Shakespeare
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 Or it would have been if the gantry gaining the actors access to the platform had been withdrawn.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 ...
David Nice
But not for long. The first ever National Theatre Live worldwide screening of a Donmar production came to a halt between great Jacobi's mad musings on archery and toasted cheese; later, pedalling back from Notting Hill against a furious wind, I guessed the reason for the blip. The weather had scuppered Lear's fate, off stage as well as on.Sitting in a packed Gate cinema, we heard a voice apologise to a presumably mortified Donmar audience (thinking about it, we guessed the actors must have been primed to expect technical glitches, and had given their consent to any potential interruptions Read more ...
james.woodall
But this comes at the expense of scale, both in characterisation - Jacobi is also simply too feathery - and in terms of space and time. We don't feel the outdoors at the Donmar, ever see and hear boorish Lear's knights, properly sense the passage of years from Cordelia's banishment to her return, or suffer the weight of battle.It would be wrong to call David Farr's Royal Shakespeare Company production a corrective, as it predates Grandage's, though it's brand-new at the Roundhouse and more faithful to the text. The space is perfect for it, too: high, resonant, dilapidated in places, gloomily Read more ...
David Nice
Even at the time it seemed a little strange: the visionary Kathryn Hunter as an oddball Cleopatra in a production that hardly seemed up to the mark either of her performing standards or of her own fabulous Shakespeare staging, a Pericles which was one of the two best things I've ever seen at the Globe.But she'd been through a good few Antony and Cleopatras before she dropped the bomb yesterday that she was withdrawing from Michael Boyd's long-term company, of which she has been an "artistic associate" since 2008.
The press statement is brief and enigmatic. Boyd's and Hunter's "joint" Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Set at a pivotal point in Shakespeare's canon, Twelfth Night is a glass-half-full kind of play. Is it a joyous, clear-eyed, compassionate comedy of human foibles by a writer reaching maturity, a wild and crazy ride through a season of carnival misrule and role reversal? Or, on the other hand, an ominous harbinger of the troubling, darkening work still to come? It will come as no great surprise that this production, directed by Peter Hall who turned 80 in November, inclines to the latter view and the play's repeated references to the fleetingness of youth, love and life itself blast across Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Now go we in content. To liberty and not to banishment.” A touchstone to productions of As You Like It, Celia’s wishful recasting of the Forest of Arden can rarely pass unchallenged by directors. In 2009 we saw Michael Boyd’s RSC production go head to head with Thea Sharrock’s unexpected and beguilingly sunny interpretation at the Globe – a contest in which Sharrock proved a comfortable victor. Returning once again with his conventionally darker-hued take on Shakespeare’s comedy, the question was always going to be whether Boyd could grasp the authority that so slimly eluded him last time. Read more ...