Dr Peter Kirwan

Tag: Dekker

  • The Roaring Girl (Treehouse Shakespeare Ensemble) @ The Wharf Studio

    The Roaring Girl (Treehouse Shakespeare Ensemble) @ The Wharf Studio

    For a play that puts so much emphasis on being seen, and being ostentatiously seen – from the fashions of Jack Dapper to the bargaining over clothing in the streets, from the performance of canting to the insistence on visibility in one’s own chosen guise – Treehouse Shakespeare Ensemble’s take on The Roaring Girl found…

  • The Shoemaker’s Holiday (RSC) @ The Swan Theatre

    The Shoemaker’s Holiday (RSC) @ The Swan Theatre

    The RSC’s Winter season, coming at the end of a year commemorating the centenary of the start of World War I, has been unified by its engagement with war. From new plays on Oppenheimer and the Christmas 1914 truce to the anchoring of Love’s Labour’s Lost and Love’s Labour’s Won on either side of WW1, the productions have engaged…

  • The Witch of Edmonton (RSC) @ The Swan Theatre

    The Witch of Edmonton (RSC) @ The Swan Theatre

    (note – this review is of a preview performance) The Roaring Girls season, discussed in previous posts on this blog, ended with an entirely untypical coda. Directed by a man (Gregory Doran), given an early modern setting and appearing divorced from the statements about feminism and gender roles within the RSC that had characterised the rest of the season, The…

  • The Roaring Girl (RSC) @ The Swan Theatre

    The Roaring Girl (RSC) @ The Swan Theatre

    The Roaring Girl is a much better idea than it is a play. The idea of the ‘Roaring Girl’ (the title, of course, of the current Swan season) is a fantastic crucible for exploring ideas of gender identity and sexual performance, and the involved plot of shopkeepers’ wives and rakes about town taking advantage of one…

  • The Bloody Banquet (Blood and Thunder Theatre Company) @ The Shakespeare Institute

    Thomas Dekker’s The Bloody Banquet (possibly written in collaboration with Thomas Middleton) has not been performed, to my knowledge, since the seventeenth century. It was a pleasure, therefore, to be involved in a major new revival of the play in the form of a one-off staged reading in Stratford-upon-Avon, as part of the Stratford Fringe. Blood and…

  • The Shoemaker’s Holiday (Black Sun) @ The Dell, Stratford-upon-Avon

    Since its institution during the Complete Works Festival, the Stratford open air festival at the Dell has become an annual event, offering free theatre to Stratford passers-by. While it’s now relocated slightly further along the river, the spirit of the outdoor performances has remained the same: accessible, entertaining and pleasantly brief. Perhaps most exciting prospect…