Timon of Athens, AC productions, Project Arts Centre (Cube), 14 July 2014. Reviewed by Derek Dunne Originally published on Shakespeare in Ireland. Timon of Athens is a thankless play, on so many levels. Unfamiliar to modern audiences, abrasive in tone, and disjointed to the point of incoherence, Shakespeare and Middleton’s play seems to push at the […]
Review by Sujata Iyengar (University of Georgia) Jamie Lloyd’s Richard III at the Trafalgar Studios, starring Martin Freeman as Shakespeare’s crafty king, has been covered widely and sensationally enough by the UK press that my mother bought me, unasked, a ticket to the production during my annual visit home and even quizzed me, post-performance, about […]
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Anna Bergmann for Malmö Stadsteater at Hipp, Malmö, Sweden. 15 April, 2014. Reviewed by Kiki Lindell In the 2014 Shakespeare Birthday Lecture in Stratford-upon-Avon, the director Michael Bogdanov spoke, among other things, about the delights and frustrations of directing in German theatres. Like Peter Brook, Bogdanov believes that we non-native […]
Julius Caesar, directed by Mirjam Koen, Het Zuidelijk Toneel, Stadsschouwburg Utrecht, the Netherlands, 25 March 2014. Review by Paul Franssen (Utrecht University) This modern dress production foregrounded the dangers of stirring up populist sentiments by skilled rhetoricians, and the disastrous consequences this might have, with a glance to the rise of populist politics in the […]
De Storm (The Tempest), directed by Johan Doesburg, Het Nationale Toneel, Stadsschouwburg Utrecht, the Netherlands, 11 March 2014. Review by Paul Franssen (Utrecht University) Based on a modern translation by Frank Albers, this performance looked somewhat Brechtian in foregrounding its own theatricality. After the storm, some of the castaways (Antonio, Alonso, Gonzalo) remained on stage, […]
Hamlet, Örkény Theatre, Budapest, Hungary 21 March 2014, directed by László Bagossy Reviewed by Natália Pikli Shakespeare’s Prince, Brecht and a football stadium: this strange combination has rattled the theatrical landscape of Budapest in the last few months, with all performances sold out in the season and countless reviews following the first night, which actually was held […]
Reviewed by Rob Ormsby The Stratford Festival’s King Lear takes a timeworn kick at the emotional-realist / Shakespeare-plus relevance can. Director Antoni Cimolino presses his actors to convey every last one of their emotions as plainly as possible and encourages us to see the purportedly timeless significance of the play’s social critiques by adding a […]
Reviewed by Eoin Price Macbeth is a play by turns familiar and strange. It is one of the most quotable and quoted plays in Shakespeare’s canon and is performed regularly, by professional and amateur companies alike, yet it is a play which features witches and in which, it is said, horses, breaking loose from their […]
Hamlet directed by Yang Jung-Ung for Yohangza Company, Peacock Theatre, London, 12 July 2014. Reviewed by Adele Lee ‘In equal scale weighing delight and dole’ (1.2.13), Yang Jung-Ung’s speedy, shamanistic Hamlet combines elements of farce with melodrama, and popular culture with traditional folklore and ancient gut rituals. Similar to the director’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which […]
Reviewed by Alun Thomas Venice, the suppurating city, bursts into new and malignant life in London’s docklands in this astonishing play. Venice Preserv’d, a site-specific production staged in the empty shells of half-built luxury flats in Greenwich, immerses the audience in the decadent world of La Serenissima, conjuring up the City of Masks in all […]
