★★★★☆ This is comedy of manners toughened up for the twenty first century. The tone is set by Jean Chan’s bleak modernist set against which, like animals pacing out their neuroses in an old fashioned zoo, the characters are paraded for our amusement . . . The Ustinov has done it again in presenting us with outstanding European theatre that deserves and ought to get, wider public recognition.
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★★★★☆ I can remember on first reading The Winter’s Tale, weeping at the description of the reunions between sundered friends and lost family. For a decidedly chilly, at times bleak and brutal play there were seams here of deep emotion, to which we might add (mixing our metaphors) the complex web of themes, Shakespeare, in the glory of his late harvest had freely woven into his reworking of Greene’s prose romance.
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★★★★★ Doing the classics can be a bit like navigating a minefield laid out by the keepers of the culture: deviate from the path of authenticity and woe betide you. Approaching without reverence on the other hand, can have an effect equivalent to a cold shower – invigorating, getting the blood circulating to parts otherwise in danger of atrophy.
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★★★☆☆ Daniel Jameson’s current offering is a morality play. The moral is a simple one: a suspicious mind can eagerly twist innocuous and innocent behaviour into something nefarious, so don’t judge on supposition. It is the mindset of the conspiracy theorist – if you look for harm you will find it.
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Mr Sellman-Leava has in mind the corrosive nature of the tiny cuts, malicious or simply thoughtless, which flow from the labels we apply to ourselves and to others . . . Too agreeable to be a polemic, the overall impression is of a rather slick and entertaining TED talk, but without any resounding ‘aha’. I’m guessing the audience was pretty much onside with much of what was said which was mostly ‘telling’ rather than ‘showing’ . . .
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