royalty
Richard II, Shakespeare's GlobeFriday, 24 July 2015
The earthy contact with groundlings that Shakespeare’s Globe offers in its stagings makes a comical but telling context for Richard II, a play largely about political point-scoring between kings. The people whose interests lie so remote, in reality... Read more... |
King Lear, Northern Broadsides, TouringMonday, 25 May 2015
Jonathan Miller’s new King Lear is rustic to its core, spoken in broad Northern accents, and the whole production could be packed onto a travelling theatre’s wagon and taken around Britain pulled by a couple of shire horses.Yet rather than cost the... Read more... |
A Royal Night OutThursday, 14 May 2015
The ongoing penchant for all things royal reaches a momentary impasse with A Royal Night Out, an eye-rollingly silly imagining of what the young Princesses Margaret and Elizabeth might have got up to on VE Day. Its release timed to coincide with the... Read more... |
The Audience, Apollo TheatreWednesday, 06 May 2015
As The Queen gains an audience with the latest royal addition, her theatrical alter ego returns to the West End, with Kristin Scott Thomas inheriting Tony-nominated Helen Mirren’s role in Peter Morgan’s updated revival. Callaghan is out; au courant... Read more... |
Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, National TheatreFriday, 24 April 2015
The trouble with the general election is that while everybody talks about money, nobody talks about ideas. We know the price of everything, but the value of nothing. This might seem to be a triumphant demonstration of the essential pragmatism of the... Read more... |
Painting Paradise: The Art of the Garden, The Queen's GallerySaturday, 28 March 2015
The young, rather homely yet grand gentleman is lounging under a tree, behind him a formal knot garden. His costume is extravagant and rich, and his hat is charming. This exquisite 1590s miniature by Isaac Oliver, watercolour on vellum, titled... Read more... |
Reinventing the Royals, BBC TwoFriday, 20 February 2015
It's the story they tried to ban! Reinventing the Royals was supposed to have been broadcast in January, but was yanked from the schedules when Prince Charles's staff at Clarence House withheld archive footage, apparently because of a behind-the-... Read more... |
Henry IV, Parts One and Two, RSC, BarbicanSunday, 14 December 2014
Heritage Shakespeare for the home counties and the tourists is just about alive but not very well at the Royal Shakespeare Company. If that sounds condescending, both audiences deserve better, and get it at Shakespeare’s Globe, where the verse-... Read more... |
Wolf Hall comes to BBC TwoFriday, 12 December 2014
You read the book, you saw the play, and in January you can see the BBC's new six-part dramatisation of Wolf Hall. Cunningly adapted by screenwriter Peter Straughan and directed by Peter Kosminsky, the series promises to be both a faithful... Read more... |
Britain's Bloodiest Dynasty, Channel 5Thursday, 27 November 2014
Dan Jones has turned up to narrate the dramatised story of the Plantagenets in history lite mode, perhaps aimed at capturing a young audience. In Plantagenet country, as shown on TV, we witness a medieval version of soap opera family sagas where all... Read more... |
King Charles III, Wyndham's TheatreFriday, 12 September 2014
Prince Charles’s “black spider letters” - his attempts to influence or change government policy - are real, as is the government’s long collusion with Clarence House to keep them from the public, despite the efforts of The Guardian in particular to... Read more... |
The James Plays, Edinburgh Festival TheatreTuesday, 12 August 2014
Rona Munro's history cycle may take some liberties with the facts, as the writer admits in the programme notes, but its broad narrative sweep has been talked about as a state-of-the-Scottish-nation trilogy. It's the first joint production of the... Read more... |
