Almost two years ago, the Berlin government announced that Frank Castorf’s contract as the artistic director of the Volksbühne would not be renewed after the end of his current term in the summer of 2017, and that his successor would be Chris Dercon, at that point Director of the Tate […]
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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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So. It’s been over a week since the Emma Rice debacle at the Globe hit the headlines. My first response was anger and disbelief, and obviously, as is my wont, I was ready to blog about it — but then, between seeing shows in Berlin and spending my days in German archives reading through rehearsal […]
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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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A brief outburst, prompted by nothing in particular.
Well, that’s lie. Prompted by this experience: I found myself walking into the Tom Patterson Theatre at Stratford in a crowd of teenaged high school students, and I was worried. I feared they’d be noisy and inattentive, and I particularly feared I’d be seeing faces lit up […]
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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.