Mainly Opera and Ballet
This Jeremy Herrin production grabs our attention with a great bang at the start … followed by the storm at sea with passengers and crew swaying and falling on the tilting deck of a ship, despite the fixed stage. Imagination? Indeed. And my lasting impression is the contrast between the bewitched characters, with their ready …
“I’ve come to wive it wealthily in Padua”, as Petruchio sings in Kiss Me Kate, but here at the Globe things seemed very different. Before the start a drunken football hooligan stumbled his way onto the stage and urinated on two plants in the audience before collapsing flat on his back. The plants walked out, and …
“For vain pleasure of four-and-twenty years hath Faustus lost eternal joy and felicity. I writ them a bill with mine own blood. The date is expired, the time will come, and he will fetch me”. Thus speaks Faust in the final scene. The scholars seek to save him, but the clock strikes eleven and he …
A young Count, Bertram is brought up in the same household as Helena, a doctor’s daughter he has neither courted nor encouraged. She loves him, is desperate to marry him, and his mother favours the match, but his adamant refusal is over-ruled by the king, so he leaves home, and we should sympathise with him. …
Miranda Raison’s smouldering sex appeal and assertive shrewdness in the role [of Anne Boleyn] was by far the most vital thing about this play.
Roger Allam was gloriously endearing as Falstaff — one could not imagine a better portrayal.
The principal role is for Cardinal Wolsey, who has some memorable lines, particularly during his final speech, “Had I but served my God with half the zeal I served my King, He would not in mine age have left me naked to mine enemies”.
This production by Lucy Bailey presents a Dante-like vision of hell … The witches in their dark red nun-like robes are gatekeepers of hell — tall, medium and very short, they occasionally skulk around the stage ready to draw the characters to their eternal doom.
This Euripedes play was given in a new translation by Frank McGuinness, and… it worked well here, directed by Deborah Bruce, with designs by Gideon Davy,
As Romeo we had Adetomiwa Edun giving a passionate performance, and commanding the stage with his presence
