Shakespeare
igor.toronyilalic
I didn't know whether to sigh or to yawn. Another opera. Another 50s set. At least it started well. In an obsessively wood-panelled hunting lodge, fat Falstaff (Ambrogio Maestri) lies in his bed in filthy long johns amid a sea of empty silver platters, working out a way to pay his bills and satisfy his lust. Not a 50s cliché in sight - yet. The banter between him and his helpers - Pistol and Bardolph - is focused and easy. And the singing from Maestri is effortless and clear and delivered in a parlando manner of exquisite style and grace. My, you could almost see beyond the grime and the gut Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There was always going to be one Borat moment in this festival. And it came courtesy of the Albanians, who, for comic effect, in the middle of their Henry VI, Part 2 indulged in the gratuitous harassment of a mentally handicapped person. It got the biggest laugh of the show from the expats, suggesting it's still quite a rib-tickler, disabled-bashing, in Albanian culture. It was an instructive reminder that you invite the globe to the Globe at your moral peril.The other parts of the warring Henry VI trilogy were being presented by two other Balkan countries: a Serbian Part 1 and Macedonian Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This music crept by me on the waters. Bangladesh’s Dhaka Theatre’s version of The Tempest took the musical route, and why not? It was always Shakespeare’s most musical play (with extant music for “Full Fathom Five” and other songs written by Robert Johnson). Four centuries after its premiere, probably over the river in Blackfriars, the play has been done in myriad incarnations around the world, including numerous sci-fi accounts, and bounced back to London last night courtesy of Rubayet Ahmed’s version.The adaptation included snippets of well-known Bengali folk tunes – drinking songs for Read more ...
josh.spero
The demands of Titus Andronicus are probably at odds with the constraints of the Globe to Globe season: a travelling troupe would find it hard to get 80 gallons of fake blood through Customs. Nor are they likely to be furnished with the sort of special effects – removable hands, slittable throats – which the play needs.The solution the Tang Shu-wing Theatre Studio, a company from Hong Kong performing in Cantonese, initially seemed to have to devised was perfect. For the first act, in which Roman general Titus demands that a son of the captured Tamora, Queen of the Goths, be killed, and the Read more ...
joe.muggs
The masterstroke of this take on Othello was to draw its focus away from race. It might seem odd to say that of a production in the rhyming vernacular of hip hop in which the Moor was African-American and the rest of the cast were not – but it was deftly done, and as a result avoided any number of crass parallels that could have been drawn, instead focusing on the meat of the play: love and betrayal among men.Acted and narrated, and occasionally sung and danced, by a cast of four men (plus DJ) taking all roles, the action was transplanted from the original's military campaign far from home to Read more ...
fisun.guner
Mention that a Palestinian theatre company are performing Richard II and the play’s themes are immediately thrown into sharp relief: usurpation, homeland and banishment, and the idea of a literally God-given mandate to rule amongst a resistant people. It is the hope of great art that it brings peoples and nations together, but not at the expense of highlighting issues that tear them asunder.And such controversies haven’t been confined to the play: Mark Rylance, the Globe’s former artistic director, was among a number of signatories to an open letter calling for the boycott of Habima, Read more ...
ash.smyth
This retelling of the Cymbeline story opened – or at least appeared to open – with the entire cast contributing their tuppenceworth on the issue of what the story of Cymbeline actually was. And fair dos. A “late” and abnormally tortuous Shakespearean number, Cymbeline seems not only to have been constructed out of the usual fragments of ancient British history and “borrowed” chunks of Italian literature, but also from itinerant bits of other Shakespeare plays! Romantic antics, warring dynasties, poison plots, nation-building myths, randy wagers, skulduggery in bedrooms, banishment, ill-gotten Read more ...
Fiona Sturges
Francesco da Mosto’s two-parter is ostensibly about the Bard and his fascination with the TV historian’s native Italy. In reality, it’s a film about da Mosto and his apparently God-given, below-the-belt hotness. Given the camera’s ceaseless drooling at the presenter, a more honest title would have been “Ladies! Get a load of this!”There’s something about da Mosto that makes TV producers come over all unnecessary. In their view there is no one more ruggedly handsome and intrinsically Italian than he. Thus, in Shakespeare in Italy, if he wasn’t captured driving his red Alfa Romeo down country Read more ...
william.ward
There has long been a conviction in Italian drama circles that there exists a “Special Relationship” between themselves and il Bardo di Stratford: something to do with the complexities of Elizabethan English syntax and the unusual amount of words of Italian that Shakespeare appropriated from the dominant European language(s) of theatre of his day.Indeed, going to almost any contemporary production of Italian theatre (for anyone raised on the English language canon and its main schools of interpretation), is to hit a very hard wall of cultural dissonance. We go for grades of naturalism; our Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A comedy of alienation, estrangement, and magical metamorphosis – if ever there was a Shakespeare play made for the linguistic transfigurations of the Globe to Globe season it’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Unmoored from the familiar English text and cast adrift in a forest of mischievous Korean spirits, you couldn’t wish for livelier or more bewitchingly colourful guides than the actors of the Yohangza Theatre Company.Shakespeare’s best-loved play gets a boldly South Korean re-write in the hands of Yohangza. Oberon and Titania become Gabi and Dot, king and queen of the Dokkebi (Korea’s own Read more ...
Angie Errigo
When Zhang Dongyu’s charismatic Richard III rose from the dead to take his bows for Sunday’s spellbinding afternoon performance by the National Theatre of China, the actor paused, remaining on his knees to kiss the stage of the Globe. It was a gesture both charming and wildly popular with the sodden but appreciative audience, affirming that, for the guest artists from afar, bringing their interpretations of the Bard to the Thames-side temple is a very big thrill and emotional experience.(One has to guess by the way at who had which part, since the programme didn't marry the actors to their Read more ...
David Nice
The rain it raineth every day this week, sometimes with monsoon-like persistence. Yet there’s no dousing the ardour of groundlings and thespian visitors to the global Shakespeare village within the wooden O. Comic exuberance reaches a sophisticated high watermark here with the Company Theatre of Mumbai unfurling Twelfth Night as a Hindi musical.Experienced director Atul Kumar makes sure that music is the food for surprisingly robust strains of romantic love and mourning as well as the expected japes in a seamless, multicoloured whirl of words, recitative, song and dance. With the perfect Read more ...