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"Performance Reviews"
It was the worst of theatre, it was the best of theatre. This cycle of Chekhov’s first three plays (Platonov — heavily edited and adapted; Ivanov; and The Seagull), in new “versions” by David Hare and directed by Jonathan Kent, was celebrated in the press when it opened at Chichester last year and is now […]
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I wasn’t too impressed with Maria Aberg’s production of Webster’s The White Devil at the RSC two years ago, and I went into this Faustus expecting more of the same: a modern show with an experimental edge on the surface that sounded exactly like every other RSC production if you closed your eyes, with actors […]
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A quick one, in between shows:
Compared to the theatre I’ve seen in London over the past two or three years, the four shows I saw in Stratford this week have been seriously, depressingly lacklustre — with the signal exception of Doctor Faustus, which was spectacularly good. I will write more about that show tonight. […]
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This will be short.
You walk into the Swan. It might as well be the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. There’s smoke in the air and lots of candles, and soon a bunch of people in Jacobean outfits will enter; there’s also a table laden with nicely antiqued props upstage. Once the acting starts, the audience intermittently […]
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I’ll be seeing a lot of theatre over the next two weeks, and I’m badly out of practice in writing about shows — it’s been almost a year since I last did a proper review! (Is anyone even still reading this? Let’s find out…) So I’m just going to throw whatever responses have up on […]
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This autumn, I directed a show. It’s something I’ve wanted to do again for a long time — there was a period in my life when I thought I wanted to be a director, and when I returned to grad school, I did so with the ultimately failed ambition to carry on doing creative as […]
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I saw the second preview of this, so held off posting until after it had opened (and what follows are my off-the-cuff responses jotted down right after I saw the show and not really reconsidered since then). Given that it was a preview, I perhaps shouldn’t be too judgey. But whatever. From the reviews that […]
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I should have hated this Medea. After all, I was massively annoyed by the National Theatre production last year, not just because of Ben Power’s pedestrian adaptation, but mostly because it reduced Medea from the status of a demigod to a woman frustrated with her domestic life. Rachel Cusk’s adaptation — though really, this is […]
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Copyright
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.
