverpool Everyman announced that it was to be razed to the ground before rising again from the ashes like the theatrical phoenix of the region. And now, a little more than two years after the original theatre closed amidst much breast-beating, the Everyman is back, and with a spanking new production of Twelfth Night that constitutes a national event. The new theatre is light, airy, and accessible, and a massive asset to the creative hub that is Hope Street. And Gemma Bodinetz's way with Shakespeare's timeless comedy of Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Andrew Hilton, the creative force that drives the consistently excellent Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory, might be playing safe by returning to a play he put originally put on in 2003. But “As You Like It”, for all its light touches, is a challenging proposition: both in terms of the way the author treats complex relationships between play-acting and authenticity, true and projected love, goodness and evil, but also because the many-threaded story doesn’t unfold with quite the same elegance as in some of the other comedies.This is a play in which structure is a little too apparent Read more ...
David Nice
An insider once told me that you get a grant for including puppets in a production. Which may account for the amount of crap puppetry haphazardly applied in the theatre. That certainly can't be said about the work of husband-and-husband team Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones of Handspring as they collaborate again with War Horse director Tom Morris, this time on Shakespearean texturing of organic discipline. The problem is that such focused visual imagination needs to be matched by verbal beauty, word magic, of the highest order, and it isn’t.I can't agree with Mark Kidel, who in his Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Two lanky, totemic marionettes with stern carved faces – one male, one female – coast haltingly around a rehearsal room in Bristol. They are being operated from inside metal framing by actors who coax tentative movement into arms and necks. “Use stillness as one of the things in your arsenal,” suggests a South African voice from the wings. “How are you doing for fatigue?” enquires a patrician English voice.The South African accent belongs to Adrian Kohler of the Handspring Puppet Company. The English director is Tom Morris. The last time they worked together they came up with War Horse. Read more ...
james.woodall
Sam Mendes thinks King Lear is a bigger play than it is. In a new staging he directs at the National Theatre, he wants it to be about a convulsion of nations, a reordering of borders, bombing populations. When Lear arrives to carve his kingdom into three - entirely in his own self-interest, not his daughters’ (in the play) - over 30 soldiers are stood to attention rear stage. The illusion suggests 300 and proposes that this is a ruler whose every command is enforced by the mere shouldering of hundreds of guns. Shakespeare’s Lear is in charge, or his “authority” (as Kent states), is. No one Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Released here last month, nearly five years after it was issued in America, The Age of Kings is a five-disc glory. It comprises the BBC production of Shakespeare's eight English history plays – Richard II, both parts of Henry IV, Henry V, the three parts of Henry VI, and Richard III – which were broadcast live to three million viewers from the Riverside Studios and the then new Television Centre between April and November 1960.The series – a repository of classical Shakespeare, made in the days before fascist uniforms became a wardrobe option for Richard III and his henchmen – was Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In his later life Shakespeare, who never ducked ways to define a hero, offered the public a challenge: Coriolanus is a professional warrior, deaf to reason, patrician hater of people power. To beat all, this man’s man’s a mother’s boy. In a world trying to be newborn in democracy and a big society, Coriolanus sticks out like a sore thumb.The play’s action is hectic, wracked by war and famine, and the shining simplicities of the sword contrast with the writhing difficulties of words to fashion slow consensus and agreements between people of sharply different motives. Josie Rourke’s production Read more ...