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 […]
Troilus and Cressida at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre, Boulder CO., August 4 2016 Reviewed by Harriet Archer Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida is a difficult work, sulky and intractable like so many of its characters. It is not a tragedy, or a comedy, or a history, or a romance. It is not really about its eponymous lovers, who […]
Cymbeline at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, University Theatre, Boulder CO., August 5, 2016 Reviewed by Harriet Archer Starring a wicked stepmother, a death-like sleep, a last-minute reprieve by a servant, and the platonic kindness of some rustic strangers, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline looks very like the story of Snow White at times, and Disney’s Snow White at that. The Colorado Shakespeare Festival company took this […]
Romeo and Juliet dir. Danielle Irvine, Perchance Theatre in Shakespearean performance at Cupids (NL), 2016 Reviewed by Rob Ormsby The seventh season of Shakespearean performance at Cupids (NL) extends the traditions that theatregoers have become accustomed to there. The cast includes actors familiar from past seasons, though the company (Perchance theatre since 2014; formerly known […]
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 […]
Macbeth, directed by Lucas de Man. Het Zuidelijk Toneel. Stadsschouwburg Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 6 May 2016 Review by Paul Franssen, Utrecht University The Macbeth of this production is clearly our contemporary. He inhabits a world of video conferencing and talk shows at home, of airstrikes and roadside explosive devices at the battle front. Yet, this […]
Macbeth @ Esplanade Studios, Singapore, 2016 Reviewed by Kevin Riordan The banquet scene closes with one of the most striking images in Full Show Lane Studio’s Macbeth. Banquo’s ghost, in partial drag, pushes Macbeth in a wheelchair, almost caringly. The chair has become a moving throne that bears the regent’s now-exhausted body. As they wheel […]
