STEVE ANDREW enjoys an account of the many communities that flourished independently of and in resistance to the empires of old
Latest editorial
Venice Preserved, Swan Theatre Stratford-upon-Avon
The conflict between love and honour in Thomas Otway’s Restoration tragedy gets a modish yet uneven update by the RSC
Patriarch: Les Denis as Priuli
[Helen Maybanks]
TOM STONE urges you to catch the last dates of a New York singer/songwriter, never afraid to challenge her audiences musically or politically
JAN WOOLF examines work that aims to give viewers a material experience of the environments in the polar north and Britain equally affected by the climate crisis
The bard recalls advice received 50 years ago from his TRB muse, and sorts out appropriate legislation for football club ownership
MICHAL BONCZA and MARIA DUARTE review Facing War, Kontinental ’25, Bugonia, and Relay
MAYER WAKEFIELD is frustrated by a production of Ibsen’s classic study of an anti-heroine that fails to elucidate her motivations
PETER MASON tunes his ear into the domestic affairs of a Carribbean couple with a troublesome son
IF THE RSC was seeking to complement its current production of Vanbrugh’s popular Restoration comedy The Provoked Wife with a tragedy of the period, they would have relatively little choice.
Thomas Otway’s 1682 play Venice Preserved has been virtually the only Restoration tragedy to maintain its stage popularity since its own time.
Although the play shares the genre’s characteristic mixture of rhetorical heroic language and thematic conflicts between love and honour — straining the patience of audiences in our more prosaic age — its subject of the plotting to overthrow a repressive regime has a more familiar ring.
Similar stories
GORDON PARSONS is blown away by a superb production of Rostand’s comedy of verbal panache and swordmanship
GORDON PARSONS is disappointed by an unsubtle production of this comedy of upper middle class infidelity
GORDON PARSONS meditates on the appetite of contemporary audiences for the obscene cruelty of Shakespeare’s Roman nightmare
SIMON PARSONS questions whether a dark take on Shakespeare’s Seasonal comedy is in harmony with the original text