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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…
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Edward II (Treehouse Shakespeare Ensemble) @ The Blackfriars Playhouse
A burgundy strip of carpet marked a sheer diagonal between the upstage right door and the downstage left steps of the Blackfriars stage. Bisecting the stage, this diagonal carpet offered a perspectival shift in relation to the straight-on view of this Edward II, a shift not dissimilar in angle to that offered by Hans Holbein’s…
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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…
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Galatea (Treehouse Shakespeare Ensemble) @ The Wharf Studio
Much of John Lyly’s Galatea riffs on individuals learning who they are while being forced to present themselves as something they are not: nymphs who’ve been magically made to fall in love, girls dressed as boys to avoid a ritual sacrifice of virgins, boys temporarily becoming apprentices to unsuitable masters. Self-identification, throughout the play, becomes…
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The Duchess of Malfi (Treehouse Shakespeare Ensemble) @ The Wharf Loft
‘I account this world a tedious theatre’ spat the Duchess (Rachel Louis). If Shakespeare’s Jacques imagines the whole world as a stage where people can play their parts, then Webster’s Duchess is tired of performing. In Treehouse Shakespeare Ensemble’s Duchess of Malfi, directed by Chase Fowler,the metaphor was literalized as an abandoned theatre came to…
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The Two Gentlemen of Verona (Treehouse Shakespeare Ensemble) @ The Wharf Loft
Perhaps there’s no such thing as Free Love. Treehouse Shakespeare Ensemble’s small-scale production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona sought to tackle the contradictions in the play by setting it in Italy’s turbulent 1970s, where the rustic old world met the cosmopolitan fashion scene, and the hippie movement bumped up against the influence of the…
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Macbeth (Treehouse Shakespeare Ensemble) @ The Wharf Loft
‘The night has been unruly’ remarked Lennox (Madison Rudolph); ‘’Twas a rough night’ agreed Macbeth (Kailey Potter). The lines resonated as an audience huddled together in the loft space of The Wharf; the planned outdoor opening of Treehouse Ensemble’s Macbeth in the garden of Rose Terrace had been scrapped as the rainstorms swept inland by…
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Dr Peter Kirwan 