When the great Victorian actor Ellen Terry was preparing to play Ophelia, she visited a London asylum to observe young women who might unlock the character. However, the madwomen were, she wrote, useless for research: ‘too theatrical.’ The interplay between playhouse and madhouse is a theme running unobtrusively through much of Bedlam, a fascinating exhibition at the invaluable Wellcome … [Read more...]
Queering the canon – the new normal?
In John Tiffany’s absorbing production of The Glass Menagerie (seen in New York in 2013, now playing at the Edinburgh International Festival), isolation is a defining note. The Wingfield family’s St Louis apartment is lapped by inky water, so that the rooms appear like islands. They’re marooned. The Wingfields are feely – so much feely – but rarely touchy. Cherry Jones’ mother … [Read more...]
Propwatch: Richard III’s spine
When archaeologists excavating a Leicestershire car park in 2013 uncovered a battle-scarred skeleton, the emergence of its severely curved spine was the first strong indication that these were the remains of Richard III: England’s most notorious monarch, Shakespeare’s irredeemable villain. Further research and DNA testing supported the archaeologists’ theory: hitting a nerve at the juncture of … [Read more...]
Opening arguments
When Emma Rice was appointed artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe earlier this year, it seemed an inspired choice. Irreverent, populist, she was director of Kneehigh. a company with a ballsy, outward-facing performance style splashed with visual and musical vigour. Her initial Globe interviews, however, wound me right up – she couldn’t stop banging on about how she struggled with Shakespeare, … [Read more...]
Propwatch: the cake in Kings of War
A good prop isn’t a decoration or a bystander but a player. The cake that dominates the stage picture midway through Ivo van Hove’s Kings of War is never mere set dressing. It’s the closest thing to a UN peacekeeping mission in this production of Shakespeare’s fractious history plays: glistening with promise yet ultimately doomed. When the Duke of York seizes power, he remodels the war room in … [Read more...]
Take me to your leader
What does leadership look like? We’re seeing an American election which has thrown up new models of presidential presentation: female politicrat, throwback socialist, celebrity blowhard. In Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s Kings of War, we see three more, applicable to our own time. Henry V, playboy-turned warmonger; the bedwetter, Henry VI; Richard III, the psycho who no one takes seriously until far … [Read more...]
Change the world, one hero at a time
From dude to dodo is a trick of vowels and imagination. Maybe, if we’re tired of seeing men dominate our stages, we need to exercise our imaginations, especially when it comes to casting. Unexpectedly, Shakespeare is leading the way. Shakespeare productions swapped gender from the word go, with the all-male Elizabethan companies. Sarah Bernhardt, Angela Winkler and Frances de la Tour have since … [Read more...]
History boy
There are productions I’ve never seen that are burned onto my brain. As a teenage Shakespeare geek, I devoured books on stage history, describing landmark productions staged long before I was born. I read reviews and memoirs, saw the same few photos. Sally Beauman’s heartfelt history of the RSC was my bedtime reading (still is, sometimes). Last month John Wyver curated a season of films of RSC … [Read more...]
Experiments in humanity
The writer Veronica Horwell likes to describe acting as laboratory for human behaviour, and believes that actors try out ways of expressing and inhabiting ideas and emotion. It’s a brilliant idea – acting on behalf of humanity – that I find endlessly helpful when thinking about why we value acting, and how to read it. Messy, imperfect theatre, changing from night to night, may not allow sterile … [Read more...]
Come for the sex dolls, stay for the protest
The Young Vic is calf deep in sex dolls. Tacky plastic fake-flesh spills over the stage as Measure for Measure begins, a ‘huge peach heap of vinyl orifices,’ as critic Natasha Tripney wrote. Mouths agape, legs akimbo, pneumatic and tumescent, it’s a prospect of everready rut. Officials pick their way gingerly through them: the deputy Angelo (Paul Ready) raising his bible to avoid … [Read more...]