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 […]
Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Mark Rylance. The Old Vic, London, September 2013. As we entered the Old Vic for Mark Rylance’s production of Much Ado About Nothing, songs of the 1940s played over the loudspeakers; the programme (which included much propaganda for the Shakespeare-didn’t-write-Shakespeare cause) claimed that the Second World War setting ‘serves […]
Au moins j’aurai laissé un beau cadavre [At least I will have left a beautiful corpse], adapted from Hamlet and directed by Vincent Macaigne, Avignon Festival, Cloître des Carmes, Avignon, 10 July 2011, tiered-seating, centre rear. Review by Florence March The actors are already there, singing, dancing, clapping and inviting us to join in. The fourteenth-century […]
Twelfth Night, directed by Edward Hall, Théâtre des Amandiers, Nanterre, 24 and 27 November 2012, mid stalls. By Stéphane Huet Edward Hall’s Propeller company chose the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre for the first performance in France of its magnificent Twelfth Night, a play that exists at the edges, along borders between genders, households, life and […]
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 […]
Coriolan/us, directed by Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes for National Theatre Wales, Hangar 858, RAF St. Athan, Vale of Glamorgan, 15th August 2012. By Harry Fox Davies Hangar 858 at RAF St Athan on the coast of South Wales was both the theatre space and setting for Coriolan/us. Infused with Bertolt Brecht’s 1950s adaptation of […]
Der bestrafte Brudermord Performed by Hidden Room Theatre Directed by Beth Burns Blackfriars Playhouse, Staunton, Virginia 25 October 2013 Review by James Loehlin Der bestrafte Brudermord has been getting a lot of attention lately. This early German version of Hamlet—one of the first surviving adaptations of a Shakespeare play into another language—was performed in […]
Originally published in The Huffington Post, 9 March 2013. Andrew Hilton’s production of King Lear, currently at Bristol’s Tobacco Factory until March 24, is a gripping rendition of Shakespeare’s most distressing tragedy, unadorned by heavy-handed gimmicks and sensitive to the text. As usual with anyShakespeare at the Tobacco Factory production, part of its strength comes from its excellent […]
