STEVE ANDREW enjoys an account of the many communities that flourished independently of and in resistance to the empires of old
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Word perfect
GORDON PARSONS wonders at a near perfect production of Shakespeare’s eloquent fairytale
Cat White (Helen), Conor Glean (Cloten), Marcia Lecky (Dorothy), Peter De Jersey (Cymbeline) and Alexandra Gilbreath (The Queen)
[Ellie Kurttz]
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
Cymbeline
The Royal Shakespeare Theatre
MODERN directors of Shakespeare often appear to start with the question, what do we want or, at best, encourage the play to say? To be fair many of his plays lend themselves to this drive for “interpretation”.
For his return to the theatre he has worked at for 30 years and the company he has led since 2012, the grandly named artistic director emeritus, Greg Doran, has recalled one of the central tenets of the RSC’s founders.
When Peter Hall and John Barton established what was to become a leading world theatre company in 1960, they centred their work on the language of the plays. The actors must not only pursue a surgical analysis of linguistic meaning but understand that the communication of the plays lay in the shape and rhythm of the blank verse.
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