Marianne Elliott is a really thoughtful director who considers very carefully the aesthetic of a production. I felt that she has done a really good job with Middleton’s macabre Women Beware Women, and her choice of twentieth-century Italian costumes works very well. Central to the play is the game of chess between Leantio’s mother and Livia. The game becomes a metaphor…
Read more Women Beware Women (National Theatre, 5th June 2010)
In the final episode of the television series ‘Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes’, we learnt that everyone was dead after all. Sam Tyler and Alex Drake had been catapulted back in time into a kind of purgatory which resembled an old-fashioned cop drama. Gene Hunt had been shot dead as a young policeman on the beat on coronation day. He couldn’t…
Read more Romeo and Juliet (The Courtyard Theatre, w/c 17th May 2010)
On entering the Globe auditorium there are notices which state: ‘Please note that this is a gruesome production of a brutal play.’ The notices set the tone for the production, which is comic and gruesome at the same time. Hovering above the stage is a metal circle. Could this symbolise the crown (the golden round) that Macbeth…
