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"Shakespeare"
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’ve spent a good deal of time and energy writing about why Brian Vickers’s The One King Lear is such a terribly misguided book — both in an almost endless string of tweets and in a forthcoming long-form essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books. One of the things that […]
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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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Three weeks ago I had what seemed like a fun idea at the time: I’d live-tweet a steady stream of my responses to Brian Vickers’s — sorry: Sir Brian Vickers’s — new work of counter-revisionist literary/textual/theatre history, The One King Lear (Harvard UP, 2016). It turned into a bit of […]
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I suspect that my generation of theatre historians will look back on this day as a game changing moment: the Curtain has been dug up in Shoreditch, and it’s nothing like what we expected. I’m too young to remember the announcement of the Rose dig, which also shattered a lot of received narratives. It probably […]
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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.
