Shakespeare
Sam Marlowe
It’s apt that a drama set among soldiers should be presented with military precision; but corruption, cruelty and perversion can lurk amid the human innards of the machine of war, and in Nicholas Hytner’s well-oiled, impeccably paced production of Shakespeare’s tragedy, the chainlink and concrete of an army base house scenes of cruel humiliation.Hytner's inaugural 2003 season as artistic director of the National included his staging of Henry V, coinciding with the Iraq War and starring Adrian Lester. Now Lester takes on the titular Moor, opposite Rory Kinnear, whom Hytner directed as Hamlet Read more ...
Mark Kidel
In spite of a text that feels at times like Shakespeare by numbers, Andrew Hilton’s tightly-knit company has once again pulled off an evening of captivating theatre. As in other productions from Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory, the casting is pitch-perfect and the acting first class, down to the star performance of a hilariously mournful black dog.Two Gentlemen of Verona is an early piece, and although there are plenty of the touches of the genius that will illuminate the bard’s greatest plays, this tale of love, friendship, inconstancy and betrayal is almost too smoothly constructed. The Read more ...
carole.woddis
"And, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind." So speaks King Lear towards the end of his monumental journey of self-knowledge that has taken the mad monarch from the highest to the lowest reaches of human experience.Unsurprisingly, it was an ambition long held and within the grasp of the actor Edward Petherbridge to play Lear, widely regarded as the summit of a classical thespian's career, when, in New Zealand to take on the part in 2007, he was struck down by not one but two strokes.The miracle is that he is here to tell the tale and, what’s more, to devise - at 76, as he keeps Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There has always been a keen air of propulsion to the career of James McAvoy. He made his name on television in State of Play and Shameless, while early film roles in Starter for 10 and Inside I’m Dancing swiftly promoted him up the leading man’s ladder to appear in The Last King of Scotland, Atonement, The Last Station, X-Men: First Class and, as of this month, Welcome to the Punch.Equally comfortable playing romantic leads and action heroes, he has never been quite a force in theatre. This is partly a matter of choice. He has prioritised screen roles over stage opportunities. The last time Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The thing about puppets, as those who have handled them know all too well, is that they take over. They have a life of their own. This is all fine and good as long as the puppet-masters don’t get swamped by the magical power of supposedly inanimate objects.Much of the fun and originality of Tom Morris’s restlessly inventive take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, made in collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company - his co-directors for War Horse - derives from the playfulness that toys encourage in us all. But the astounding array of mechanical inventions, from the simple miniature Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, set in an Italian prison, performed by criminals? If it sounds like a gimmick, the Taviani brothers’ Caesar Must Die is anything but. Following a popular tradition of freshening up Shakespeare's works with a shift in setting or location (think 10 Things I Hate About You or Ran), the Tavianis' deft editing creates a lean and intriguing 76 minutes that outstrips three hour epics in meaning and depth.Now in their eighties, the brothers are no strangers to effective cinema, with Padre, Padrone and Night of the Shooting Stars hallmarks of their time. Discovering Julius Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The last time James McAvoy played the Scottish king, it was in a scintillating reworking of the play written in the modern idiom by Peter Moffat, for the BBC's ShakespeaRe-Told season in 2005. McAvoy was Joe Macbeth, a Glasgow chef passionate about his work, the restaurant kitchen where he worked a fitting place for the play's blood and gore.Jamie Lloyd's production is equally thrilling and radical, and is set 50 years hence in a (possibly) post-independence Scotland, brutalised by war and, we may assume from the programme notes, ravaged by the effects of climate change. Soutra Gilmour's Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Performing Shakespeare in a former cigarette factory in South Bristol has become something of a ritual for Andrew Hilton and his close-knit company. Any act of ritual requires a dedicated space and the red-tiled floor on which the drama unfolds on this most intimate of stages has taken on a certain aura. With the minimum of sets and props, a deep probing of the text and the minimum of modish theatrical artifice, Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory proves year after year that less is more, at least when it comes to awakening the imagination.Hilton uses the space as an alchemical vessel, a place Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Far be it from me to try to impose shape or meaning on the past 12 months of television. You'd need teams of statisticians and psephologists to have any chance of drawing conclusions from the whirling cosmos of TV, and its infinite variety of soaps, shopping, repeats, weird sports, ailing current affairs programmes, forgotten comedies and obscure dramas. Instead, in a spirit of shameless subjectivity, here are 10 of my favourite performances from 2012.Ben Whishaw in The Hollow Crown: Richard II, BBC TwoIn a year saturated in Shakespeare, the Hollow Crown series of history plays stood out for Read more ...
Matt Wolf
For much of 2012, London theatre seemed to celebrate the playhouse as much as the play, turning certain venues into essential destinations. I'm thinking, of course, of Shakespeare's Globe, whose mindblowing Globe to Globe season - its namesake's canon performed in as many languages as there are plays - redefined the concept of marathon well before the Olympic athletes came to town. Or the Royal Court, which traversed the year in high, heady style, setting established names (Jez Butterworth, Caryl Churchill, Martin Crimp) alongside gifted newcomers (Luke Norris, Hayley Squires) and fast-rising Read more ...
kate.bassett
When I first mentioned to a colleague that I was embarking on a biography of the doctor/director Jonathan Miller, he instantly yelped, “My God, your work’s cut out! The man must have met half the famous names in the twentieth century!"My subsequent conversations with Miller provided a cornucopia of highly entertaining anecdotes. These included his brushes with Princess Margaret (who was very taken with his comic turns in the 1950s); Bobby Kennedy (who told him to shut up, shortly before being shot); Bridget Riley (who nearly sued); and Kevin Spacey (who got his big break by stalking Miller Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s no ignoring gender in Julius Caesar. Whether it’s Portia’s “I grant I am a woman” speech, an enfeebled Caesar likened to a “sick girl”, or Cassius raging against oppression – “our yoke and sufferance make us womanish” – the issue is written into the language and ideological fabric of the play. So all those who might be tempted to rage against the travesty of Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female production for the Donmar should take their complaints directly to Shakespeare’s door.Wherever there is political tyranny there are inevitably the silenced, the disenfranchised, so it seems only natural Read more ...