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April 2, 2019 by billbruce Leave a Comment

King Lear, The Attic Theatre, Review by Peter Buckroyd.

When you know it’s a great play and when you’ve already seen over twenty productions of it you can sometimes feel reluctant about seeing yet another production, particularly if you have memories, as I do, of wonderful things you have already seen.

Tread the Boards Company is doing its double act again this spring – two Shakespeare plays done by the same company, playing in repertoire. King Lear is the first, directed by John-Robert Partridge. Much Ado About Nothing is following next week.

It’s a wonderful coincidence that Kunene and the King, a play where a dying actor has the chance of his last role as King Lear, is playing at the Swan Theatre at the same time as King Lear is playing at the RSC. If you don’t know King Lear back to front you need to see it. If you don’t know Kunene you have to go to the RSC after you have been to The Attic.

Because John-Robert Partridge’s production is played with eleven actors there is a great deal of doubling. Right from the opening Robert Moore impresses with his presence as the King of France, impresses again as Edgar and then wows us with his very physical and often lightning speed Poor Tom. Matilda Bott is a beautiful Cordelia played with apparent simplicity and a vigorous Fool. I’ve been to lots of productions where it’s not easy to remember which daughter is Goneril and which Regan. Not so here. Kate Gee Finch’s lively sinuous Regan, all over her husband Cornwall when occasion allows, is contrasted by Alexandra Whitworth’s steely Goneril, stuck in a loveless marriage to the delightfully wimpy Albany . Joe Deverell-Smith differentiates his roles splendidly and is the best Doctor I have seen. Pete Meredith is chilling as the villainous Edmund.

The revelation is Philip Leach as Lear. The hardest thing an actor has to do is to look as if there is no acting. It takes tremendous skill and control and Leach does it perfectly. We never quite know why Lear does and says what he does. He’s always in the moment. It’s a most impressive performance.

Those who know the play well will enjoy some splendid touches – Regan putting on Lear’s crown once he has cast it aside, Albany’s rather insipid milky tenderness, the Fool and Kent (Philip Jennings) as attentive but unobtrusive onlookers in the storm scene, the stunning end to the first half where Partridge takes away the metaphor from Act V’s  ‘And my poor fool is hanged’, the way Georgia Kelly is used as Oswald and other servants as a thread which binds the whole play together, the Fool’s fear of lightning.

Rarely has the way Lear makes the transition between the stale court and its stuffy characters and the transformative power of nature shown by Poor Tom in the storm been so clear.

Partridge made me think again about different manifestations of madness and the ways in which image, metaphor, symbol and reality collide. I loved it.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: Attic theatre, King Lear, shakespeare, theatre, William Shakespeare

March 14, 2019 by billbruce Leave a Comment

Review, As you like it. Royal Shakespeare Theatre

I had the misfortune last year to see two execrable productions at Shakespeare’s Globe – As You Like It and Hamlet, both of which contained subsidised theatre’s latest obsessions: a character who used British Sign Language and gender switching. Gender switching usually means that women play men’s parts but the Globe went further and switched the genders of both Orlando and Rosalind. These two gimmicks both led to the text often being rendered incomprehensible, particularly as there seemed to be no good reason to feature a relationship between a female to male transvestite and a drag queen. Just as bad was having a main role (Celia) signing so that he lines had to be reallocated to other people. Confusing and ludicrous. Similar nonsense was in Hamlet where the main character’s university friends were a white geriatric man and a signing woman and where both Hamlet and Laertes were female (the latter of challenged stature).
Such decisions went right against the text so it was with some trepidation that I went to the RSC to see this production as it featured both gender switching and signing. And yet in the hands of director Kimberley Sykes these decisions enriched the text and worked perfectly. I was amazed. It just shows the different between a play which has a talented and inspired director and one which has a rubbish one (or, in the case of Hamlet no director at all).
The central concept of Kimberley Sykes’s (and designer Stephen Brimson Lewis’s) production is ‘All the world’s a stage’. So, when the actors from Duke Frederick’s court become characters in Duke Senior’s, curtains fall, costume racks come on and we watch the actors change in front of a metallic strip globe which forms the backdrop to the Forest of Arden. Ironically there had been a large round fake grass carpet in Duke Frederick’s Court which is folded in two by Rosalind when she and Celia reject it for a bare wooden floor with a large circle in the middle. Set, metaphor and symbol come together. And what about Jacques? Just as M. le Beau becomes Madame Le Beau, tottering hilariously in her heels on the fake grass, so Jacques becomes Madame Melancholy. It is an inspired choice which places Jacques at the heart of the play. It is even more inspired that Jacques is played by Sophie Stanton, usually part of but on the fringes of the court, remote yet sensitive, exquisite in her verse speaking, completely devoid of histrionics and by far the best Jacques I have ever seen and heard.
This production is in many ways a breath of fresh air. There are no gimmicks. Even the giant puppet of Hymen who presides over the weddings at the end proved to be a deus ex machina, another example of the world as a stage and vice versa, joining the lovers together but whose task could not be performed without stage mechanisms and the assistance of other human characters.
The range of possible relationships is fully highlighted by the imaginative choice to make Audrey use sign language (so that she can’t hear or grasp Touchstone’s almost ceaseless bibble babble) and provide the touching moment when she rejects her signer, the loyal William, for the hilariously clad Touchstone, he of the large lunchbox. Even making Silvius Sylvia has its benefits, introducing a touch of modern non-binary into the play.
It is a strong cast. Lucy Phelps is splendid as Rosalind and Sophie Khan Levy almost convinces that Shakespeare created a viable female character in Celia. Even she can’t give Celia’s falling in love with Oliver credibility, though. For me the real joys of the show were Sophie Stanton’s Jacques and Richard Clews’s Adam. Their verse speaking, movement and stillness were quite magical.
I really enjoyed this production, even more on a second viewing. You should see it. And you can sample the homemade jams and marmalades at Moss Cottage, especially as for the first time Moss Cottage has gained a gold award in the World Marmalade Competition.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: As you like it, rsc, rsc review, RSC | Theatre reviews | RSC reviews | Theatre |, Stratford upon Avon theatre, William Shakespeare

December 21, 2018 by billbruce Leave a Comment

Timon of Athens, review by Peter Buckroyd

I have to admit that I’m a Kathryn Hunter groupie. Some of most exciting theatrical experiences I have had have involved her – as director of an incredible Pericles at the Globe and as actor in Kafka’s Monkey at the Young Vic, in The Skriker at the National, as the best Fool I have ever seen at the RSC and as a Cleopatra which had me on the edge of my seat and open mouthed with amazement and admiration at the RSC. So I have been excited since the present season was announced that she is playing Timon.
But her highly individual physical and vocal delivery is not to everyone’s taste. And at the preview which we attended people further back said they couldn’t hear everything. That wasn’t my experience because I had made sure I was in the front row so that I could see at close quarters her incredible use of hands and arms. She is an actor (like the incomparable Oliver Ford-Davies and Ian McKellen) who excites me as soon as she appears on stage and opens her mouth.
One of the things about this performance is that she gives nothing at all away about what she is feeling and why in the first half. Her Timon is engaged with philanthropy and generosity but not at all with the people she invites to her lavish banquets. She smiles, greets and embraces but without any real personal connection. Her guests recognise people and types we can recognise but she doesn’t. She is on a different planet altogether. And so it makes sense that she can be as intense in her rejection of the world as she was in displaying her generosity. She was never part of the world as evinced by her ignoring her Steward’s warnings.
I wasn’t convinced in the first half that the acting was as good as it might have been but then I realised that director Simon Godwin was turning things on their head by suggesting that the servants were real and the Athenians shallow caricatures. Flavius the Steward (Patrick Drury), the Welsh Apemantus (Nia Gwynne), Lucilius (Salman Akhtar) and Servilius (Riad Richie), all dressed in black, were not part of the corrupt world. Only they seemed ‘real’ in modern terms. It was striking in the opening banquet scene Alcibiades (splendidly played by Debbie Korley) looked different from all the others. And it was masterstroke by Godwin that these Corbinites, genuine in their desire for a revolution from all the self-seeking, utterly selfish Tories, should turn out to be the ones in Alcibiades’s victorious army.
I’ve never thought that Aristotle had much to do with Shakespearian tragedy and yet I ended up thinking at the end of this production that it was as Aristotelian as Shakespeare gets: greatness meeting with a fall, realisation and purgation for the audience, all the greater for not witnessing Timon’s death on stage.
This production is pretty amazing to look at. Just about everything in the early part of the play is gold – the backdrop, the carpet, the statue, the table settings, the gifts Timon bestows, the chairs and chandelier and the wonderful OTT costumes designed as is the set by Soutra Gilmour. Then it turns to black and white so that gold, black, white and dirt all become powerfully and resonantly symbolic, especially when Timon digs up the chest of gold from the dirt.
There are lots of splendid moments – the freezes at the banquet, the intertwined missions to get contributions for Timon’s impoverishment, Alcibiades’s protest march, the barefootedness of Timon’s second satirical feast, the picnic Apemantus brings to the hermitised Timon, the unforgettable
moment then Flavius shares his little reining gold with the other servants.
Two things I don’t understand. This is just about the only Shakespearian tragedy when there is no mention of the protagonist’s family. Why was Timon wearing a wedding ring then? I fear this was an error. The other thing is that it has become a fashion in plays not directed by Gregory Doran or Erica Whyman for actors to lose their consonants this means that they become hard to hear. It is an issue for the RSC voice coaches (such as Kate Godfrey in this case) to address with some urgency.
I think this is a play worth seeing – as is Tartuffe. Come and make a special treat of it with a night or two at Moss Cottage with its newly refurbished bathrooms.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: review, rsc review, shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon, Timon of Athens, William Shakespeare

September 7, 2018 by billbruce Leave a Comment

Merry Wives of Windsor. Review by Peter Buckroyd

The Merry Wives of Windsor
RST

There are several quite different ways of going about mounting this play. One extreme is to highlight all the darker edges: the cruelty to Falstaff; the scheming malevolence of women; generational conflict; the subjugation of young people by parents; male power; satire of the rising Elizabethan middle class; subduing the old order. At the other is a light hearted romp, with farcical elements.
Director Fiona Laird chooses the latter in a very funny and delightful comedy. In order to gain some contemporary resonances she uses the Essex cliché, choosing the Old Lady of Brentwood (rather than Shakespeare’s Brentford) in order the make the audience think about The Only Way is Essex. It works beautifully, the mood and genre established right at the start by a messenger announcing that Queen Elizabeth wants a new play with Falstaff in it and wants it quickly.
There is a lot of light hearted music, some of it country and a long dumb show dance which introduces the characters. Falstaff’s arrival is heralded by cacophonous music Liz Brotherston’s costumes are wonderful, combining modern dress, tastlessness and Elizabethan ruffs. There is lovely detail such as Slender’s chavvy rings and Falstaff’s codpiece. There are some clever and witty jokes. The statement that there are ‘some simples in my closet’ is made hilariously literal because Simple is hiding in the closet. Dr Caius’s franglais is a joy throughout, with some Brexit allusions and jokes. Ford’s disguise as Brook is great with plastic nose and coat while he still wears the same posh M and S carpet slippers that he wears as Ford. I guess he knew that Falstaff never looks at anyone’s feet! The director also has fun with Nym, Pistol and Bardolph, the latter played by Charlotte Josephine who is also splendid as Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. Nym (Josh Finan) is used as the boy who dresses up to masquerade as Anne at the end, giving rise to a lovely joke as Caius (Jonathan Cullan) realised ‘it’s a Nym’ (it’s an him’). Nima Taleghani has very little to do as Robin but executes an audience focussing role splendidly in several scenes where he has no lines as well as being very welcome eye candy. Nym and Pistol (Afolabi Alli) act as the servants who manipulate the laundry basket (here transmogrified into a wheelie bin) with delightful cod Slavic (Polish?). Fenton is short sighted and accident prone, falling over frequently when he isn’t wearing his glasses. Sir Hugh’s Welshness is highlighted by a Welsh choir. The Essex girls display themselves on sunbeds which Falstaff attempts to hide under. Mistress Page displays Carry On style Barbara Windsor (get the joke?) tits. There is an absurd remote control golf buggy. Slapstick and high farce and well handled for Falstaff’s escape.
David Troughton is close to perfection as Falstaff. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an actor play Falstaff before when I haven’t been drawn to the farcical nature of the fatty prosthetic padding. Not so here. I could have been deceived into thinking that Falstaff was grossly fat.
Laird just gets rid of the Herne’s Oak stuff and sets the final scene in the town square presided over by a statue of Queen Elizabeth with a Spanish carnival like atmosphere. I always find the Herne the Hunter stuff irritating as well as barely comprehensible, despite my work on provenance and footnotes and Laird obliterates the problem so easily.
It’s all great fun.
I only had one disappointment. Shakespeare’s text is striking in its use of prose except for Mistress Anne and Fenton. Their parts were cut and I could not hear any verse. I ended up caring only for what happened to Falstaff (in keeping with the way the play began and with what Laird was doing) but I missed the extra layer of aural stimulation and seriousness that Shakespeare creates.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: Merry Wives of Windsor, rsc review, shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon, William Shakespeare

May 19, 2018 by billbruce

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.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews, Uncategorized Tagged With: reviews, Romeo & Juliet, rsc review, shakespeare, Stratford upon Avon theatre, William Shakespeare

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