ANDY HEDGECOCK is entertained by a playful novel that embeds a fictional game at its heart
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By far the best Bard production of the year
An ideal balance between comedy and gravity in riveting Shakespeare reinvention, suggests MAYER WAKEFIELD
Hattie Ladbury as Duke and Ashley Zhangazha as Angelo
[Helen Murray]
Death comes for Liberals, entitled murder, Vatican hit squads, and fraternising with the Blitz killer
New releases from Public Image Ltd, William Basinski, and John Luther Adams
GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
The Bard pays homage to Hull’s finest promoter and venue, and awards Douze Points to Laibach
KEVIN DONNELLY outlines how the bourgeois institutions inhibit our ability to to view art in revolutionary ways, and suggests some tactics to overturn it
Measure for Measure
Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
ABUSE of power. Check. Corruption. Check. Predatory male behaviour. Check. Draconian measures. Check. A sprinkle of pantomime. Check.
Blanche McIntyre’s Measure for Measure couldn’t be timelier. But rather than locate it in the here and now she’s transposed Shakespeare’s quintessential “problem play” into the 1970s, with James Cotterill’s design finding a happy medium between Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Austin Powers.
There is a sneaky reference to the three-day week as the electronic lighting flickers until the candles which usually light the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse take over. It’s the first of many clever devices which characterise this perceptive production.
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