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 […]
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 […]
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 – […]