Shakespeare
David Nice
Forget Dan Brown’s phony grail trail which has led so many paying pilgrims to Rosslyn outside Edinburgh. For the last week of the Festival Fringe the Chapel, most intricate and mysterious of 15th-century sanctuaries, has become a temple of high art dedicated to Mozart, Shakespeare and Britten. Ambitious indeed of a bunch of Cambridge undergrads and alumni to mount The Magic Flute and the operatic Midsummer Night’s Dream side by side. Did they pull it off? Just, in the case of the Britten, which is saying something given a score which is... well, again, intricate and mysterious are the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A genuine, if unanticipated, phenomenon has emerged over time at Shakespeare's Globe, the Bardic-themed playhouse that these days is full more often than not and with good reason, too. Time was when the canon's lesser-known offerings could be counted on to play to not much more than a devoted few. Well, no more. The same summer that has seen so commercially dubious a piece of esoterica as Henry VIII packing them in is now hosting a return engagement of the director Christopher Luscombe's 2008 staging of The Merry Wives of Windsor, a comedy often derided as cut-rate Shakespeare that sells Sir Read more ...
theartsdesk
The premise of Jonathan Bate’s one-man play, directed by Tom Cairns, is simple but surprisingly effective: a trawl through the seven ages of Shakespeare, from babe to box, told through a mixture of biographical narrative illuminated by relevant scenes from Will’s work.Shakespeare – The Man From Stratford, Assembly Hall ****The aim is to fathom how a boy from an archetypal English market town became the world’s most celebrated wordsmith. We see how his life and work entwined; how the rhetoric and wordplay he learned in the schoolroom grounded him in the language of power and politics; how the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“It isn’t a surprise to me, but it is a surprise to him that it isn’t a surprise to me.” On a Monday morning in the rehearsal room at Shakespeare’s Globe, actors and actresses are getting into character. “You’re acting panic,” clarifies the director, “and when you hear his voice it’s real panic.” Exactly how funny is The Merry Wives of Windsor in the 21st century?On the evidence of the Shakespeare’s Globe production, which opened two summers ago to huge acclaim and audiences to match (pictured below), very funny indeed. It is now returning to the Globe before heading off around the globe in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“Well! It is now publique, & you wil stand for your priuiledges wee know: to read, and censure. Do so, but buy it first...” In 1623, the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s works was collected by the actors John Heminge and Henry Condell. It cost a quid. Whenever they come on the market nowadays, editions tend to shift for rather more. Not so long ago I was allowed to leaf through the copy belonging to the Guildhall Library in the City of London. Valued at perhaps £2.5 million, it leaves the shelves only rarely. Whenever it does, it rests on a judiciously arranged beanbag. All who Read more ...
David Nice
Never have the Tudors seemed so real. After decades of TV and film characters keeping us at a teasing, ermined distance, Hilary Mantel's dazzling novel Wolf Hall brings it all to life as never before, and the Globe's still-running Henry VIII has vigorously built on that. But the Stuarts? You wouldn't expect James I to dominate in Howard Brenton's new play ostensibly about a tragic-heroic vision of the Tudor queen. Yet Brenton may have started something: the bisexual transvestite intellectual Scot with Tourette's and epilepsy, as spellbindingly played by James Garnon, could become the new Read more ...
james.woodall
Shakespeare’s two-part Henry IV cycle locks together the first modern plays in English. They strive for something quite new in drama, retaining a structural boldness and complexity seldom encountered in contemporary theatre. That's how "modern" they are (or seem). And in reiterating what others must have said oft and better, I intend no abutment on that deadly phrase “early modern” into which historians, and most annoyingly many literary critics, now incorporate the word “Renaissance” - which Henry IV of course also magnificently is.Dominic Dromgoole’s new Globe production of both parts is Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The second season of the Bridge Project - a transatlantic relationship forged between between Kevin Spacey, artistic director at the Old Vic in London, theatre and film director Sam Mendes, and Joseph Melillo, executive producer of the Brooklyn Academy of Music - which aims to make theatrical connections in a series of cross-cast co-productions with American and British actors, has opened with a double header of Shakespeare. At first sight, As You Like It and The Tempest may not appear obvious bedfellows but, as Mendes (who directs both plays) points out in his programmes notes, they both Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The beautiful gardens of Garsington Manor might seem an ideal setting for Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its ilex groves, its miniature forests of pyramid yew, and its paths overhung (o’er-canopied?) with climbing roses. So it’s a mild shock to confront on the actual stage what looks like a huge attic store-room littered with beds, chucked in at all angles, a few lamps, various items of bric-à-brac, and, upstage centre, a large C. S. Lewis-style wardrobe through which, in due course, characters enter and exit.Bed admittedly is iconic in the Dream, a work in which half the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Shakespeare's Macbeth is full of fleetingly funny moments. Halfway through the regicidal Second Act, we stumble upon a castle porter gibbering on about the bodily consequences of drink - "nose-painting, sleep and urine". Verdi's opera mostly shuns these vignettes for the bigger, more concentratedly darker picture. The music works itself up into an ornamented mania and for the most part broods on low orchestral colourings. There is nothing funny about a single second of it. Why Richard Jones has therefore decided to send the whole thing up for Glyndebourne in a series of dumb gags is Read more ...
mike.poulton
The RSC’s Morte d’Arthur is not what you’d call a rushed job. John Barton, the company’s advisory director, has been on a mission to see the work performed for at least 50 years. The director Greg Doran had also been wanting to stage Malory’s epic for many years. He asked me to produce a version when we were working together on the York Mystery Plays in the Minster, to mark the Millennium. We’ve been putting it together ever since, and now it's finally opening.All things Arthurian are very popular in this country. The myth of Arthur has a potency. This is, after all, the epic of England. It Read more ...
mick.gordon
The central character in Shakespeare's final play, The Tempest, is a betrayed Duke called Prospero. Prospero means omniscient panic: an apt name for an all-powerful creator of tempests and general wreaker of revenge. However, the profound appeal of this 400-year-old play, which I am directing in the Oxford Shakespeare Company's site-specific open-air touring production this summer, lies not in the narratives of malignant magi and lustful monsters, power-craving lords and their wine-craving servants. Rather it resides in the force of the external stories and characters as metaphor.All theatre Read more ...