The Cherry Orchard is Chekhov’s barmiest and bleakest play.
The Cherry Orchard is Chekhov’s barmiest and bleakest play. It’s also his richest. The madness starts immediately. To set the opening scene of a sprawling family drama at four o’clock in the morning seems eccentric to the point of rashness but Chekhov is a master of his craft. A wealthy widow, Ranyevskaya, has arrived at her estate after a long trip from Paris and she’s greeted by staff and relatives who’ve waited up all night to help her entourage settle into the house. This gives the scene a fragmented dynamism which allows a dozen characters and relationships to be gradually...
ShareThis
A short while ago Rupert Goold transplanted Prospero’s isle to an Arctic ice floe.
A short while ago Rupert Goold transplanted Prospero’s isle to an Arctic ice floe. His latest hazard as theatrical travel agent is to whisk Antonio and Shylock off to Las Vegas. The hurly-burly of a modern casino turns out to be a buzzy metaphor for the high stakes for which everyone’s playing in The Merchant of Venice. There actually is a super-casino in Venice — bizarrely located in the very palazzo on the Grand Canal where Wagner died — but it’s much more fun for Goold to relocate to the US. This also allows Portia to star as hostess of...
ShareThis
Edward Albee doesn’t like the word ‘revival’. His plays aren’t dead, he says, just lurking. His 1966 drama A Delicate Balance has been coaxed back into the limelight by James Macdonald in a sumptuous new version starring Penelope Wilton and Imelda Staunton.
Edward Albee doesn’t like the word ‘revival’. His plays aren’t dead, he says, just lurking. His 1966 drama A Delicate Balance has been coaxed back into the limelight by James Macdonald in a sumptuous new version starring Penelope Wilton and Imelda Staunton. We’re in a New England mansion whose unshowy opulence is brilliantly suggested by designer Laura Hopkins. The chairs are elegant, costly and fading. The shelves are neatly crammed with dilapidated classics. And on the sideboard a great rash of family photographs hints at an ominous hinterland of family complexities.
Steely matriarch Agnes, played by Penelope Wilton, is...
ShareThis
‘Shakespeare’s Lost Play Re-imagined’, thus Gregory Doran’s subtitle to Cardenio. The play appears to have been lost in the Globe fire of 1613, but why should the RSC’s chief associate director have wanted to ‘re-imagine’ and stage it as the inaugural production in the refurbished Swan?
‘Shakespeare’s Lost Play Re-imagined’, thus Gregory Doran’s subtitle to Cardenio. The play appears to have been lost in the Globe fire of 1613, but why should the RSC’s chief associate director have wanted to ‘re-imagine’ and stage it as the inaugural production in the refurbished Swan? There was nothing to go on other than a dubious trail leading back from a 1727 effort by one Lewis Theobald (Double Falsehood) through an MS ‘conceivably’ adapted by Sir William Davenant (who gave himself out as Shakespeare’s ‘lost’ son) from a play by Fletcher and Shakespeare, performed at Court in 1612/13, and which...
ShareThis
I rarely visit the Jermyn Street theatre because it’s too nice.
I rarely visit the Jermyn Street theatre because it’s too nice. A small, raffish space just off Piccadilly, it has plush crimson seats and good-natured staff who never to fail to press a welcoming glass of claret into my hand. To criticise one of their shows would feel like abuse of hospitality. So in discussing Anthony Biggs’s production of Ibsen’s late play Little Eyolf let’s focus on the positive. The costumes are nice. Now we can move on. Though written when he was in his mid-60s, the play finds Ibsen in suicidal teenager mode and taking a perverse delight in...
ShareThis
The RSC isn’t limited to Shakespeare.
The RSC isn’t limited to Shakespeare. It’s also one of the richest and most prolific fringe operations in the country. ‘We have between 30 and 40 writers working on plays for us at any one time.’ Golly. Some Stratford bigwig wants to tell the tale of the Russian space programme so a Casualty writer, Rona Munro, has been hired to knock out a script. The programme note is an act of contrition. ‘I have had to take some glaring liberties with time and space and imagined events,’ Munro confesses. A strange approach to scientific history. ‘I ask forgiveness of the...
ShareThis
Previous
