Dr Peter Kirwan

Tag: Rowley

  • The Birth of Merlin (Treehouse Shakespeare Ensemble) @ The Blackfriars Playhouse

    The Birth of Merlin (Treehouse Shakespeare Ensemble) @ The Blackfriars Playhouse

    Never has a side-eye side-eyed more side-eydily than the side-eye of George Durfee’s Toclio. Amid a court of international intrigue, royal marriages, internecine conflicts, and warring magicians, the smooth Toclio – whose sudden appearance at one point caused the Briton nobles to jump in shock, and who was often the only representative of the Britons…

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

    The Changeling (Shakespeare’s Globe) @ The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

    Note: This review is based on a preview performance. The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, as with its more established counterpart, works much better for comedy than tragedy, in my eyes at least. The one outstanding success of the theatre so far has been its side-splitting The Knight of the Burning Pestle, but even in its tragedies it…

  • 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 Changeling @ The Young Vic

    The Changeling @ The Young Vic

    With the bulk of the audience divided from the main stage by a net barrier, it quickly became clear that Joe Hill-Gibbins’s celebrated production of Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling was deeply concerned with the question of who, exactly, was being watched. While the floor-level stage surrounded by tiers and galleries of spectators cast the central action at the…

  • The Changeling (Shakespeare Institute Players) @ The Shakespeare Institute

    The poster for the new production by the Shakespeare Institute Players advertised “The Changeling by Thomas Middleton”. Beneath, in much smaller letters, came the almost apologetic “and William Rowley”. It’s an interesting reminder of the hierarchies that persist in the presentation of collaborative work, even when Shakespeare isn’t involved. It also pointed to a severe editing…

  • Compulsion (film)

    This one almost slipped under the wire. Last night, ITV premiered a new one-off drama called Compulsion, heavily based on Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling and starring Ray Winstone and Parminder Nagra. The actual “Changeling” subplot is completely removed in order to focus on the main relationship between Anjika (Nagra, in the Beatrice-Joanna role) and Don Flowers (Winstone, DeFlores). Anjika is the…