The present – whatever the truth – is always seen as a grossly lacking, cynical, depressing and ignoble era. So why not simply ignore reality, pick a supposed golden age and dream-shift into it?
That’s the plot of Cervantes’ 400 year old classic novel: Don Quixote. And at its best this stage version by James Fenton, shows why that idea continues to resonate with meaning and amusement.
Twenty-four years fly by hellishly fast when they’re leading to a date with eternal damnation. That’s director Maria Aberg’s 105 minute, interval-less, zoom-through of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. And hellish it is. Blood-stirringly and entertainingly hellish that is, full of quirky vitality and bizarre imagination. It is also on occasion confusing and distanced from Marlowe’s Renaissance questioning about science’s challenge to God.
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Director Erica Whyman has magic-ed Shakespeare’s Dream into a fast, furious and imaginative fun fiesta. And to judge from this Stratford performance it will radiate national delight as it tours from March, supported by fourteen am-dram companies and armies of children turned into fairies . . . ‘The Dream’ is the play which wins many a young person to Shakespeare and this production, especially if its poetic depth grows in performance, should bring many to the fold.
Read MoreIf your history lessons excluded Queen Anne or reduced her to a footnote, you can now compensate by meeting the real women in this RSC production of Helen Edmundson’s enthralling new play . . . Roll over the Elizabeth and Victoria drama industry, there’s a new queen on the block with a captivating tale of passion and politics, told with deep psychological insight courtesy of surviving personal letters, and set against the scurrilous journalism, satire and licence of the time.
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According to Shakespeare, the course of true love never did run smooth. According to William Congreve, playwright of Restoration England, by his time it had almost ground to a halt. And with Love for Love, his comedy of 1695, he had enormous fun satirising high society with that concept. The work has become a classic and in this spirited version, director Selina Cadell and a fine cast, add energetic lustre to its long tradition. As the vain fop Tattle explains, relations between the sexes are simple if you just remember that all well-bred people lie, and that a women should never speak what she thinks. No means yes, and the rest follows on.
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