I saw Maxine Peake as Hamlet back in September 2014. Seeing the production live was an amazing electrifying experience. Of course, I was curious to see if Peake would play Hamlet as a man, or as a woman. Actually, she played the part as neither. The male pronoun was retained and the rest of the…
Read more Hamlet (City Screen – Manchester Royal Exchange, 27th March 2015)
Top Shakespeare 1. All’s Well That Ends Well, (RSC RST and Theatre Royal Newcastle). 2. As You Like It (RSC, RST and Theatre Royal Newcastle). 3. Titus Andronicus (RSC, Swan Theatre). 4. Julius Caesar (Donmar Warehouse). 5. The Taming of the Shrew (Propeller, Newcastle Theatre Royal) 6. Macbeth (Trafalgar Studios). 7. Richard II (RSC, RST and…
I saw the latest Royal Shakespeare Company Hamlet in previews and I am sure that by the Opening/Press night, the production will have changed considerably since I first saw it. What struck me was on the two nights that I was in the audience was that there were standing ovations on both nights which suggests…
Read more The new RSC Hamlet is out of joint? (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, 14th and 15th March 2013)
Updated 6th January 2013. Thanks to updates from RSC long ensemble audience members. After I saw Debbie Korley and Dharmesh Patel in the RSC’s young people’s King Lear at the Theatre Royal in York recently, I started to wonder what the rest of the RSC’s long ensemble were dong now. I had seen some of…
2013 will be another year for celebrity Shakespeare. James McAvoy will play Macbeth early in the year. The Michael Grandage season continues with David Walliams and Sheridan Smith staring in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Jude Law in Henry V. In autumn, at the Old Vic, Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones will be playing Beatrice and Bendick…
In 2011, the sublime was a popular topic of discussion. At the National Theatre there was Frankenstein and in the John Martin exhibition at the Tate, the sublime was on show in a spectacular way. The John Martin exhibition was my favourite exhibition of the year. The epic was presented on grand canvases, but what…
The year started for me with the National Hamlet, and since then I’ve seen the Northern Broadsides Hamlet, and the Globe’s touring Hamlet. In contrast to all these productions along comes a very unnerving production with Michael Sheen as Hamlet. The play is set in a psychiatric hospital and the concept works in some places and not as…
When I came out of the NT Live screening of the National Theatre’s Hamlet last December, my first response was that the director Nicholas Hytner wanted to create a production that was very different from Greg Doran’s 2008 production. Whereas in Doran’s production, David Tennant played up the comedy, I felt that Kinnear’s performance was…
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.…
What I felt about this production of Hamlet was that when it opened it was a very good production and on the last day I saw it, I thought that it was a superb production. I suppose the question here is, is a form of rehearsal be taking place as a production develops beyond previews and through the run and how…
Read more Hamlet (Crucible Sheffield, September/October 2010)
Julie Raby 