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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Richard II arrives in London after a highly successful Stratford run and while the glow of David Tennant’s Hamlet resides still in the memory. Surprisingly, the pleasure of the production lies not so much in dazzle as solidity. This doesn’t give a bold new reading but a robust interpretation; it is not a star vehicle (so often with the star surrounded by mediocre support) but one of the strongest company performances of Shakespeare that I’ve seen for many a year.Though Richard II can easily be seen as a stand-alone play, it’s actually the first of a tetralogy that includes the Henry IVs and Read more ...

It has been a hard slog, but he's emerging victorious in the end. Essentially, Shakespeare's Henry V tracks a military campaign. In Act One, the eponymous king declares war on France. By Act Five, against the odds, he has won and is sealing an entente cordiale with a kiss – wooing the French princess, Katharine. At the start of Michael Grandage's eagerly awaited West End production, the Chorus (Ashley Zhangazha) darts to the apron stage to address the audience with: "Oh for a Muse of fire, that would ascend/The brightest heaven of invention!"He's a youth in jeans and a T-shirt printed Read more ...

It begins on the street, nastily. An immigrant has got his hands on an English woman. Trouble is brewing. Then there is a dispute about money, involving a “Lombard” – the identification originally applied to immigrants from Lombardy in northern Italy, famous for its banking, but it had gradually become a term of abuse for all foreigners engaged in trade or banking, a word bandied around in the same way as “Jew”. Doll, the lusty London woman who has been hauled by the arm, sums up the popular sentiment of the day: “I am ashamed that freeborn Englishmen, having beaten strangers within their own Read more ...

How irksome in some ways for the National Theatre that both the glamour and the accessibility of cinema have bookended its first 50 years, when the company and, latterly, its Southbank home, are essentially driven by and dedicated to live performance. But it was Laurence Olivier’s film career, making him a household name, which helped secure for him the job as first director of the National Theatre in 1963. And it is cinema relays that have taken NT productions to places and people who might never step into Denys Lasdun’s building, despite the company’s national ambitions.The Olivier years Read more ...

What would happen if a top Hollywood and TV director decided to take actors familiar to him to make a Shakespearean comedy? Something very interesting, especially to those enamoured of The Bard.Joss Whedon, creator of TV series like Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel, Dollhouse and the beguiling Firefly, used Shakespeare to cleanse his palette after the hard graft of Avengers Assemble. Shot in 12 days, using many of his favourite ensemble actors dressed in modern clothing, this lively black and white comedy emphasizes the screwball nature of Much Ado before it pulls an emotional sleight of hand Read more ...

All starts with a barely perceptible bass rumble, before Britten’s lower strings begin their queasy glissandi, shifting key signature every few seconds. It’s a wonderful operatic opening, here teased out with deft mystery by conductor Stuart Stratford.One of many surprises in this polished revival of Martin Duncan’s 2008 production is the look of Johan Engels’s forest. There’s no greenery, but lots of translucent perspex. Giant plastic balloons drift uncertainly. Bruno Poet’s funky lighting shimmers. All that’s missing is a giant lava lamp. Shakespeare’s fairies look here like primary Read more ...

The idea behind Muse of Fire was a simple one. We wanted to spend a year travelling the world and find out from as many sources as we could why Shakespeare is both so loved and so feared. We wanted to try and eradicate our own deep-rooted anxieties and help others to remove theirs.  This was the goal. How we would achieve all this was the ordeal.  It has been a five-year adventure but now the film is complete and ready for its world premiere at Raindance Film Festival, we can say that every moment of an incredible journey was worth it.Before we became filmmakers we were already Read more ...