Dr Peter Kirwan

Tag: Kyd

  • The Spanish Tragedy (MBU Shakespeare & Performance) @ The Wharf Loft

    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…

  • The Spanish Tragedy (Planet Theatre Productions) @ The Rose Bankside

    Or perhaps that should be The Spanish Comedy; for Adrian Brown’s new production of Kyd’s epochal play understood the play primarily through burlesque. To render Elizabethan revenge tragedies disproportionately comic is, of course, a standard modern strategy, often used to great effect in productions of Titus Andronicus and even Hamlet, as well as to great effect in the Rose’s recent production…

  • Soliman and Perseda (Trifle Productions) @ The Rose Bankside

    The Rose Theatre in Bankside is a very different enterprise to its big brother around the corner, Shakespeare’s Globe. Where the reconstructed Globe presents “living history”, a modern reimagining of a Shakespearean theatre, the exposed archaeological remains of the Rose provide a very different kind of experience. In a low-roofed cavern, red fibre-optic light tubes outline the vague shape…