King Lear, dir. & libretto by Joke Hoolboom. Holland Opera, Jong Nederlands Blazers Ensemble and “155” dance group. Utrecht, Fort Rijnauwen, 12 July 2019. Review by Paul Franssen (Utrecht University) Holland Opera, formerly known as Xynix, has a long history of musical adaptations of Shakespeare, particularly for the young, including children’s versions of Romeo and […]
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 […]
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 […]
Antony and Cleopatra, a rehearsed reading of Dir. George Costigan York Theatre Royal, York 22 February 2015 My relationship with Antony and Cleopatra is as unstable as its protagonists’. Seeing Elizabeth Taylor’s depiction of the Egyptian queen as a six year-old led to a juvenile obsession with bath salts in order to recreate her […]
Titus Andronicus at The RST, dir. Blanche McIntyre, 1/7/2017. Reviewed by Sara Marie Westh The red warning posters warns prospective audience members at the RST that the play they are about to see is Shakespeare’s bloodiest, and that it contains “bad language”. The former statement is undoubtedly true, while the latter appears to pass judgement of […]
Directed by Lucy Bailey, Globe Theatre, London, 31 May 2014. Review by Steve Orman Being somewhat squeamish when it comes to violence, particularly of the bloody kind, I had a feeling that Lucy Bailey’s Titus Andronicus, a revival of her popular 2006 production, would be something that I would have to endure rather than […]
Hamlet: Drama of Vengeance – directed by Sven Gade, Heinz Schall for Silents Now at the York International Shakespeare Festival at Jack Lyons Concert Hall, University of York. 9 May 2015 Reviewed by Sarah Olive, University of York This is the first instalment in a series of around ten reviews which I’ll be writing to celebrate the […]
Directed by Ragna Weisteen for Sommarteater på Krapperup in Höganäs, Sweden, 25 July, 2014. Reviewed by Kiki Lindell I saw this production with a group of my students who recently studied and played Romeo and Juliet themselves (in English, at Lund University). Beforehand, they laughingly acknowledged that they fully intended to remain unimpressed, and prefer […]
Review of Murray McGibbon’s King Lear in Original Pronunciation by Terri Bourus When I took my seat in the Wells-Metz theater in Bloomington for Murray McGibbon’s staging of King Lear, the first thing I noticed in the theatre-in-the-round set, was a stack of old tires, placed so that they were just at my feet, in the […]
Othello, Shakespeare Company of Japan and Pirikap, dir. Kazumi Shimodate and Debo Akibe. Tara Arts, London. 7 August 2019 By Sarah Olive It’s a popular fallacy in Japan that it is difficult to produce Othello because the country is too culturally homogenous: fallacious because, in Japan, there are several marginalised indigenous populations plus zainichi Koreans […]
