Shakespeare

Dorset Opera seems to receive far less coverage than the rest of the country-house summer shows, although it is in most respects well up to the standard of any of them except Glyndebourne, which is in a category, social and artistic, of its own. The Dorset productions take place in the Coade Theatre of Bryanston School, and are the result of a brief but what must be an incredibly intense period of preparation, with some big names in the major roles, and the smaller parts and chorus taken by a large collection of young singers who are strenuously trained for the week-long rehearsals. I like going on the last day,

It takes a particularly wilful wit to alight on Berlioz’s Béatrice et Bénédict as the perfect operatic nod to a Shakespeare anniversary. To walk past Verdi’s Otello, Falstaff and Macbeth, to pass over Purcell’s Fairy Queen, Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette and Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi and instead opt for this curiously and idiomatically French piece of musical flummery, in which Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing finds itself stripped of any sour notes and whipped up into a sugary dramatic froth, is bold indeed. If it weren’t for the revival of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, opening at Glyndebourne later this season, it might even look a bit like

Spoiler alerts aren’t normally required for reviews of Shakespeare — but perhaps I’d better issue one before saying that in BBC1’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Monday) Theseus dies near the end. Not only that, but Hippolyta and Titania fly off on butterfly wings to become lovers, and the mechanicals’ play goes down a storm. Personally, I’ve never been sure about the existence of that mysterious tribe known as ‘Shakespeare purists’. If they do exist, though, Russell T. Davies’s heavily cut and cheerfully tweaked adaptation seems almost deliberately designed to flush them out. Famous, of course, for reviving Doctor Who, Davies here showed a similar fondness for jumbling together different eras

The Globe’s new chatelaine, Emma Rice, has certainly shaken the old place up. It’s almost unrecognisable. Huge white plastic orbs dangle overhead amid plunging green chutes like rainforest vines. The back wall is smothered in a blinding rampart of explosively coloured saffron petals. Up top, partially concealed by pillars, lurks a rock band togged up in a blend of Elizabethan casuals and modern gear. Presiding over everything is an Indian matriarch, seated in cross-legged solemnity, playing an electric sitar whose headstock (the bit with the tuning pegs) resembles a Fender bass. What are we supposed to make of this weird, druggy, space-age Bollywood mash-up? Nothing much. Except that Shakespeare belongs

There’s no way of saying this without shredding the last vestiges of my critical credibility, but this new Ben Elton comedy series, Upstart Crow (BBC2, Mondays), about William Shakespeare: I’m loving it and think it’s really, really funny. Yes, all right, it’s very like season two of Blackadder — which Elton co-wrote with Richard Curtis. But that, believe it or not, was more than 30 years ago — I know it was because I remember going to watch an episode with friends in the Brasenose college JCR, one of whom, three decades later, would become the butt of a joke in Upstart Crow on the subject of entitled young toffs

‘Comedy is like music,’ said Edwin Apps, one of the characters in Wednesday afternoon’s Radio 4 play, All Mouth and Trousers (directed by David Blount). ‘The words are the notes and they have to be in exactly the right place. And every line has to pull its weight, add something to the situation.’ Apps was one half of the writing partnership who created that most unlikely of TV hits in the supposedly swinging Sixties, All Gas and Gaiters, set in the cathedral close of St Oggs and featuring a laughably inept quartet of Anglican clerics. Mark Burgess’s engaging drama told the story of how the series (which ran for 33

In this much-heralded Shakespeare anniversary year, one might expect a certain respect for the works to prevail. In Holland it’s different. Under the tutelage of a Belgian, Ivo van Hove, a huge slice of Shakespeare’s history theatre has been filleted for the stage into something that might sit nicely on HBO alongside Game of Thrones. It opens at the Barbican on 22 April, a day before the official Shakespeare-death day four centuries ago. And it’s all in contemporary Dutch verse — four hours of it… Kings of War starts with a photo, on a video-screen, of little Prince George. His infant form is followed in rapid succession by that of