Desperate to live the truth: An Ideal Husband, Oscar Wilde
It is a strange and fascinating inversion of life by art that, as Oscar Wilde’s own life unravelled towards its final, dark ruin, his dramas became ever lighter and funnier.…
“I was made for destruction;” Wilde at Heart, Patrick Marley
The last time I saw a one-man show which an actor had personally researched about the life, times and trials of his lifelong hero, it was Simon Callow’s brilliantly vivid…
Anglian Mist, Tim Lane & Cordelia Spence
Stuff of Dreams Theatre Company first performed Anglian Mist in a site-specific, immersive performance on Orford Ness itself in June. Written by Tim Lane and Cordelia Spence, who also directs,…
Civil class war: Coriolanus, RSC
Coriolanus doesn’t often hit the modern stage: its plot, a hymn to the necessary evil of educated patrician privilege in order to provide for the politically fickle, unthinking plebeian multitude, doesn’t…
Here, too, are tears: Dido, Queen of Carthage, Marlowe, RSC
While there are many excellent reasons to read Virgil’s Aeneid from cover to cover, more than once, the fourth book of the great Roman epic (Dido’s abandonment by Aeneas and subsequent suicide)…
Power hour: Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, The Hermes Experiment at Tête à Tête
The Winter’s Tale is surely one of Shakespeare’s cruellest tragedies: Leontes’ mistaken, yet unshakeable jealousy destroys family bonds and friendships alike, culminating in blasphemy as he refuses to accept the…
Pass me my pitchfork: D.C. Moore’s Common, National Theatre
“You are blight and darkness and sin…” Lost village girl Mary comes home to her beloved Laura after a lifetime of sin in “that devil-town London”, but finds – well…
Love, pity, horror: Jack Thorne’s new Woyzeck at The Old Vic
Jack Thorne’s explosive new Woyzeck brings Büchner’s unfinished working class tragedy to Berlin in 1981, with our hero a British Army private, trying to adjust to life on the German…
Cauliflower power: Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Donmar Warehouse
How do you get, keep and wield power? What do you use it for, and why? And, if you will stop at nothing, how can the rest of society stop…
Snog, Marry, Avoid: Romeo and Juliet, The Globe, SE1
Daniel Kramer’s production of Romeo and Juliet for The Globe’s ‘Summer of Love’ season opens with a powerful visual image: two women in labour, wheeled onto the stage on…