fri 11/07/2025

Shakespeare

Measure for Measure, Shakespeare's Globe

If Simon McBurney’s Measure for Measure for the National Theatre and Declan Donnellan’s recent Cheek By Jowl production mined deep for darkness, Dominic Dromgoole’s for the Globe is content to skim the play’s sunny surface – the comedy manqué that...

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NYCC, NYJO, Southwark Cathedral

Cleopatra in her barge gliding down the nave of Southwark Cathedral? Only figuratively, in the hypnotic “Half the Fun” movement of Duke Ellington’s constantly surprising Shakespeare compendium Such Sweet Thunder. Still, it wouldn’t be that much...

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King Lear, Northern Broadsides, Touring

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...

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As You Like It, Shakespeare's Globe

The Forest of Arden takes many forms, but in Blanche McIntyre’s meticulously purist production, it’s strictly a state of mind – no leafy bowers in sight. Here, the unspoken can be voiced, the bounds of gender and class broken, and courtly...

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The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare's Globe

There’s a certainty, a reassurance that comes with attending a Globe show. You know that however bad things get, however bloodied the stage at final curtain, however bruised the relationships on stage, everyone – corpses and all – will rise and come...

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Measure for Measure, Cheek by Jowl/Pushkin Theatre, Barbican

Russia isn’t the only country where violations of personal freedoms and censorship seem to be mounting by the day, but it’s surely the most confused: ask any of the persecutors what they hope to achieve, and you won’t get a convincing answer. Moral...

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Romeo and Juliet, Tobacco Factory, Bristol

Teen spirit explodes time and time again in the intimate space of Bristol’s Tobacco Factory, with piercing electronic sounds, fierce lighting and a torrent of high-energy movement. The frenetic pace of Baz Luhrman’s film has left its mark on...

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Richard III, Wales Millennium Centre

The casual theatre-goer may be forgiven for thinking that, in Wales at least, serious theatre is going through a phase of chronic disregard for the audience. Yvonne Murphy’s all-female Richard III, performed in the rafters of the monolithic Wales...

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The Merchant of Venice, Almeida Theatre

All that glisters is not gold in the casino and television game-show world of Rupert Goold’s American Shakespeare, first staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2011. Not all the accents are gold either, though working on them only seems to have...

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Henry IV, Parts One and Two, RSC, Barbican

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-...

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theartsdesk in Oslo: Two Peer Gynts and a Hamlet

Not so much a national hero, more a national disgrace. That seems to be the current consensus on Peer Gynt as Norway moves forward from having canonized the wild-card wanderer of Ibsen's early epic. It’s now 200 years since Norway gained a...

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Hamlet, Park Theatre

A chalky-faced man stands in the shadows and his limbs jolt about, as if battling for position beneath his skin. This is the ghost of Hamlet's father and he is a fearful sight in ACS Random's Victorian and spectral take on Shakespeare's tragedy....

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