When I read that in Justin Audibert’s production the men would be played by women and the women by men I was all set to hate it. But then I thought it might be interesting. If, at the end of what Shakespeare wrote, Katerina triumphs then it might be interesting to see a production when the men triumph and I was amazed that I would be seeing an anti-feminist interpretation of the play.
That’s the great thing about live theatre. You can be completely wrong and I was wrong here on both counts.
Amanda Harris is strong and dominant as Baptista Minola and so sets the matriarchy setting firmly right from the start. The boys, Katherine (Joseph Arkley) showing a little bit of feistiness at the start and Bianco (James Cooney), established as a wimp at the start and maintaining this throughout, were nowhere as interesting as those characters played by women. Straight from a triumphant Jacques in As You Like It Sophie Stanton as Gremia is equally good here, showing off by gliding on metaphorical casters except at the end of the first half where for a single moment she realises she is defeated in her absurd quest for the juvenile Bianco. Claire Price is wonderful as Petruchia. Her character is much less obnoxious than usual and I found myself rooting for her in her task of subduing a dull Katherine. Melody Brown is also energetic and powerful as Vincentia.
Amy Trigg in her turbo charged wheelchair as Biondella is full of life and vigour. She could outsprint everyone – clever for the resourceful Biondella, whose set pieces were delivered at breakneck speed with every word audible. Charlotte Arrowsmith as the signing Curtis is as good here as she was in As You Like It and it is a great touch by Audibert not to translate what she signs. All Petruchio’s household know exactly what she is saying by her signs, even though we don’t. After all, she is talking to them.
The rest of the cast are all o.k. One thing I didn’t understand, though. The only significant character not to be gender switched is Grumio (splendidly played by Richard Clews). Why? Bill thought it might be because he was played as gay. If so I don’t approve. I don’t think gay men are women really.
There is song and dance. Indeed the play opens with a Spanish style dance. I didn’t get why it was appropriate to be Spanish but the dancing was great – better than the singing at the Preview we went to, but that might improve. You could see why Leo Wan was in it. He can sing.
There were several interesting and stimulating choices. In the sun and moon scene both Katherine and Petruchio drink water before she metaphorically baptises him. I liked the way Katherine was defiantly eating a chicken leg in his opening scene and eating another at the festivities at the end. I liked the way Petruchia kissed Katherine at the end rather than treading on her hand.
Hannah Clark’s costumes are sort of period, sumptuous, beautifully made, and full. Katherine’s wedding outfit, lit at first with black light, is stunning. Gremia’s handling and fondling of her sword was hilarious, particularly the way she wanked it at moments of stress. Petruchia’s odd boots and Grumio’s down-gyved one at the wedding scene were nice touches. I didn’t understand why Katherine didn’t have a wig, though. It certainly made her look out of place in company with these people. Can that be the purpose of it?
There’s a lot to enjoy here. Unfortunately for me it made clear the weaknesses in Shakespeare’s script. In this production it seemed obvious that Shakespeare was not interested in either Katherine or Bianco in the openings Acts they are barely characterised and have almost no motivation. I didn’t think Katherine was worth listening to before the final speech and the only characterisation of Bianco seemed to be an exaggerated walk and the tossing of his absurdly long locks. There was far too much sub-plot in the first half and I thought all the suitor for Bianco stuff was not only strung out but rather tedious. The play is about sex and money. Money was brought out well.
I think that seeing As You Like It and Taming of the Shrew as a pair is the way to do it. That experience shows off the versatility and skills of the best actors and the ways Shakespeare can be interpreted in many different ways.
Come and see them. There will be a warm welcome for you at Moss Cottage.
Romeo & Juliet. Review by Peter Buckroyd.
Romeo and Juliet
Royal Shakespeare Theatre
We nearly always go to the previews of the plays at the RSC and we have yet to go to one directed
either by Gregory Doran or Erica Whyman which isn’t completely ready for public performance.
I enjoyed this brilliantly paced production, splendidly directed by Erica Whyman, for many reasons. It
was great to see characters who are the age Shakespeare intended. You can believe that Juliet (Karen
Fishwick), talking ten to the dozen, is fourteen and her mother (Mariam Haque) twenty eight. Romeo
(Bally Gill) is also a convincing teenager with streetwise swagger, rapid changes of emotion,
impetuosity and body in perpetual motion. It is also refreshing to see a modern production which is
contemporary. It is dominated by gangland culture where the races and genders are mixed and knife
crime is rife. I think it’s most inventive of Whyman to present iambic pentameter and rhyming
couplets as characteristic of rap-like street culture; the form of language itself becomes myth. And
Romeo’s purchase from the apothecary makes clear that drug dealing is in contemporary cities a
response to poverty and threatened destitution.
You can see that although Shakespeare calls the feud an ‘ancient quarrel’ it is passed down from
generation to generation. Tybalt’s irrational belligerence is mirrored by Capulet in his vile and
abusive treatment of Juliet. In that scene you can easily imagine Lord Capulet in a street gang fifteen
or twenty years previously. The verse is well delivered throughout but the language and rhythms are
from the street. Splendid. There is impressive attention to detail, too. Don’t miss (as most of the
audience did when I saw it) the dumb show with Romeo and Juliet in bed together during the interval.
I had not noticed before how Lord Capulet talks about Juliet in the third person even while she is
present. The most highly political and social statement comes at the end of the play where the dead
walk among the living and where there is little understanding of how to change the world except by
splitting and violence – timely for me in week where the irrational President Trump took on Iran,
alienated Europe and was busy cosying up to North Korea.
Tom Piper’s set is simple. No need for the RSC to spend loads of money just for the sake of it when
the play is what we have gone to see. There’s a big cube with an open face which can be turned roun
as which deals with all the location changes prompting the thought that no matter who is involved and
wherever it is taking place the same things recur. There’s a small ladder, some ladders on the outside
of the cube and an armchair which is carried on and off. It’s all the more effective, therefore, when
after Tybalt’s death red candles, red roses and a red shroud are brought on. The complete lack of
unnecessary frills is demonstrated when the dead Tybalt is placed on the shroud which is then pulled
easily off stage – far more effective than trying to heave a sizeable Tybalt (Raphale Sowole) off by
muscle power. The music composed by Sophie Cotton, too, is contemporary and effective in creating
moods. The rock music at Capulet’s feast, with its undertones of energy and anarchy, creates
wonderful prolepsis and dramatic irony.
There are some subtleties of characterisation, too, all of which make sense of some of the problems in
the play. Rather than gloss over it, Whyman deals with the behaviour of Lady Capulet. She is faced
with a dilemma: she loves her daughter but is scared of her husband. She knows that he will react
violently towards Juliet when she refuses to marry Paris; that is why she leaves Juliet to him. It is for
her own survival that she sides with her husband. Paris is gentle, loyal and charming, genuinely
distressed at Juliet’s death. That is why he visits the monument at the end. Friar Lawrence (Andrew
French) is also interestingly characterised. In a different way from the street gang members he, too,
acts on the spur of the moment. All his decisions are made because he has just thought of them. This
is a clever choice because he’s just like Romeo, really. And one of the real problems of the text is
what to do with Mercutio and how. As a female gang member this Mercutio, played with
extraordinary physicality and energy by Charlotte Josephine, tries to outmale the gang’s males but
suffers in the end for it .The Duke, too, is female, striding on stage in her sharp suit and shoes and
making pronnouncements which sound authoritative but do little to solve society’s problems. We
cannot avoid thinking of our present Prime Minister. In this way Whyman invites us to think about all
the females in the play and their places in their society. And if we do that she has forced us to reflect
on contemporary Britain.
We are also invited to think about class, ethnicity and background. It becomes clear that some
members of the lower classes such as Balthasar (Tom Padley) have unfailing loyalty to their masters
in refusing to leave the monument even when instructed to do so, unlike Friar Lawrence who flees in
fright in order to save his own skin. Whyman gives the one illiterate character in the play a West
Indian accent. Lady Capulet and Juliet have Scottish accents. Benvolio a northern one. The Nurse
(splendidly played by Ishia Bennison), having escaped from her position merely as a wet nurse, has to
side with her masters in telling Juliet to marry Paris because she needs to keep her job. The black
characters, like the white, have a range of accents.
I feel I haven’t done justice to the depth and sophistication of the problemisation and interrogation of
the text which Whyman has undertaken. It is a play about extremism and impetuosity. It is a study in
false logic. It is truly contemporary with much to say about a multi-ethnic society. I have seen it
twice already and I am looking forward to seeing it again.
Coriolanus. Review by Peter Buckroyd
Coriolanus
This isn’t one of Shakespeare’s most frequently performed plays, and for several reasons. Coriolanus doesn’t have any soliloquies so the audience cannot hear what is going on in his head and why he changes his course and allegiance several times. Although he dies at the end the play is more of history play than a tragedy unless the actor can let the audience feel the sense of tragic waste at the end. Coriolanus is also dominated by his mother, Volumnia, and her ambitions for him.We need to understand why. His wife Virgilia has little to say or do and so it is hard to see anything of a relationship. Virgilia has few lines and some of them were cut. This robbed the scene in Act V of any significance because we had seen so little of the relationship between husband and wife earlier. The relationship between Coriolanus and Aufidius also has to be accounted for. All these are challenges of character and relationships which are not easy to solve. The director needs to work hard to fill in some of the gaps that Shakespeare left in the play.
Angus Jackson’s production establishes the play’s modernity at the beginning with a fork lift truck moving sacks of grain into a secure area so that it cannot be accessed by the people who rush on as an angry modern dress mob in hoodies as soon as it has been secured for the patricians. It is a shame that the truck plays no further part in the play, suggesting that it is just an expensive gimmick. Indeed the visual spectacles were all limited in their usefulness – the fork lift truck, the sacks of corn, the big bleachers, the Venus statue and the Rome statue merely to denote location.
Robert Innes Hopkins’s design is four square, symmetrical, uncomfortable and unyielding. Grey is the dominant colour. The whole thing is bleak and cold to look at. Given the rigidity of the set, I didn’t understand the untidy asymmetrical group pictures throughout.
I did think it was an interesting choice, however, to make Coriolanus so unappealing. Sope Dirisu’s utterances as Coriolanus are uniformly uninteresting, with repeated inflections and a very narrow vocal range. By the time the interval came, at the point of Coriolanus’s self-banishment from Rome, I agreed with the two tribunes that it would have been better if he had been thrown from the Tarpeian Rock there and then. Dirisu gave his character a little more range and variety in the second half but I could never warm to him.
Jackson had obviously decided that Aufidius was by far the more interesting character although it was, I thought, a shame that James Corrigan’s plentiful beard robbed him of some of the facial expressions that he has shown off to tremendous advantage in his previous roles. But this Aufidius was full of power and authority and the sword fights and wrestling match with Coriolanus were skilfully choreographed and exciting to watch. There was a moment, too, where Corrigan was allowed to show some depth and motivation, with his summary dismissal of his wife’s importance and the hints of his bisexual (?) attraction for Coriolanus. I was a bit disappointed that this did not seem to have been worked through the whole production.
Also exciting to watch was Haydn Gwynn’s wonderful Volumnia (although I didn’t understand the dowdy second half women’s costumes which looked as if they had come from a charity shop, unless it was an attempt to parallel their position at the end of the play with Coriolanus’s in his gown of humility). The scene between Coriolanus and Volumnia where she is advocating hypocritical pragmatism while he is affectless and almost autistic brought an unexpected warmth to her character, albeit at the expense of the hero.
The decision to make Sicinius Veletus (Jackie Morrison) and Junius Brutus (Martina Laird) female was interesting throughout, especially as it brought to mind Scottish and Welsh nationalism, opposing the conservatism of the patricians.
Other characters were worth watching. Charles Aitken was striking as Cominius and Paul Jesson had some convincing moments in the thankless and difficult role of Menenius.
I didn’t think that the modern dress worked very well. I could draw few contemporary parallels except of the most general kind. Coriolanus’s arrival to join up with Aufidius dressed as an American student in Europe backpacking for the summer was not an inspired choice. I didn’t think the music contributed anything worthwhile, either, particularly the singing and the blinding lights at the end.
This is a bleak production of a bleak play. In that it is suceessful. But it is the first of this season’s productions that I don’t want to see again.
Dido, Queen of Carthage. Review by Peter Buckroyd.
Dido, Queen of Carthage
I read this play by Marlowe fifty years ago when I was an undergraduate. I thought it was unputonable. So I read it again before I went to the Swan to see Kimberley Sykes’s production. I still thought it was impossible.
It certainly isn’t a very obvious twenty-first century blockbuster, but it’s always good to see an old play by a great dramatist for the first time. I wasn’t disappointed. It helps to know a bit about the Trojan wars in order to be able to follow some of the references, but it’s easy to mug that up on the internet before you go.
This is the first Marlowe production at the RSC where I have heard Marlowe’s ‘mighty line’ and I suspect that the RSC’s voice coach Anna McSweeney did a great deal of work with the company to make the verse speaking so effective,
The story is very simple. Aeneas is shipwrecked in Carthage after the Trojan war. The gods manipulate Dido into falling in love with him. She rejects her would be lover Iarbus. Aeneas eventually leaves her. She kills herself.
There is a lot of talk in this play, even though many of the long poetic speeches are cut or curtailed. But it’s made very palatable by Ti Green’s wonderful design. There are some splendid effects and lovely use of the stage space. The banquet scene where Aeneas tells the story of the Trojan War has an authentic middle eastern meal on small benches while the other characters are the audience and the audience watches the audience watching Aeneas, played by Sandy Grierson. Lovely frames.
The set is a sandpit, creating the footprints of the gods at the beginning – a metaphor for the whole of the action – the dousing of fire and the connections of the characters with shifting ground, both physical and metaphorical. Wonderful effects are created by proscenium rainstorms, characters arriving through the water – sea, rain – proleptically preparing for the play’s conclusion.
Dido’s suitor Iarbus (Daniel York) was not at all what I epected from reading the play. He held the audience’s fascinaion throughout. I had also not expected my reaction to the gods. They even control the music (a wonderful eclectic score by Mike Fletcher). It is they who are responsible for the tragedy at the end and it is their conspiracy to make Dido fall in love with Aeneas which leads to our complex reactions to her death at the end. It isn’t just a thwarted love story; it all happens because of blind belief in the gods (God? Protestant? Catholic? Marlowe as atheist?)
There are other hints of Marlovian subtext, nicely but subtly brought out. There is the relationship between Jupiter the (splendid Nicholas Day) and Ganymede (the cute Andro Cowperthwaite) and between Juno and Hermes. It was good to see a hilarious Cupid played by Ben Goffe. Watch out for some fascinating details. There are some tattooed feet. There are presaging echoes of Doctor Faustus. I ended up thinking how powerful this play must have been when Dido was played by a teenage boy.
I wish the ending had been more subdued and subtler. I could have done without all the squirming as Dido dies, and the end was shouty and screamy. The last very few minutes apart I really enjoyed this rarely played piece. You should see it. Come and make your stay complete with a night at Moss Cottage.
King Lear. Review by Peter Buckroyd.
King Lear
We have finally managed to get to see Greg Doran’s eagerly awaited production of King Lear starring Antony Sher. Sher is splendid at the beginning and the ending of the play. The middle I was less convinced by. Sher characterises Lear physically by slightly hunched shoulders, a slightly forward bent posture and by bear-like heaviness, matched by his animal fur costume. Vocally, though, there is a good deal of monotone. It is not entirely Sher’s fault that I could not warm to him mad on the heath. He is elevated on an unnecessary metal structure and surrounded by an unnecessary huge tarpaulin (which muffed its lines badly on the night we went necessitating a pause in the production while the tarpaulin was removed). The best of Sher was when he was relieved of this clutter. By the end we are able to understand his Lear. Lear ‘slenderly knows himself’. He reacts with gusto to the moment but he doesn’t link those moments together and so he is perceived by others as inconsistent while he is simply responding to whatever moment presents itself to him without joining them together and without thinking in a systematic way.
The best moment in the production is when Lear and the blind Gloucester are sitting talking on an otherwise bare stage. That brings me to the real star of this production: David Troughton as Gloucester. Every phase in Gloucester’s rich characterisation is portrayed with wonderful clarity, both physical and vocal. I didn’t watch the blinding, of course, which took place in another structure – a Perspex box – but I did listen. Troughton’s Gloucester is an efficient court servant, a deluded credulous father, a self-sacrificing prisoner, a dignified victim of torture, a blind creature of insight and a despairing tragic figure. The fall from the ‘cliff’ was breathtaking in its simplicity. It is a wonderful performance.
There are other excellent performances, too. Oliver Johnstone was equally powerful and effective as Edgar. Natalie Simpson was strong, practical and dignified as Cordelia, as clear and unfussy as you could ask for. Both James Clyde as Cornwall and Clarence Smith as Albany make the most of their thankless roles and Antony Byrne’s Kent is as powerful in disguise as he was before his disgrace. I have thought long and hard about Paapa Essiedu’s Edmund because I have to admit that while I was sitting in the theatre I could not grasp why he did so little. But then it dawned on me. Edmund is completely devoid of affect. He is a heartless, conscienceless, evil bastard who smiles and smiles and is a villain. Clever, I now think, and interesting because it makes Goneril and Regan even more stupid for being in love with him. And even cleverer when you realise that he just acts in and on the moment as Lear does.
As for design, I thought the high chair on which Lear appeared in Act I effective. I thought Act I, as well as being brilliantly cut, looked stunning in black and gold while Cordelia was in white and Lear draped in furs. The hand held barren trees and what became two planets were thematically effective. The dim lighting and the preponderance of shadows are completely in keeping with the play’s mood, and the tableau of Lear with the dead Cordelia echoing Michelangelo’s Pieta, created another layer of depth and meaning.
This is a production well worth seeing. It has all the hallmarks of Doran’s contrast between movement and stillness, his lovely stage pictures, his brilliant cutting, his control of pace, his eschewing of stagey ‘acting’, his creation of intense and understated emotional moments.
Come and see it and make it an enhanced treat with a night at Moss Cottage.
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