Theatre: Shakespeare 1. Romeo and Juliet (RSC). 2. King Lear (RSC). 3. As You Like It (West Yorkshire Playhouse). 4. Measure for Measure (Almeida). 5. The Winter’s Tale (RSC/Roundhouse). 6. Henry IV part 2 (Globe). 7. Macbeth (Globe). 8. Antony and Cleopatra (RSC). 9. Antony and Cleopatra (Liverpool Playhouse). 10. Hamlet (The Crucible, Sheffield). 11.…
A Serpent, an apple and a garden. With the new Doctor Who series we are on familiar story-telling territory, but with an electrifying and stimulating twist. In ‘Blink’ (3.10) Steve Moffat utilises the horror genre beautifully, as the rain is pouring down and a young woman (Sally Sparrow) enters a deserted house. In the ‘Eleventh…
Read more Doctor Who ‘The Eleventh Hour’ 5.1 (3rd April 2010, BBC 1)
In the Doctor Who two parter, ‘The End of Time’, the time is clearly ‘out of joint’ for the Doctor. He has been having fun instead of being there to sort out the Master’s usurpation of the human race. In trying to set this right, the tenth Doctor hurtles towards his own death. Does this remind us of the…
There will be a change in the Doctor we kept getting told. What did we think before ‘The Waters of Mars’ aired? Possibly that the Doctor will give up and fail to save those he was sent to help. That his failure leads to tragedy on a grand scale and that he feels so bad he just gives up and because…
Read more Doctor Who, ‘The Waters of Mars’ (15th November 2009)
I couldn’t help making another Doctor Who and Hamlet connection when I saw the images of Jude Law performing ‘To be or not to be’ in the snow and thinking of those images of David Tennant as the Doctor’s apparent last moments staggering through the snow.
I am a great fan of Doctor Who and look forward to each episode. Unfortunately, the special ‘Planet of the Dead’ was not, in my view, one of the best episodes of the TV programme. With any Doctor Who episode, viewers are confronted with the layers of narratives surrounding the production. It is as if…
Read more Doctor Who, Planet of the Dead (BBC 1, 11th April 2009)
I have just been reading Russell Davies’ The Writer’s Tale. The book is about the conception and filming of Series 4 of Doctor Who. So a very heavy hardback, with lots of delicious photographs of the programme and behind the scenes stuff, as well as snippets of scripts. Written in an epistolatory style, it uses…
Julie Raby 