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 old, but his plays still have the capacity to hit us afresh – particularly if, like Measure for Measure, they lurk quietly amidst his collected…
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 sit at all well with modern political correctness. Even in an age of Remoaning, as the failed political class continue to wring their well-manicured hands…
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 Oracle of Apollo which exonerates his blameless wife. Even the eventual restoration of his wife and daughter, an earthly miracle achieved only by the courage…
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 gurneys, bring forth from their fatal loins a pair of tiny child-sized coffins, covered in roses. The visual lexicon of the Mexican Day of the…
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). Director Bruno Ravella presides over a sophisticated traditional reading which proves faithful to both Shakespeare’s eerie original, and also to Verdi’s passionate protests for Italian…
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 fine naturalistic sense with elements of Eastern European folktale and cartoon to deliver a world of animals bursting with colour, while humans exist in monochrome…
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 pick a conflict from the ever-mounting list of today’s tragedies). The libretto is carved straight from Shakespeare’s original by Ted Huffman, who also directs this…
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 one of Shakespeare’s own stage directions: an elegant bit of magpie borrowing. The piece is intended as “a sustained homage to the words of The…
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 diva. Trinity Laban’s 1970s A Midsummer Night’s Dream takes Britten to the disco – and back again. Cordelia Chisholm’s clean, hard set, made luscious with…
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, after he has fallen? Shakespeare’s study of political extremism, violence and civil war feels almost chillingly relevant today: as Rome slips from angry whispers and…