Shakespeare
hilary.whitney
The Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre has always been one of London’s theatrical success stories, attracting luminaries from Flora Robson to Judi Dench, but over the past few years under the stewardship of artistic director Timothy Sheader, it has really come into its own. In 2010, its Olivier Award-winning production of Into the Woods became the highest-grossing production in the venue's history, whilst The Crucible by Arthur Miller attracted a whole new audience to the theatre – 72 per cent of those who attended the play had never visited the theatre before – and The Comedy of Errors became Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Has the King of Knotty Ash been usurped? I saw him embrace Shakespeare and play Malvolio here just 40 years ago. I’m talking about Ken Dodd, more used to playing the fool. Now, another upstart from Knotty Ash is even more ambitiously playing the King of Scotland. I’m talking about David Morrissey. No fool he. In Macbeth he returns to the cradle of his birth as a fledgling actor to grace the last production at the Liverpool Everyman before it closes for a two-year £28 million redevelopment.It all started for Morrissey when he turned up on spec at the Hope Street box office 25 years ago – and Read more ...
martin.white
John Ford’s tragedy‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, set in the Italian city of Parma, tells the story of a young brother and sister, Giovanni and Annabella, who discover a mutual love for each other and embark on a passionate sexual relationship. The challenges of family, church and society increasingly curtail their freedom to pursue their desires, and the play culminates in a terrifyingly brutal and bloody climax. When Ford wrote the play, probably in the late 1620s, he was in his forties and was nearing 50 when it was published in 1633. The play is so often talked about as if the work of a Read more ...
graham.rickson
This week we’ve offbeat violin and viola duets played by a renowned husband-and-wife duo, Scarlatti keyboard sonatas played on piano, and a very Italian take on Shakespeare from one of the 20th century’s fieriest conductors.Victor de Sabata: The Merchant of Venice Orquesta Filarmónica de Malága, Coro de Malága/Aldo Ceccato (La Bottega Discantica)
Italian conductor Victor de Sabata (1892-1967) is best remembered today for recording a classic account of Tosca with Maria Callas in 1953. He was also a composer and collaborated with the German director Max Reinhardt on a spectacular production Read more ...
David Nice
Trust the "wooden O" to set the Shakespearean record straighter than usual. In John Dove's production, this is no problem play but a bright comedy where the immaculate plotting proves more admirable than its questionable characters. Its low cuddleability quotient will never make All's Well Everyman's favourite; the heroine has Rosalind's or Viola's resourcefulness and none of their charm as she pursues a callow, snobbish young man whom you can't at first blame for feeling cornered but who ends up an irredeemable cad. The figure of fun despised by everyone else in the play, the mouthy Parolles Read more ...
carole.woddis
Puppetry has come a long way in this country. Once considered the domain of children’s theatre only, you’ll now be hard pushed to find a classical production where puppets are not used in some way. For this sea change we have to thank, amongst others, a couple of Canadian geniuses, Ronnie Birkett and Robert Lepage, and - almost single-handedly carrying the torch for puppetry as a grown-up form to be taken seriously in this country - John and Lyndie Wright, founders of the Little Angel Theatre, Islington. With both celebrating their half-centuries this year, Little Angel and the Royal Read more ...
theartsdesk
The King James Bible, that great monument in the biography of the English language, is 400 years old this year. To use its own wording, it is as old as the hills, as old as Methuselah. Contemporaneous with Shakespeare, it has given us as many of the richly colourful phrases by which we still live: a nest of vipers, a thorn in the flesh, a fly in the ointment, a lamb to the slaughter, the skin of your teeth, in the twinkling of an eye. And so on and on. It was created, to quote it again, as a labour of love. To celebrate its anniversary, and as Easter approaches, theartsdesk considers some of Read more ...
james.woodall
Tradition, in the form of Victorian performance, conferred on The Tempest the VC of Highest Shakespearean Poetry, though it probably wasn't Shakespeare's final play. John Gielgud was in an important sense the last great Victorian English thesp and, in the apparently valedictory role of Prospero, took the island parable to an Olympus of rhetoric. More recent Shakespearean poetics have led us to a drama riven with attacks on its own rhetorical afflatus and most contemporary stagings make Prospero, for a start, a bully. Cheek by Jowl's new version certainly does.This is the company's fourth Read more ...
Jasper Rees
I can tell you the year (1983). I can tell you the theatre (the newly opened Barbican), the actors (Gambon, Sher), and the speech (“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!”). Hell, I can all but tell you the seat number. Lear and the Fool in the storm stood on a platform mounted on a high pole. It was an arresting way of establishing their elemental isolation. Or it would have been if the gantry gaining the actors access to the platform had been withdrawn. “That’s not meant to be there,” said the person next door to me. And then louder, “They’ve got it wrong.” My father. I still remember someone Read more ...
james.woodall
Shakespeare’s The Tempest is apparently a gift for the big screen. It's full of tricks, illusions, two half-humans and of course kicks off with a stonker of a storm: any film-maker might, particularly in this hi-tech epoch, give his or her eye teeth to unleash wildest imaginings on this magical text for grabbiest effect. “The isle is full of noises,/ Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not”, says Caliban. Julie Taymor’s new adaptation is full of digital delights, built mainly around Ben Whishaw as Ariel - and, with Helen Mirren as Prospero, it's also responsible for one of the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Best sit upstairs in the Rose for their new As You Like It, Stephen Unwin's first Shakespeare production in the three-year-old theatre, modelled on the Elizabethan principle. The tilted perspective helps a great deal with the sparse little bit of scenery. From the ground stalls the hummock of leaf-strewn earth and the three oak branches hanging overhead seriously lack the forcefield of a Forest of Arden, hemmed in with black unadorned walls and exit doors.Shakespeare’s Arden should be a surreal place, where people lose their court inhibitions, where they’re far from hot water and clean Read more ...
theartsdesk
Whether it’s consolation, stimulation, or just some old-fashioned romance you’re after this Valentine’s Day, theartsdesk’s team of writers (with a little help from a certain Bard from Stratford) have got it covered. Exhibitions to stir the heart, music to swell the soul, and comedy to help recover from both – we offer our pick of the most romantic of the arts. So from Giselle to Joe Versus the Volcano, from Barthes to the Bard, theartsdesk celebrates the many-splendoured thing that is love. Judith FlandersValentine’s Day might not seem the ideal day to give your loved one a break-up Read more ...