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"Performance Reviews"
The pitch for Josie Rourke’s Measure for Measure at the Donmar, as I had understood it, was that half-way through the show, Isabella and Angelo – or rather, Hayley Atwell and Jack Lowden – would switch parts. This seemed like an intriguing twist on a long-established theatrical sleight of hand (with a pedigree as old […]
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This is not a review of The Wolves, though if I were writing such a review, I’d urge you all to snap up the last few remaining tickets for the production of Sarah DeLappe’s play, directed by Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster, co-produced by the Howland Company and Crow’s, and still on until this […]
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Just some thoughts and responses, very much off-the-cuff, written right after I saw the show and only lightly edited:
1) I do not and will never understand the Anglo-American approach to “concept.” Taking a 17th-century play and transporting it to 1930s Spain does precisely nothing for anyone, except perhaps for the handful of people in […]
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When Simon Stone “overwrote” Lorca’s Yerma at the Young Vic last year, I was impressed — partly because he did so on a set that toyed with the apparent naturalism of the show (a perspex box, largely empty except for one brief fantasy of exclusively furnished bourgeois life, an aquarium in which the mic’ed-up cast […]
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I saw Ivo van Hove’s Roman Tragedies on Sunday. There is no doubt that the work is a significant achievement, an evening of towering ambition and awe-inspiring commitment, a display of an actorly virtuosity very unlike that of most Anglophone actors (a difference in kind, not necessarily in quality), and a show that offers a […]
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Robert Icke’s Hamlet is so absolutely stacked with ideas and original takes that someone could produce an annotated edition of the play based on it. After a single viewing, I have almost 40 pages of notes, and I have no idea how to turn those into anything like a “review.”
I’ll […]
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One might say that Nicolas Stemann doesn’t so much stage The Merchant of Venice as interrogate the play – or the very possibility of staging it now. That would only capture part of what this production is up to, but it’s an important part – and the part that would be most unusual in an […]
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This is really quick and dirty and off the cuff… Carly Maga’s excellent review in the Toronto Star (wow, it feels nice to be able to use “excellent review” and “Toronto Star” in the same sentence!) gives a quick summary of the play if you need it.
Let me just say, first and […]
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Holger Syme's work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.Images may be reused as long as their source is properly attributed in accordance with the Creative Commons License detailed above. Many of the photos here were taken at the Folger Shakespeare Library; please consult their policy on digital images as well.
