MEN BEHAVING RIDICULOUSLY The lord of Navarre and three nobles have resolved to retreat and study for three years, eschewing  female company: so even the princess  suing for land has to be encamped outside the court with her ladies, with messages  exchanged  more or less comically through interfering underlings. But of course all four men fall in love, break their vows, find one another out in forbidden yearning, break the vow  and proceed to be tricked by the wily ladies.  In Emily Burns’  s lively, rather overlong production it has been sportily set on a Pa ..read more

MUD, MARSH, MONEY      Now here’s a bracing new way to do Dickens:  avoid sets full of Victoriana by keeping the stage pretty much empty beneath a set of uneasily moving lighting-bars evocative of a tidal river. Cut out all the harrumphing Cheeryble rhetoric and lovable Peggotying; choose a late,  least-familiar novel and  get Ben Power to fillet the meaning out of the story  in short scenes, as he did with the Lehman Trilogy.  Then find a modern , eerily original and hypnotic songwriter – PJ Harvey –  to set  thirteen songs for individuals and ..read more

REFLECTIONS ON A FAT KNIGHT Due to train disruption – speak not of overhead wires and wind – I had to bail out at the interval,  from  Robert Icke’s epic three and a half hour modern-dress combination of Henry IV parts 1 and 2.          But I got my money’s worth, oh yes.,  Patt I, the least cut down, takes us to the interval in two magnificent straight hours.  We reach Hotspur’s desth at Shrewsbury and Falstaff’s faked death,  with almost all the favourite Falstaff moments   (though I would have liked to see more of Clare Perkins’ Quickly ..read more

WHY HALESWORTH MATTERS TO THE NATIONAL DRAMATIC ECOSYSTEM    The other day I did an overview-preview from some dress rehearsals at the INK short play festival in Suffolk (scroll below),  where each “Pod” may contain up to five short plays.   Now its four crowded days have passed, a few comments.          Firstly, an audience point was made at the Future of the Arts debate:  that we should respect the short play – 5 to 15 minutes – just as we respect the short stories of masters like Graham Greene or HH Munro.  A lot can be conveyed in a sh ..read more

      CROOKBACK DICK REIMAGINED          Saving Richard III from Shakespeare’s calumny seems to have a particular appeal to women: probably because around his accession in the 1480s there surged both female ambition and female victimhood . Both are stunningly present even in Shakespeare’s story of his murders and infanticide , which was basically a 16c court  conspiracy-theory to solidify the dubious legitimacy of the Tudors.    Josephine Tey wrote the brilliant detective story “The Daughter of Time”,  debunking that theory and making ..read more

DIVING ABOUT IN A UNIQUE SHORT-PLAY FESTIVAL          Join me on a parked Hoppa minibus where Henry VIII is chatting up a new Jane.  She is not impressed by the Tudor-Tinder qualifications  of a man who divorced two wives and killed two,  but he  protests that he was “in a bad place back then”.Since faking his death and living on for 477 years  he’s taken up yoga, and deserves a new start.         This fifteen-minute treat is in the most unusual of the Halesworth settings for this year’s INK festival;  why not, since th ..read more

WUTHERING SIBLINGS      Grace Smart the designer sets the scene as we settle in with a sweet miniature moor, all harebells and heather and cloddy bits of earth.  But it rises in the air as soon as Gemma Whelan’s cheerful, swaggering Charlotte Bronte has toured the auditorium demanding to know what our favourite novel is.  The overhead grassland stays up there throughout, just occasionally throwing down sheets of paper or a microphone.           Charlotte opens the family scene with her two sisters – Rhiannon Clements as gentle Anne and Ade ..read more

THE GAME’S AFOOT. EVENTUALLY. Nick Lane’s adaptation of Conan Doyle’s late, broodingly complicated novel has met many huzzahs from Sherlock Holmes fans, previously here, on tour and  streaming. So as a Southwark supporter I thought I should at last have a look now it’s back.   Lane’s take on the 221b household is certainly refreshing: both Bobby Bradley’s lanky arrogant Sherlock and the tweedily amiable Watson of Joseph Derrington are more youthful than usual, and Alice Osmanski’s Mrs Hudson un-Victorian in her laid-back confident impertinence. So far, so modern. They double – every ..read more

DOSTOYEVSKY IN DALTON       “These days” says the man on the empty stage,  “people are precious to me, even when they insult me.  I have woken up”.  His stark features do not smile as he says it, because he has an urgent stoey  to tell.   Greg Hicks, restlessly prowling with a suitcase, making himself shabby, explains how he made a career, made friends, lost both as it dawned on him that ‘human existence is an unhappy accident in a malign universe”, and that there is no reason for anything.   He evokes a Dalston pub where people are drunk,  qu ..read more

CAMPUS RITES AND WRONGS Sometimes, I do like a stage set you could cosily move right into.  Paul Farnsworth’s is a nice  evocation of a Harvard professor’s study: shelves and panelling and framed certificates,  and a leather chair redolent of five generations of chin-stroking academe and Democrat politics.   Oh, and there’s a model yacht: things will happen to that.          The latter matters,  because the witty poster for Paul Grellong’s play, written in 2019  and suddenly even more topical on its European premiere,  has that same p ..read more