Dr Peter Kirwan

Tag: King John

  • King John (RSC) @ The Swan Theatre

    King John (RSC) @ The Swan Theatre

    In a pointed and spectacular image towards the end of Eleanor Rhode’s production of King John, Cardinal Pandulph (Zara Ramm doing fantastic understudy work) sashayed across a stage filled with English and French soldiers wrestling and dying. King John (Rosie Sheehy) lay dead in an aluminium bathtub, bled out and soiled. As Pandulph reached centre-stage, she threw a handful…

  • King John @ Shakespeare’s Globe

    King John @ Shakespeare’s Globe

    The final performance of the Globe’s King John (claimed by Dominic Dromgoole to be the last Shakespeare play to receive a production at the theatre, although he is clearly excluding more recent attributions) took place on a sweltering summer evening and was punctuated by fainting. With the play’s religious ritual foregrounded through canopies and incense, the closeness…

  • King John (RSC) @ The Swan Theatre

    King John (RSC) @ The Swan Theatre

    The RSC’s King John is now into its final week, and remains one of the best productions the RSC has produced in quite some time. I reviewed it in full back in July, but the production has continued to go from strength to strength. What remains remarkable about the production is its visceral intensity, turning a play often…

  • King John (RSC) @ The Swan Theatre

    King John (RSC) @ The Swan Theatre

    The RSC’s King John is playing in rep with Richard III and A Soldier in Every Son: The Rise of the Aztecs as part of the “Nations at War” strand of this season’s work. It’s a fascinating notional concept, but one thing that Maria Aberg’s fresh reimagining of King John didn’t emphasise was a sense of war. This was the most domestic take on the…

  • King John (Shakespeare Institute Players) @ The Shakespeare Institute

    Jose A. Perez Diaz, as John, began tonight’s performance looking at a series of placards depicting an unblinking eye. The placards broke apart, and their bearers surrounded John in a circle. As he broke into song (“I’m sittin’ on top of the world”), his anonymous oppressors took his crown and began passing it around the…

  • Before The Bardathon

    As we enter the final week of my year-long project, I’m going to be posting a few retrospective entries in addition to the final couple of reviews. First up, I thought for interest I’d mention my PREVIOUS Shakespeare theatre-going. I haven’t been attending the theatre as long as many people think. Being a Northerner born-and-bred, and not…

  • King John (RSC) @ The Swan Theatre

    I’d be lying to say that this is one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays. When Nos do Morro were invited to do a play in the Complete Works Festival, the only two left were ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’ and ‘King John’- and to them, there wasn’t even a choice to make. So, the RSC quite bravely mounted…