Macbeth @ The National Theatre, dir. Rufus Norris, 2018 Reviewed by Ronan Hatfull Macbeth is Shakespeare’s shortest and sharpest tragedy, demonstrating the playwright’s mastery of the tightly-coiled thriller. What a pity, therefore, that Rufus Norris’s production of Macbeth fails to fulfil the promise shown by Rory Kinnear and Anne-Marie Duff in 2016, when they performed […]
‘Know us by these colours’: Oregon Shakespeare Festival 2016 By Sheila T. Cavanagh, Emory University Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) in Ashland, Oregon sparked considerable controversy last year when they announced their “Play On!” initiative, whereby current playwrights and dramaturgs are being commissioned to “translate” the plays attributed to Shakespeare into twenty first century English. […]
A Woman Killed with Kindness by Thomas Heywood. Directed by Eleanor Sax for Theatron Novum at the Burton Taylor Studio, Oxford Playhouse, 25 October 2016 Reviewed by Peter Malin References to the play are to “A Woman Killed with Kindness” and Other Domestic Plays, ed. by Martin Wiggins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). This […]
King Lear, directed by Sam Mendes for the National Theatre, London at the Music Box Theater in Chicago, IL for NT Live. May 26, 2014. Reviewed by Regina Buccola In May, I had the unique experience of taking a backstage tour featuring key set pieces, props and costumes for the National Theatre’s production of King […]
Coriolanus, dir. Josie Rourke. NTL broadcast seen on 08.05.2014 at Kino Silver Screen Łódź, Poland Come for Hiddleston, stay for Shakespeare Reviewed by Magdalena Popłońska and Katarzyna Bresler Only a few years ago if we wanted to see a National Theatre Live broadcast in Poland, it would mean travelling more than 200 kilometres to a tiny […]
Review by Peter Kirwan Originally published on The Bardathon, 9 September 2013. Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II is an obvious companion piece to Shakespeare’sRichard II, both dealing with the deposition of a king arguably more preoccupied with his friends and sycophants than with his kingdom, and the two have been performed together frequently (including most famously with Ian McKellen […]
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 – […]
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 […]
Originally published on The Bardathon, 1 March 2012. Writing about web page https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/67933/productions/the-comedy-of-errors.html The NT Live juggernaut rolls on. Now well-established as a theatrical/cinematic event, it was a pleasure to see the enormous Screen 1 of Nottingham’s Broadway cinema packed out with a lively audience for the latest offering, a broadcast of Dominic Cooke’s hugely successful The Comedy of […]
