One of the best things about Shakespeare is his endless capacity to surprise you. This is partly because he simply wrote so much: they may be more than four centuries…
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…
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…
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…
Macbeth’s turbulent emotions and fierce storms make it ironically ideally suited to an English summer evening, as the clouds gather menacingly overhead (although I managed to stay dry at Iford).…
Melly Still’s magical production of Janáček‘s The Cunning Little Vixen (revival, 2012) is back, the only opera I know to have been born from a comic strip. Still’s vision balances a…
Glyndebourne’s short opera from Luke Styles sets Macbeth in a modern British army unit deployed, judging by their desert fatigues, somewhere in the Middle East East (so, feel free to…
In the mixed bag that is Tête à Tête, you always get at least one well-intentioned flop. they heavily vanish is a prime example. The title is an excerpt from…
Oberon reaches near-Bowie levels of magnificence in a feather-fringed fur coat, PVC trousers and glam rock makeup; Tytania shimmers in a pink evening gown and boa worthy of any cabaret…
What happens when a great man falls? And what happens to you, if you were the one to make him fall? Above all, what happens to your society, his society,…