As the baby boom generation moves into old age, ageing audiences, and ageing actors, are increasingly drawn to King Lear which is now staged more frequently than Hamlet. This year alone we’ve already seen Timothy West’s Lear in Bristol, Don Warrington’s in Manchester and Michael Pennington’s in Northampton and later this year Glenda Jackson will play it […]
Polly Findlay’s production of The Merchant Of Venice at the RSC was conceived and created in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris and the rising tide of racial and religious intolerance in Europe gives the play a relevance which was absent four years ago when Rupert Goold set the RSC’s previous production […]
This is Yukio Ninagawa’s eighth production of Hamlet and it’s on tour in the year of his eightieth birthday although this year, for the first time, he is too ill to travel with his own show. This also marks the thirtieth anniversary of Ninagawa’s first visit to the UK with the ‘cherry blossom’ Macbeth which […]
In 2013 I posted an article on this blog saying it’s time a black actor was cast as Iago. Now, in 2015, the RSC has, for the first time, cast a black actor, Lucian Msamati, in the role. Coincidence? Well yes, probably, but if it means Greg Doran, the Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare […]
Reviewed by Andrew Cowie John Webster’s The White Devil must have a label on it somewhere in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s files saying, ‘Avoid this play, and if you must do it, make sure a woman directs it’. Maria Aberg’s new production at the Swan Theatre in Stratford is the first since the Australian director Gale […]
Review by Andrew Cowie In the 1990s a group of actors and musicians from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama got together to see how they might make work together. In 2006 their theatre company, Filter, was successful enough to be commissioned by the RSC to stage a production of Twelfth Night for the […]
Antony and Cleopatra, directed by Tarell Alvin McCraney, RSC Swan Theatre, November 2013. Review by Andrew Cowie. When Charles Spencer described the RSC’s 2013 Antony and Cleopatra in The Telegraph newspaper as a ‘travesty’ and ‘a fiasco’ connoisseurs of train-wreck theatre hurried to book their tickets. All the warning signs were there; a young American director, Tarell […]
Nicholas Hytner’s National Theatre production of Othello, with Adrian Lester as Othello and Rory Kinnear as Iago, was a big hit this year; it won five star reviews in the press and the live transmission played to cinema audiences around the world. Several critics noted that Hytner had reconstructed the play to make it less about racism – […]
In an interview in The Independent newspaper Maria Aberg, director of this season’s As You Like It at the RSC, acknowledged the play’s reputation as ‘lightweight and insubstantial’ and I must admit it’s one I struggle with. On paper it’s got everything; comedy, love interest and drama but all too often the comedy misfires, the love stories meander and the […]
Macbeth at the Manchester International Festival, live cinema transmission, 20 July 2013. The National Theatre Live series of digitally transmitted theatre performances sits somewhere between film, TV and theatre. It’s live, like theatre, and it goes into cinemas to provide some sense of a theatre-like shared experience with an audience but the live event is mediatised via a […]
