Back in the 1920s someone complained there wasn’t a play on the London stage that didn’t have a telephone in it. While it’s the lifeblood of theatre to move with the times, a mania for modish contemporaneity can only get you so far. The danger is especially endemic in theatre troupes dedicated to outreach and
The RSC’s Complete Works festival continues to produce wondrous juxtapositions. In the Courtyard Theatre Michael Boyd has rounded off his Wars of the Roses sequence with a Richard III which for a week played alongside an Arab reworking of the same play in the Swan. There seems no end to the uses to which the
Shakespeare’s ill-advised reimagining of Falstaff as a buffoon at large in Windsor has always been fair game for adaptation. The story goes that he wrote The Merry Wives in response to Queen Elizabeth’s wish to see Sir John in love. The fee may have been a good one and the Bard actually subverts the wish
In his late ‘romances’ Shakespeare reaches out for happy endings in which sinners are forgiven and the unjustly dead restored to life. This, plainly enough, is territory more problematic than his worlds of tragedy and comedy. For Cymbeline, the RSC’s Complete Works cycle ordered up a rewrite from the Cornish Kneehigh troupe and for The
Michael Boyd’s Complete Works festival may not have over-garlanded Stratford with bunting and flags, but it’s made the town a much more buzzy place. Boyd is not only bringing back some of the best Shakespeareans of the older generation — including Patrick Stewart as Antony and Prospero, and Ian McKellen as Lear — but also
The programme gets it right in rating Henry VIII ‘at the edge of William Shakespeare’s drama and theatre’. It’s from the very end of his working life, co-written with John Fletcher, and is but seldom given. This, as became abundantly apparent in AandBC’s production for the RSC’s Complete Works, is because it’s a dry biscuit,
The story so far of the RSC’s Complete Works marathon has been largely that of performances, some wonderfully rich and strange, coming in from abroad. Unable to spend an entire summer camped out in Stratford, I have still to catch up with some of the reputedly stronger offerings by the home team. But even the
On a perfect summer’s day by the Avon it was the turn of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater to take the stage at the Swan It was really rather a surprise to stumble across Shakespeare in his native tongue after the revelatory pleasures (I do not jest) of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a cornucopia of
Titus Andronicus is the Shakespeare shocker of the moment. At the Globe in London the groundlings have made Page Three news by fainting away in droves as limbs are lopped and tongues excised in Lucy Bailey’s staging (which I regret I haven’t seen). In the Daily Telegraph Charles Spencer rates it the hottest, goriest ticket
Listing page content here In my first report (13 May) from the front line of the RSC’s Complete Works festival, I praised a visiting German company’s take on Othello, making unfavourable comparison between its radical daring and the RSC’s own often disappointing response to the big S in its title. If that was an unkind
Listing page content here Completism has become a maddening obsession these days with the BBC’s Radio Three. Every crotchet of Beethoven given in a week, every demisemiquaver of Webern encompassed within hours, two weeks of wall-to-wall Bach before Christmas, and, most recently, Wagner’s Ring spun into a single day. What’s wrong is that good music
At its première just over 50 years ago, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible was, at least in part, a sane man’s strike against America’s McCarthyite paranoia about communism. Miller’s cover for his protest was, of course, the infamous Salem witch-hunts conducted by the New England Puritans in 1692. In resurrecting the play as its tribute to
It is all the fault of John Tusa. He’d been slated to give a lecture to launch the RSC’s autumn festival of new work. This year’s focus has been on the West’s relationship with what is usually called the developing world. The talk was to have been at 11.00 a.m., and I’d booked into a
Farewell to Bonfire Night, farewell to the heedless celebration of ‘gun- powder, treason and plot’. Events since 9/11 have branded us all with the grim reality of religiously inspired terrorism. Play after play now seeks to dramatise the underlying causes. Who’s to say that the theatre doesn’t stand at least as good a chance as
The other day on Radio Four David Hare set one of his namesakes running when he remarked that the RSC was ‘completely irrelevant to the theatrical life of the country’. Well, certainly in so far as it’s a company dedicated to the Swan of Avon rather than the Bard of Hampstead. Is it self-evident that
A chill spring day in Stratford for the RSC’s launch of its summer comedies season with a new Midsummer Night’s Dream from Gregory Doran. A production to warm the heart? Certainly, for how could any half-competent staging fail to do so, and anything directed by Doran is usually rather better than that. But where so
What does anyone readily recall of the Two Gents other than the servant Launce and his magnificent dog Crab? Maybe that’s all you need to remember, for it’s really only in Launce’s observations on Crab that the unmistakeable voice of Shakespeare surfaces from the dross of a comedy that may well have been his first.