Dr Peter Kirwan

Tag: All's Well That Ends Well

  • The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) [Revised] (Again) (American Shakespeare Center) @ The Blackfriars Playhouse

    The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) [Revised] (Again) (American Shakespeare Center) @ The Blackfriars Playhouse

    Every now and again, I’ve been lucky to see a revival of an existing play that makes that play feel freshly written, as if designed for that company and that moment. The reworking of Death of a Salesman for an African American family; Theatre Wallay’s reworking of The Taming of the Shrew as a commentary…

  • All’s Well that Ends Well (Shakespeare’s Globe) @ The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

    All’s Well that Ends Well (Shakespeare’s Globe) @ The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

    In the end, I only saw two productions at the Globe while it was under Emma Rice’s leadership. This wasn’t by design – I loved Rice’s work with Kneehigh and, irrespective of the ongoing complaints about her treatment of the space, I thoroughly enjoyed the version of her Midsummer Night’s Dream that the BBC broadcast last year.…

  • All’s Well that Ends Well (Arpana) @ Shakespeare’s Globe

    It is not unusual to note that, when adapting classical English texts that particularly deal with class systems and social hierarchies, from Shakespeare to Austen, the Indian caste system lends itself particularly well to direct translation. In Sunil Shanbab’s Globe to Globe production of All’s Well that Ends Well, the transgressive nature of Heli’s (Mansi Parkeh) pursuit of…

  • All’s Well That Ends Well @ Shakespeare’s Globe

    All’s Well That Ends Well @ Shakespeare’s Globe

    It was a good weekend for obscure Shakespeare in London. In between a version of the first quarto Hamlet and a rare revival of 1 Henry VI, I found time to get to the Globe, bravely leading off its main summer season with its first ever production of the little-loved All’s Well that Ends Well. It was also a rare evening…

  • Shakespeare Poetry Hour @ The Underglobe

    Just a quick note on a thoroughly pleasant event last night. As part of the British Academy’s Literature Week, Elisabeth Dutton (who did wonders with Hoffman last year) directed a series of snippets designed to illustrate interactions between players and audiences, drawn from the early modern drama and later. The programme ran as follows: Fulgens and Lucrece (Induction, with household members…

  • All’s Well That Ends Well (Warwick Shakespeare Society) @ University of Warwick Chaplaincy

    The Shakespeare Society at the University of Warwick has only been in existence for about a year and a half, yet has already worked its way through several of the most popular plays in the canon. Commendably, though, they haven’t ignored the more obscure fringes of the canon, and tonight they debuted their new production of All’s Well…

  • All Well That Ends Well (National Theatre) @ The Olivier Theatre, via NT Live

    Nicholas Hytner, in an interview with Alex Jennings that preceded the National Theatre’s second NT Live broadcast, qualified the expectations for this experimental programme in a way which chimed more with my own expectations. The broadcast of Phedre back in June was preceded by rather hyperbolic and over-ambitious suggestions that the event would recreate a theatrical experience; that the cameras would…

  • All’s Well that Ends Well (National Theatre) @ The Olivier Theatre

    The label of “problem play” has long been regarded as an unhelpful and negatively loaded description for those plays of Shakespeare’s which fit uncomfortably into neat genres, yet in the case of All’s Well That Ends Well, the label has stuck. Marianne Elliott’s new production for the National Theatre, however, made a virtue of the production’s problems by…

  • All’s Well that Ends Well (Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama) @ The Swan Theatre

    This was the first of the Young People’s Shakespeare series, of which there are five over the next fortnight- one off performances, heavily cut, each done by a different UK drama school. It’s a harsh deal for ‘All’s Well’ to only get an hour and fifteen minutes single performance when it’s a relatively little-performed play…