Dr Peter Kirwan

Tag: Antony and Cleopatra

  • 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…

  • Antony and Cleopatra (National Theatre) @ The Olivier Theatre, via NT Live

    Antony and Cleopatra (National Theatre) @ The Olivier Theatre, via NT Live

    In November, Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo became the first pair of co-leads in over thirty years to win the two Best Actor prizes at the Evening Standard Theatre awards. The casting alone, perhaps, made this not entirely unexpected; two Oscar-nominated actors in a big prestige National Theatre production directed by Simon Godwin, in one of his final productions before…

  • Roman Tragedies (Toneelgroep Amsterdam) @ The Barbican Theatre

    Roman Tragedies (Toneelgroep Amsterdam) @ The Barbican Theatre

    I last saw Roman Tragedies eight years ago, when I was a teeny and energetic PhD student for whom theatrical marathons were par for the course. The production was, at the time, one of the biggest influences on my understanding of theatre; it remains on my mental list of my top five Shakespeare productions, and I was…

  • Antony and Cleopatra (American Shakespeare Center) @ The Blackfriars Playhouse

    Antony and Cleopatra (American Shakespeare Center) @ The Blackfriars Playhouse

    Although Staunton’s Blackfriars was constructed first, my experience of it comes through having seen several shows previously in the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Virginia’s theatre feels very like the Wanamaker, if the Wanamaker breathed out substantially and took itself a lot less seriously. The resident company (most of the current acting company have been in…

  • Antony and Cleopatra (Warwick University Drama Society) @ Warwick Arts Centre Studio

    WUDS made a bold decision for their new take on Antony and Cleopatra. Set in a school playground, the conceit of Clare Byrne and Joshua Elliott’s production was that Antony was a game played by a group of schoolkids, just one more in a series of daily encounters among bickering, backstabbing, playful, cruel kids. Hats off to the large cast: I’ve rarely seen…

  • Antony and Cleopatra (RSC) @ The Courtyard Theatre

    Michael Boyd’s Antony and Cleopatra follows interestingly from Lucy Bailey’s Julius Caesar, the resident ensemble’s last foray into the Roman histories. While the retention of Darrell D’Silva as Mark Antony may have initially suggested a continuity between the two productions, Boyd’s Antony was in many ways the polar opposite of Bailey’s prequel. Defiantly proud of its bare thrust stage, dominated by Tom Piper’s enormous steel,…

  • Roman Tragedies (Toneelgroep Amsterdam) @ The Barbican Theatre

    A six hour version of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra stitched together. With no interval. In promenade. In Dutch with surtitles. It’s been a while since I’ve subjected myself to a Shakespearean endurance test (The Histories), and this was the kind of hardcore event which doesn’t come around very often. Happily, Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s first visit to the UK…

  • Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory) @ The Tobacco Factory

    Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory have followed a similar format for most of their ten seasons to date, putting on two classic plays a year, one after the other. This tenth anniversary season, though, marks the first time that they have tried to link their two productions into a cohesive whole, with the same ensemble…

  • Antony and Cleopatra @ The Novello Theatre

    Friday night was the chance to revisit, for one final time, the excellent ‘Antony and Cleopatra’, bookending my Complete Works marathon quite nicely with the same production, seen for a third time almost a year after I first saw it in the Swan. It was very good, but I was disappointed at how much its…

  • Antony and Cleopatra (RSC) @ The Swan Theatre

    Last night’s play was the wonderful, universally lauded ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ starring Patrick Stewart and Harriet Walter, which I reviewed way back when I first started this blog. Then, though, I was standing in the top gallery of the Swan. Tonight, I was on the front row, at times mere inches from the actors. And…