Privacy & Cookies

Moss Cottage uses cookies to track and improve site performance and enhance your experience.

By using our website, you consent to our use of cookies. To learn more about how we use cookies, read our Privacy Policy

Moss Cottage

Tel. 01789 294 770
Email. info@mosscottage.org
  • Home
  • About Us
    • Blog
    • Local Attractions
    • RSC Reviews
  • Breakfast
  • Rooms
  • Tariff
  • Gallery
  • Contact
  • Book Now

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

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.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: Coriolanus, reviews, Rsc reviews, shakespeare, Stratford upon Avon theatre, 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

August 15, 2017 by billbruce Leave a Comment

Titus Andronicus, Review by Peter Buckroyd

Blood, guts, murder, revenge, the severing of limbs for rape, cannibalism, political assassination, fighting foreign wars, dubious political alliances, spin, the gullibility of the general population, political volte faces, framings and hypocrisy, nepotism, suicide, sacrifice… this list goes on.

Even when Shakespeare wrote this play it was old-fashioned: a revenge tragedy in the Roman tradition. And yet political murders, internecine struggles, nepotism, racism, political assassination were all things that the Elizabethan audience could identify happening in their own time. Even more of them can be identified as happening right now at some place in the world.

Exaggerated as it may seem, then, this is a play for Shakespearian times and it is a play for ours. That is why when you come to see this fine production you should be in your seats ahead of time. The contemporary context is set before the dialogue starts. There are three factions vying for power, represented by a retrospectively splendid extended dumb show.

Blanche McIntyre’s production highlights power struggles of many kinds. The placard ‘Austerity kills’ immediately sets the sub-text of the production, placed amidst street fighting, looting, rival gangs whose members are interchangeable, the police as another gang jockeying for power, all followed by an election. Ring any bells? Sure. So is the unlikely outcome of the election. The production is prescient in its presentation of a corrupt leader forming an alliance with a right wing foreign power in order to maintain power. How did he know this would happen? Because it is the stuff of dangerous and corrupt societies. What a message.

David Troughton’s Titus is a figure imprisoned within himself and within his own mind commenting on himself and others but not really engaging with the reality of any of them. This play is so harsh in its message that to begin with the audience found it hard to engage with the farcical black comedy with which this production is infused. The grotesque removal of Titus’s hand when he sacrifices it to save the lives of his sons is hard to watch.

The hands are not the only metaphors in this production. Sex is throughout a metaphor for politics and vice versa. And the many costume changes become a metaphor too.

The production is busy, often hectically busy, with action and yet there are some superb moments of stillness. Watch out for the powerful effect of Titus’s laughter scene.

And characters are distinguished not only by costume, behaviour and posture but also by the style of vocal delivery. Titus’s brother Marcus, for example, (splendidly played by Patrick Drury) is set apart from the others not only by his formal contemporary clothes but by his wonderful Olivier-like delivery and intonation – a survivor in an alien world.

There is so much to see and think about in this production that it is even better in retrospect. Emperor Saturninus’s Superman t shirt, extraordinary use of a cardboard box, the stew with Tamara’s sons’ heads in it, the banquet at a table set only for four, the framing of the drama with the spin of a political MC, the messengers on a bike, a pool scene: these are only some of the production’s inspired thought provoking elements which become ideas.
It’s all pretty exhausting.

You will need to recover with a relaxing night’s stay at Moss Cottage to bring you back to the kind of reality you would like to inhabit.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: RSC | Theatre reviews | RSC reviews | Theatre |, shakespeare, Stratford upon Avon theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, Theatre Stratford upon Avon, Titus Andronicus, William Shakespeare

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

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Next Page »

Quick Links

  • Home
  • About Us
    • Blog
    • Local Attractions
    • RSC Reviews
  • Breakfast
  • Rooms
  • Tariff
  • Gallery
  • Contact
  • Book Now

About Moss Cottage

Moss Cottage is a charming 1930s detached house located just a 15 minute walk from the very heart of Stratford-upon-Avon … More...

Our Latest Posts

Orchestra of the Swan, review from May 29th concert. Sonnets.

A little about Moss Cottage

Welcome to our new blog

We’re Rated on Tripadvisor!

Tripadvisor Certificate of Excellence

  • TripAdvisor

 

Tripadvisor Reviews

  • TripAdvisor

Contact Us

Moss Cottage Bed & Breakfast
61 Evesham Road
Stratford upon Avon
Warwickshire
CV37 9BA

Tel:  01789 294 770
Email:  info@mosscottage.org

Reviews from the RSC

Rsc review. The Whip.

King John. Review by Dr Peter Buckroyd.

A museum in Baghdad. Review by Dr Peter Buckroyd.

The boy in the dress. Review by Dr Peter Buckroyd.

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

copyright © 2015 Moss Cottage | website by studio595