Hamlet, Belvoir St, Sydney, Australia, 16 October 2013. Australian theatrical royalty abounds in this new production at the Belvoir St Theatre, one of Sydney’s most loved theatrical spaces. Robyn Nevin and John Gaden as Gertrude and Claudius bring a lifetime’s experience of the stage and complete ease with the language of classical drama. So too […]
Romeo and Juliet, The Aboriginal Centre for the Performance Arts (ACPA), Brisbane, Australia, 9-11 May 2013, as part of the Anywhere Theatre Festival. The first order of business was to find the place. Kangaroo Point. Our two weeks in Australia were enough to teach us that we wouldn’t, alas, be greeted by […]
Review of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (directed by Rupert Goold for the Royal Shakespeare Company) at the Roundhouse, London, 4 December 2010 Originally published in Shakespeare, 7:2 (2011), 208-21. By B. J. Sokol, Goldsmiths, University of London. To throw the biggest bouquet first, Mariah Gale’s performance of Juliet was among the best I have seen. All of Gale’s […]
Review of Shakespeare’s King Lear (directed by David Farr for the Royal Shakespeare Company) at the Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 30 March 2010. Originally published in Shakespeare, 7.2 (2011), 217-22. By Kate Rumbold (University of Birmingham) Halfway through a successful three-year project, the Royal Shakespeare Company remains highly committed to the principles of ensemble theatre: its website states, “We […]
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 – […]
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 […]
We are in the gym at a public school with the school motto, Mens sana in corpore sano (a healthy mind in a healthy body), overhead. There’s a stage at one end and a border of black soil with skulls poking through it all round the acting area. A man in a black suit, wearing […]
Othello directed by Nicholas Hytner, The National Theatre, London, 2013. If my memory serves me correctly, then all of Nicholas Hytner’s Shakespeare productions I have seen have been in modern-dress. Occasionally the need to find a visual, contemporary cultural idiom has been unsuccessful. In 2002, Hytner’s setting of the long pastoral scenes of The Winter’s […]
We walked into the prison. Bald neon strip-lights glared onto a grey common-room space. The walls were painted in a serviceable half and half fashion and as I sat down in my hard, plastic, prison-visiting-room-style chair I immediately became aware of an old sofa, a trolley of the kind I recall from my school […]
Macbeth, directed by Lynne Parker, The Lyric Theatre, Belfast, 24 November 2012, stalls back left. By Laura Campbell The tragic hero is not the focal point of this production. Lynne Parker has shifted the focus of power to the rest of the characters in order to emphasise the impact of cyclic violence on an entire […]
