Tag Archives: William Shakespeare

Writer: William Shakespeare Director: Rufus Norris Reviewer: Joan Phillips Raven-black and using the full depth of Theatre Royal Plymouth's deep stage, designer Rae Smith's cavernous, almost subterranean set, ominously establishes the doomed atmosphere that permeates throughout the National Theatre's production of Macbeth. A huge arched bridge descends sharply to the front of the stage at floor level, and ascending to ...

Writer: William Shakespeare Director: Dominic Hill Reviewer: Edie Ranvier Forget the witches, haunted banquets and walking trees: the bloody beating heart of Shakespeare’s Macbeth is the relationship between the regicidal Scot and his fiendlike queen, who between them nab almost all the best lines in the Scottish Play. So the vision of director Dominic Hill and dramaturg Frances Poet for ...

Writer: William Shakespeare Director: Rufus Norris Reviewer: Jay Nuttall Beginning its UK tour at The Lowry Theatre in Salford, The National Theatre’s touring production of Macbeth originally starred Rory Kinnear as the Scottish Lord and Anne-Marie Duff as his scheming wife, the production has been entirely recast as it takes to the road for a six-month tour. The National Theatre’s Artistic ...

Writer: William Shakespeare Music: Dan Gillespie Sells Director: Robert Hastie Choreographer: Darragh O’Leary Reviewer: Janet Jepson “The course of true love never did run smooth”, so goes the most quoted line from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A sentiment totally echoed in real life, but never so true as in this magical tale of both fairy and human love affairs. It ...

Writer: William Shakespeare  Director: Yaël Farber  Reviewer: Ciara L. Murphy “Now might I do it”. The closing quotation of Yaël Farber’s director’s note signals a willingness to try. To try to bring new meaning to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. A Hamlet for our times, perhaps. However, this contemporary production raises one question for this reviewer: why? Alas, this question remains unanswered. It is clear ...

Writer: William Shakespeare Director: Jude Christian Reviewer: Jo Beggs This co-production between Lyric Hammersmith and HOME could so easily be all concept and little content, given that it is pretty much what you might imagine from the title. Heavily abridged, the two plays are performed back to back with the same cast, drawing some neat parallels while retaining their individual ...

Writer: William Shakespeare Director: Nick Bagnall Reviewer: Karl O'Doherty Love's Labour's Lost is more a philosophic meditation on art, love and melancholy than a play. But in the best way. A rattling thoroughfare of discourse, pretty words, wit and self indulgent writing from Shakespeare takes us through a lacklustre plot about princes and princesses. Far from heavy going, however, the ...

Writer: William Shakespeare  Adaptor: Chris Bush  Music: Jim Fortune  Director: Emily Lim  Reviewer: Stephen Bates  Pericles, Prince of Tyre is not William Shakespeare’s best play, nor his best-known play and, according to many scholars, it is not wholly his play at all, but here, in the unlikeliest of circumstances, a case can be made for it being one of his ...