Writer: William Shakespeare
Director: Greg Doran
Originally produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in collaboration with Little Angel Theatre, Greg Doran’s rightly acclaimed, gloriously executed adaptation of Shakespeare’s narrative poem, Venus and Adonis, has had three major ‘event’ revivals over the last 22 years. The current UK tour, which takes in a sold-out few days at the Barbican Theatre’s Pit venue, sees a beautifully nuanced Simon Russell Beale step into the role of narrator and reminds us of just how much the deceptively simple mash-up of richly sensual puppetry, narration, and live instrumentation has to offer.
It is dawn. The extraordinarily handsome Adonis – puppet designer and creator Lyndie Wright conceives him as a muscular Greek god draped seductively in a chest-revealing, flimsy white toga – has his sights set on the thrills and spills of a day’s boar hunting. Venus, the Goddess of Love (Wright affords her a distinctly Rubenesque, hour-glass aesthetic), dressed in white and borne aloft by doves on a seashell-shaped chariot, spies the young man in the distance.
Shakespeare’s narrative famously flips the script on classical romance. Smitten by the boy’s haunting good looks, and frankly, who wouldn’t be, Venus becomes the hunter. She sets about a relentless, exhausting, and ultimately fruitless rhetorical and physical endeavour to entrap her handsome prey. At one point, she literally plucks him from his horse with the strength of a seasoned warrior. At another, she kisses him from the top of his head to the tip of his toes, then all the way back again, dallying a while halfway between. Doran’s direction delivers delightful wit, the bitter fury of rejection, and simmering eroticism in equal measure.
The quite literally wooden-hearted Adonis is having none of the lady’s advances. Rejecting Venus’s pretensions with the affronted pride of a stroppy teenager, he delivers a withering take-down of her sense of self-entitlement and gluttonous lust. Ignoring her frantic warnings of the fate that awaits him should he take on the boar, Adonis sets about his pursuit. Designer Rob Jones’s golden proscenium arch transforms late on into the skeletal head and bony fingers of the grim reaper himself, aided by top-notch lighting from Vince Herbert and Lauren Watson.
At the production’s visual heart is a flawless puppetry ensemble, seamlessly combining black-clad handlers with half-size puppets at the front of the stage and impeccable marionette string work at the rear. Nick Lee’s evocative guitar – hints of flamenco mashed-up with Elizabethan lute – provides an atmospheric counterpoint to Russell Beale’s measured narration. This is one of those productions in which everything comes together flawlessly. No wonder it is sold out, but catch it on tour if you can.
Runs until 27 June 2026 and continues to tour
