Dr Peter Kirwan

Tag: Richard III

  • Richard III (Shakespeare in the Park) @ The Delacorte, via Great Performances on PBS

    Richard III (Shakespeare in the Park) @ The Delacorte, via Great Performances on PBS

    At a time when most major theatre companies are looking to use Richard III as a vehicle to give a disabled actor a starring role as a way of speaking back to a history of ‘cripped-up’ tour de forces by able-bodied actors, Robert O’Hara’s production for New York’s Shakespeare in the Park (directed for the…

  • 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…

  • Richard III (RSC) @ The Royal Shakespeare Theatre

    Richard III (RSC) @ The Royal Shakespeare Theatre

    At the end of Gregory Doran’s Richard III, the conclusion to the RSC’s latest stab at the first tetralogy, the enormous tower that stood as backdrop to Stephen Brimson Lewis’s set was revealed to be a monument. As Nicholas Armfield’s Richmond announced the joining of the white and red roses, a wreath made up of…

  • Richard III (Schaubühne) @ L’Opéra Grand Avignon (archival recording)

    Richard III (Schaubühne) @ L’Opéra Grand Avignon (archival recording)

    Everything Richard needs hangs from the ceiling. At the end of a long cable, a combined microphone, video camera and light dangle from the ceiling. With this single device, Lars Eidinger’s Richard conducts his rise to power. It’s a combination of personal diary and megaphone, a piece of tech to which only he has access and which…

  • Teenage Dick @ The Donmar Warehouse

    Teenage Dick @ The Donmar Warehouse

    The best high-school Shakespeare adaptations don’t simply look for one-on-one equivalences in their new milieu for the Shakespearean text, but engage deeply with the concerns, clichés, and stakes of their environment. To translate wars and intrigues to basketball courts or class president elections does not require matters to be trivialised simply because they are no…

  • Richard III (Shakespeare’s Globe) @ The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

    Richard III (Shakespeare’s Globe) @ The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

    It may now have been a new play, with a new king (Sarah Amankwah’s Edward IV) and his courtiers standing for a family portrait, but the stage of Richard III bore all the scars of the Wars of the Roses. Edward and his wife Elizabeth (Nina Bowers) stood centrally in the family group, atop the mound of soil…

  • Richard III (Northern Broadsides) @ Hull Truck

    Richard III (Northern Broadsides) @ Hull Truck

    On Tuesday and Wednesday, I was speaking at a conference in Newcastle on ‘Offensive Shakespeare’, the aim of the event being to theorise ‘offence’ in relation to Shakespeare, whether attempts by practitioners to use Shakespeare to offend; offended reactions to Shakespearean texts and productions; or attempts to deconstruct the icon of Shakespeare him/itself. The conference…

  • Richard III @ The Almeida, broadcast via Almeida Live

    Richard III @ The Almeida, broadcast via Almeida Live

    I’d been warned to expect it, but even so, the scene of Ralph Fiennes’s Richard III raping Aislin McGuckin’s Queen Elizabeth towards the end of Rupert Goold’s new production came out of nowhere. Falling late in a mostly intelligent, finely characterised take on the play, Fiennes and McGuckin pulled out all the stops for their final trading of wit and argument.…

  • The Wars of the Roses (RSC) (film)

    The Wars of the Roses (RSC) (film)

    The Wars of the Roses is one of those iconic productions – like Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream – that I never expected to get a chance to watch in full. Peter Hall and John Barton’s three-part condensation of the first tetralogy of history plays was one of the resounding triumphs of the young Royal Shakespeare Company.…

  • Kings of War (Toneelgroep Amsterdam) @ The Barbican Theatre

    Kings of War (Toneelgroep Amsterdam) @ The Barbican Theatre

    In 2009 I was lucky enough to see Toneelgroep Amsterdam perform Ivo van Hove’s Roman Tragedies at the Barbican. That mammoth reworking of Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra remains one of my lifetime theatrical highlights – not just for its length and ambition, but for its cohesive use of space, its innovative flexibility around the actor-audience arrangement, and its thorough…