Directed and adapted by Tiago Rodrigues, based on a translation by Rui Carvalho Homen. Performers: Sofia Dias and Victor Roriz Date seen: 13th June, 2015 Reviewed by Francesca Rayner Within the Shakespeare canon, Antony and Cleopatra has been entirely absent from Portuguese theatre history. In fact, the only performance registered at all is a 1987 […]
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 […]
King Lear in Transit – Time Travel through Translation and Performance Reviewed by Kinga Földváry Translation is an issue for us in Hungary. It is an issue in Hungarian Shakespeare studies, and it is an equally relevant and lively area of debate concerning Shakespearean performance, so much so that translations and retranslations may even come […]
Julius Caesar. Directed by Jeff Hinkle at The City Theater, Austin, Texas. 28 February, 2015. Reviewed by Michael Saenger Austin’s City Theater is a modest but impressive institution, and this Julius Caesar makes a strong case for a relatively traditional style of Shakespearean performance. It is surely a sign of the city’s maturity that such […]
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 […]
Reviewed by Eoin Price Why do we go to plays? Is it to see extraordinary fictions, or to watch people like us? On the one hand, we know we are entertained by illusion, on the other, we know that these illusions are performed by actors, who may or may not be ‘people like us’ but […]
Evil is all around us! Reviewed by Zsolt Almási Ádám Horgas’s Macbeth[1] in the Hungarian Theatre, Budapest provides a thorough theatrical representation of the overwhelming power of evil. In this production all the smallest details line up into a coherent unity exploring magically how fragile human virtue is, how seductive evil can be. The exploration […]
Directed and Abridged by Ed Hughes, National Youth Theatre of Great Britain, Ambassadors Theatre, London, 18 November 2014. www.nyt.org.uk Reviewed by Steve Orman I’m somewhat ashamed to say that this was the first time that I had seen a production by the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain. What I can say with certainty, […]
Hamlet, dir. Jan Klata, Schauspielhaus Bochum, Gdańsk, Poland, 4 October 2014. https://www.festiwalszekspirowski.pl/index.php Reviewed by Magdalena Cieślak With Hamlet, perhaps more that with other plays, one always waits for the first words. Is it going to be “Who’s there?”, or are they going straight for Claudius’s speech? Or maybe they’ll start with Hamlet’s soliloquy? There are many possibilities. […]
