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December 31, 2017 by billbruce Leave a Comment

Rsc Twelfth Night, review by Peter Buckroyd

Royal Shakespeare Theatre
Twelfth Night

Maybe it’s because Shakespeare chose Illyria as the setting for his play – part of the western Balkans in the time of classical antiquity – a place with no particular resonances either for an Elizabethan/Jacobean audience or for us, particularly when Sebastian and Antonio are staying at a hostelry at the Elephant just down the road from Bankside in London – that directors and designers have chosen to set the plays anywhere they like. Most of those I have seen have been decorative. But the best productions choose somewhere which enriches the text rather than just decorates it. I’m thinking particularly of the RSC production about thirty years ago which set the play in Stratford and made the entertainer Feste’s home ‘hard by the church’ New Place, setting off a mass of possible biographical allusions in the play. But I haven’t seen many productions like that.
Director Christopher Luscombe and designer Simon Higlett have chosen the 1890s for their production, maybe fortuitously but particularly appropriately timed because of the current Oscar Wilde season at the Vaudeville theatre in London. The sometimes dodgy sexual and gender issues in the play are seen in a new light. Orsino (Nicholas Bishop) is not the usual Chattertonian melancholic but a dandy about town who really doesn’t care very much what gender his love object is. established right at the beginning with his kissing Valentine. Olivia (Kara Tointon) indulges herself in fashionable Victorian prolonged mourning but is quite open to the attraction of a bit of eye candy. All this is set against the twin stuff. Of course it was obvious that after Hamnet’s death Shakespeare was always reminded of Hamnet when he saw Judith; maybe that’s why he doesn’t appear to have liked her very much. In their normal clothes Viola (a spirited and rather splendid Cesario played by Dinita Gohil) and Sebastian (Esh Alladi) are dressed identically and we can begin to understand why people can’t tell which is which when we realise that the great English unwashed say that all Chinese people look the same or that the Chinese call white Westerners ‘big noses’ because they all look the same. Further use is made of the 1890s by the references to Queen Victoria’s patronage of Abdul Karim, mirrored by Olivia’s patronage of Feste (and, possibly Queen Elizabeth’s and later King James’s patronage of Shakespeare). There is an aesthetic exoticism about the households of both Olivia and Orsino which unifies the setting. The production is a rich presentation of ideas which a twenty-first century can engage with.
That is not to say that the setting solves all the problems in the play. Antonio’s misery and disillusionment at the end of the play picks up on the complex sexual dynamics in the play but (and maybe this is a costuming issue) doesn’t quite convince that he is a pirate or that he belongs in the 1890s. And I didn’t see how Sir Toby or Sir Andrew were from the 1890s either. I did get Malvolio, though. Adrian Edmondson gives him a rather sinister and unpleasant edge, familiar both in Shakespeare’s dealings in the theatre world of the 1590s and Oscar Wilde’s encounters three hundred years later.
It took a second viewing of the production for me to realise that this is very much a contemporary, twenty-first century interpretation of the play, showing that where sexual attraction, and even love, are concerned, gender is not a significant issue. So Orsino can give Cesario a passionate kiss while sending ‘him’ to woo Olivia. Olivia can fall for Cesario while ‘he’ is pretending to be Orsino’s emissary. Olivia can fall for and marry Sebastian as it doesn’t matter what gender he is and whether he is really male or just masquerading as male. Orsino loves Cesario anyway so it doesn’t make any difference at all when ‘he’ turns out to be female.
Of course there are casualties of all this. The older generation, with more conventional views of love and marriage – Sir Andrew’s (Michael Cochrane) that they can be bought, Sir Toby’s (John Hodgkinson) that they are a reward for misdeeds and favours done, Antonio’s (Giles Taylor) that a gay relationship is all that counts, Malvolio’s that he can overreach his status and class – all suffer because they have not been able to enter this new world, characterised on one hand by metrosexuality, on the second hand by the covert bisexuality of the 1890s and on the third hand (eh?) by the hidden and unspoken sexuality of Elizabethan and Jacobean England..
Maybe this is all too much about ideas. What about production values?
This is the first production I have seen where I have been able to believe that Viola and Sebastian could be mistaken for each other. They are dressed the same and to a considerable degree mirror each other’s postures and gestures.
Simon Higlett’s design is outstanding and beautiful to look at. The exotic and opulent cushions, furnishings and pre-Raphaelitish paintings in Orsino’s establishment give a clear indication of the aesthetic decadence of the 1890s while evoking in the interior of Leighton House. The painting being done by Orsino at the beginning is very similar to one of Linley Sambourne’s photographs, though here the model is the dishy Tom Byrne rather than Sambourne’s servant. Feste, described in the programme’s dramatis personae as Olivia’s munshi, wears Asian/Middle Eastern costume, linking him in terms of ethnicity and culture with Viola and Sebastian and therefore providing a kind of prolepsis of the Olivia/Viola/Cesario/Sebastion plot. A railway station entrance hall establishes the idea of a journey, sets period and gives a new and interesting geographical dimension to the distance between Orsino’s and Olivia’s courts. The Gilbert and Sullivan style patter song at the end frames the whole play in the 1890s. Olivia’s garden provides the setting for the best comedy in the play – Sir Andrew, Sir Toby and Fabria’s spying on Malvolio being statues behind a fountain – at the same time as providing ideas about Malvolio’s blind self-absorbtion and the gullers’ ridiculous posturing.
Luscombe’s use of short pauses and caesuras, particularly in his presentation of Viola, made me listen afresh, and his decisions about when characters would address the audience rather than each other drew attention to a range of details and phrases often skated by.
This production is shaped with changing tones which create the effect of an exquisite piece of music.This rich production is not only worth seeing. It is worth seeing more than once. Splendid.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: review, rsc, Rsc reviews, shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon, theatre review, William Shakespeare

October 19, 2017 by billbruce Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: Dido, reviews, rsc, Rsc reviews, shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon, William Shakespeare

May 17, 2017 by billbruce Leave a Comment

Vice Versa. Review by Dr Peter Buckroyd

Vice Versa

This new play at the Swan is ‘A new Roman Comedy by Phil Porter inspired by the plays of Plautus’. I haven’t either read or seen any plays by Plautus and am therefore reliant on the RSC programme where I am told that they were borrowed from Greek comedy, ‘quite slight and short’, with stock characters, an author on the side of the underdog, puns, vaudevillian silliness, song, dance and lots of broad and bawdy jokes. Vice Versa has them all. Polonius says ‘Seneca cannot be too heavy nor Plautus too light.’ I’m not so sure. Vice Versa was too light for me. Also too long at just over two hours playing time.
The RSC programme has a discussion between assistant director Emma Butler, director Janice Honeyman and writer Phil Porter where much is made of adding some depth to the characters. If they have done this then I dread to think what it would have been like without the additions. I could find very little depth in anyone. It just seemed to be good fun, although rather lengthy and repetitive good fun (the repetition was part of Plautus’s style, we are told).
Constant addresses to the audience are designed to make the audience have a good time and to feel part of the vacuous world depicted. Granted there is a little very simple undeveloped satire – the play is anti-slavery, depicts women taking control, a little anti-war and anti-establishment – but most of it is based round a scheme by the slave/servants of General Braggadocio to take control and frame their freedom and the struggle that characters who are very dim have in being able to make any plan work.
Colin Richmond’s set is very pretty to look at. It’s a nice Italian street scene with two house facades and all the action takes place outside the house fronts. There is loads of stuff, much of which has a joke attached, the costumes are appropriately comedic: overblown, silly and unrealistically exaggerated. There’s a great deal of running about the auditorium. Sam Kenyon’s music is rousing and energetic.
Because it’s farcical it’s hard to say much about the acting. Carry On and Up Pompei provide many of the references, gestures and walks as well as allusions. Jon Trenchard’s monkey is fun to watch, Nicholas Day’s Philoproximus is a delight, with far more subtlety of comic gesture and timing than anyone else’s and Katherine Toy’s Melodius amused me whenever she appeared.
Felix Hayes’s General Braggodicio, having graduated from the School of Silly Walks and Postures, lived up to his name and Sophia Nomvette as the centre of the play was energetic.
I managed eventually to stop my mind trying to find an idea where there wasn’t one but I wish there had been something.
There’s a temptation to think that this is populist. It isn’t really. It’s entertainment for the theatre-aware middle classes who want to have an evening where they can laugh without thinking. Go see it if that’s what you like. You will enjoy it.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: rsc, rsc review, Stratford-upon-Avon, theatre, theatre review, Vice Versa

May 9, 2017 by billbruce Leave a Comment

Antony & Cloepatra. Review by Dr. Peter Buckroyd

Antony and Cleopatra

There are plenty of problems with this play for a director and it’s always a surprise to me when the actress playing Cleopatra makes it work. When we hear Enobarbus describe Cleopatra we usually take it as romanticised hyperbole by someone who has been bewitched by her, possibly besotted. Not so here. Enobarbus describes exactly what we have seen. Cleopatra is a creature of ‘infinite variety’. We never quite know what she is going to do or how she is going to behave next. And age has certainly not withered her in any way: she is elegant, charismatic, slim, sexy, dangerous alluring and changeable.
I have to admit that I didn’t really want to see another production of this play. Despite its mixed critical opinions I was smitten by Kathryn Hunter’s amazing physical and vocal performance as Cleopatra in the RSC’s last production. But Josette Simon is equally alluring, though in very different ways. You can see why Antony is so besotted with a middle aged woman who looks thirty. And who wouldn’t be?
Director Iqbal Khan gives us a Cleopatra focussed production with some psychological depth. The extraordinary intelligence and imagination he showed in Much Ado About Nothing is abundantly evident here too. Cleopatra doesn’t just put her robe on at the end; she strips herself bare of earthly trappings before she does so and prepares for the afterlife sans power, sans wig, sans clothes, sans everything mortal as she makes an existential breakthrough from the physical world to mythical timelessness. And the asp, unseen inside her costume as she dies, is a projection of her own physical and spiritual reality rather than an external agent of mortality. And we are never allowed to forget that Cleopatra is an outsider in Egypt; she may command it but she is not of it.
But it is not just the brilliance of Josette Simon’s performance which makes this a must-see production. From the very beginning we are presented with an exciting and vibrant dance, but one which foreshadows a dance of death. And Cleopatra’s ‘fearful sails’ are another dance of death, beautiful to look at but shrouded in empyrean dry ice, paper/cardboard ships which are inscrutable projections whose movements are unpredictable and unfathomable. The sea battle ends with a metaphorical burning ship in the storm and clouds, betokening the crumbling of empires.
Although the story is very clearly told, by downplaying the changes in political allegiance in the play the director highlights an important and contemporary message. When things are rough at home fight foreign wars. Caesar does it; Thatcher did. Mexico, North Korea and Gibraltar are lurking somewhere in the back of my mind. There is no doubt that in political terms Caesar plays his cards right, but this production suggests that Shakespeare filtered through Iqubal Khan is interested in what happens to everyone else.
Robert Innes Hopkins’s design for the production is sumptuous. Following the gorgeous dance opening a bed arises from the trap and we are presented with Egyptian luxury in costumes and cushions, an appropriate theatrical location for Cleopatra’s self-indulgence. There is some fine male flesh and a steam bath in Rome. The architectural background is at a sharp angle in in Egypt but straightens up for Rome, although we slowly notice that it is only almost straight on; there is a suggestion of a skewed society despite its apparent brazenness.
Lepidus (Patrick Drury), Antony (Antony Byrne) and Caesar (Ben Allen) are clearly delineated: the peacemaker, the passionate and the narcisissistic pragmatist. The characters become part of the architectural plan of the play and by the middle we become aware of the parallels between Cleopatra’s narcissism and Caesar’s. His eating grapes as he meets Cleopatra is a wonderful detail, conjuring up ideas about appetite, sensuality and the beast that devours. There are beautiful groups and pictures throughout. The freeze on Pompey’s ship is marvellous.
This production is not to be missed. Neither is Julius Caesar with largely the same extremely strong cast. Come and make your visit even more enjoyable with a stay at Moss Cottage.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews, Uncategorized Tagged With: Antony & Cleopatra review, rsc, rsc review, Rsc reviews, Stratford-upon-Avon, William Shakespeare

November 29, 2016 by billbruce Leave a Comment

The Seven Acts of Mercy at the RCS. Review by Peter Buckroyd

The Seven Acts of Mercy

This gritty new play by Anders Lustgarten, playing at the Swan Theatre, is brilliantly directed by Erica Whyman.
The starting point is simple enough. Caravaggio’s painted altarpiece The Seven Acts of Mercy, is set in a Naples Street and depicts the seven acts of mercy undertaken by the lay brothers of the church of the Pio Monte della Misericordia where the painting can still be found. Caravaggio used real people as his models for the allegorical figures in the painting and so Lustgarten intersperses the story of Caravaggio’s creation of his painting with scenes from everyday poverty and deprivation in Bootle. The play examines the disgrace of governmental policies of austerity creating poverty and homelessness, raising the question of whether it is possible or likely that those not wedded to Toryism and Bexitism can do anything positive to act. It centres on pensioner Leon Carragher and his relationship with his grandson Mickey as they discover that they are going to lose their home. Leon’s son Lee, himself a product of this social spiralling, an edgy and difficult character like Caravaggio, is instrumental in evicting people from their homes and is in part instrumental in hastening his son’s and father’s imminent demise.
The stories are told unsentimentally and there are many moments when Whyman slows the action down, forces the audience to be mentally active during long pauses and therefore to be engaged with the characters’ dilemmas. It is political drama but only occasionally agitprop (a politician’s speech about housing had me yawning and looking at my watch, but this was rare).
The set is splendid. Tom Piper has designed a range of locations simply on a stripped down, no frills, essentially bare stage, dominated by Caravaggio’s transparent picture frame on casters. A room is quickly and efficiently created. So are streets, a food bank, and a hospital room. This enables the action to flow freely between Naples and Bootle and for one to be a metaphor for the other. Caravaggio’s paintings are projected onto the backdrop and the sides of the stage so that the audience is prompted always to think of one setting while they are presented with the other on stage.
The acting, particularly the ensemble work, is extremely strong. We are forced to examine the relationship between Caravaggio and the prostitute Lavinia and to ponder the difficult relationships between fathers and sons. Indeed the best bits of the play are where very little is happening. There are some wonderful moments between Leon (Tom Georgeson) and Mickey (TJ Jones), between Caravaggio (Patrick O’Kane) and Lavinia (Allison McKenzie) and between Caravaggio and the Marchese (Edmund Kingsley). There is also the delight of Vincenzo’s (or is it James Corrigan’s?) wonderful naked upper body.
In preview I felt the play was a touch long and I could have done without some of the sermons about social issues. But I loved the vignettes of the food bank presided over by Karen (Eloise Secker) and the relationship between Sandra (Lena Kaur) and Danny (Nicky Priest).
This is a fine new play which you should see. The RSC is not just Shakespeare.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: rsc, rsc review, shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon, Swan theatre, The Seven Acts Of Mercy, William Shakespeare

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Tartuffe. Review by Peter Buckroyd

Merry Wives of Windsor. Review by Peter Buckroyd

Tamburlaine. Rsc review by Peter Buckroyd.

Miss Littlewood, review by Peter Buckroyd.

Romeo & Juliet. Review by Peter Buckroyd.

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