Richard II hands over the crown to a usurper, and the now-deposed monarch asks for a mirror. ‘That it may show me what a face I have.’ In the new production at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at the Globe, the glass is a rectangle, size of an i-pad. Richard takes it in both hands and looks, long and hard. What face does Richard see? Not, as in virtually any previous production, the face of a white … [Read more...]
Propwatch: the handkerchief in Othello
No, not that handkerchief, the one that convinces Othello that his wife has been unfaithful. When Shakespeare’s hero finds that Desdemona has apparently mislaid the cherished keepsake from his mother, decorated with strawberries and traced with delicate patterns, he becomes suspicious; when led to believe that she has casually handed it to another man, he becomes murderous. The 17th-century … [Read more...]
Great job. You’re fired
Shakespeare’s Globe yesterday released a baffling public statement. It praised Emma Rice, its new artistic director, for the creative, critical and commercial success of her first season, her achievement in attracting new, diverse audiences. And then it sacked her. Rice will lead one more season, and then she goes – taking, the open-air theatre has decreed, her ‘designed sound and light rigging’ … [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...]
Spectator sport
Georgian theatre going was not for the faint hearted. Dandies in the pit, doxies in the boxes, light fingers filching your pockets. If it wasn’t the fire that got you, it was the riots. I could cope with all that, given enough wig powder and beauty spots. But I’d think twice about the visibility. Until the Victorians contrived to lower the house lights and steep the audience in shadow, … [Read more...]
Suicide watch
Someone starves to death, another stage manages his own execution. A person falls victim to a booby-trapped chair. And someone dies, as it says on the playbill, of a broken heart. John Ford’s The Broken Heart (c1629-33), in a rare revival from Shakespeare’s Globe, sounds sensational. And of course it is. But it is also unlike more familiar Jacobean tragedies – it’s even quite distinct from … [Read more...]
Ruff stuff
Sex. Slaughter. Ruff stuff. You may think you know Jacobean tragedy. But here’s the thing about genre. If theatres only programme an occasional offering, it’s easy to assume that it’s typical. If you only see Miss Saigon, you might think that all musicals are bombastic and overwrought; or that they’re all cheesy and cheery if Annie is all you know. Jacobean tragedy is infamous for improbable plot … [Read more...]
Little hawks
Polite. Agreeable. Well-behaved. These are not terms that should come to mind when you evoke the seamy edges of Jacobean drama, but they were the impression left by The Malcontent, John Martson’s swingeing tragic-comedy, originally written for a company of child actors, and now revived by Shakespeare’s Globe Young Players. Marston was 26 at the play’s premiere. He was enmeshed in the combative, … [Read more...]