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The Birth of Merlin (Treehouse Shakespeare Ensemble) @ The Blackfriars Playhouse
Never has a side-eye side-eyed more side-eydily than the side-eye of George Durfee’s Toclio. Amid a court of international intrigue, royal marriages, internecine conflicts, and warring magicians, the smooth Toclio – whose sudden appearance at one point caused the Briton nobles to jump in shock, and who was often the only representative of the Britons…
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King Lear (Shakespeare Theatre Company) @ The Klein Theatre
Few Lears have ever made an entrance with the panache of Patrick Page in Simon Godwin’s already-lauded Shakespeare Theatre Company production. The doors of the hangar (designed by Daniel Soule) in which his daughters, sons-in-law and attendants waited anxiously slid open. A full-size small plane could be seen through the doors, its running lights throwing…
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Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare’s Globe) @ The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
“It’s a story of men killing men killing men killing women killing men killing men killing men killing children killing men killing men killing men killing clowns killing men killing men killing men killing flies” crooned the pyjama-clad, all-female-identifying company of the Globe’s Titus Andronicus. The promise of this opening number – a murder ballad,…
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The Merchant of Venice 1936 @ Watford Palace Theatre
The choice to perform The Merchant of Venice in a current political climate rife with antisemitism specifically and xenophobia more broadly requires care, to say the least. Produced at a time when moral leadership on immigration was being provided primarily by a football pundit, Brigid Larmour’s production (created in collaboration with actor Tracy-Ann Oberman, who…
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The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare’s Globe) @ The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse and Globe Theatre
Sean Holmes’s alternately delicious and stomach-churning serving of The Winter’s Tale began with an act of ostentatiously conspicuous consumption. A table of four were all served with ortolans, the tiny bird eaten whole while wearing a towel over one’s head. The consumption of ortolans, as famously depicted in Succession (a show this production referenced more…
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Romeo and Julie (National Theatre) @ The Dorfman Theatre
While almost any new play or film featuring two lovers kept apart by external forces risks being associated with Romeo and Juliet, it’s rare that one signals the connection in its title as boldly as Gary Owen’s Romeo and Julie. What’s more surprising is that the connections between Shakespeare and this play are so loose that the…
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As You Like It (American Shakespeare Center) @ The Blackfriars Playhouse
‘Don’t worry. Be happy’ sang Amiens (Kenzie Ross), as Orlando (Kayla Carter) and Adam (Summer England) were welcomed into the forest court of Duke Senior (Topher Embrey). The simple song, strummed out on a uke, acted as a salve after this production’s main moment of tension, during which a desperate Orlando had vaulted onto the…
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GUEST POST: Doctor Faustus (Mary Baldwin Shakespeare & Performance) @ The Blackfriars Playhouse
This is a guest post by Austen Bell, a student from the inaugural cohort of my “Reviewing Shakespeare” class at Mary Baldwin University. For reasons that will be obvious, I wasn’t in a position to review the 11pm one-night-only staged reading of Doctor Faustus directed by Hailey Pearce as part of the MBU Shakespeare and…
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The Rover (MBU Shakespeare & Performance) @ The Wharf Loft
As an analogue for the Naples of Aphra Behn’s The Rover, Gold Rush-era San Francisco has natural affordances. In Alaina Smith’s beautifully reconceived world for the play, the lure of gold offered a capitalist reconfiguring of Carnival, in which the suspension of rules was a direct consequence of a destination where everyone is arriving and…
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The Spanish Tragedy (MBU Shakespeare & Performance) @ The Wharf Loft
Sergio Leone famously described his editing of Once Upon a Time in the West as timed to the slowing heartbeat of a dying man; at the structural, formal level, the film slowly loses its breath, its pulse, suffusing the whole with the weight of passing. If Alaina Smith’s Gold Rush-set Rover borrowed and parodied the…
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Dr Peter Kirwan 