★★★★☆ Director Peter Stickney has served up perfect holiday fare; a joyful celebration of the Bard, intelligent without condescension, whilst unlocking some of those secrets and joys of Shakespeare production, which may get overlooked in more self-consciously ‘relevant’ interpretations.
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★★★★☆ The show, which is on tour from the West End, has no shortage of star talent to entertain us. Frances Barber is positively gleeful in her devious manipulation and blackmail of Sir Robert. Every swish of her costume, every pointed gesture, every hiss of defiance sets her out as a woman with an abundance of willpower, ambition and guile.
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★★★★☆ Shakespeare’s Globe on Tour are spending a few weeks in July in the Bodleian Quad, giving Oxford a dose of alfresco Shakespeare. . . The audience is drawn into the story inexorably, and by the end of the play, it’s hard to believe that you haven’t just spent an evening under a Venetian sky.
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★★★★☆ South Western is an energetic, cleverly-devised show that is frequently both dramatically effective and very funny . . . Tom Brennan has succeeded in tying all the different elements of South Western into a thoroughly enjoyable package.
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★★★★☆ This was an excellent choice of play for this group of overseas postgraduate drama students as their accented voices added to the verisimilitude of the piece. Gary Owston, the dialect coach, must have worked particularly hard to produce the completely convincing Romanian accents.
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★★★☆☆The soccer stimulus over, the BREXIT debate rumbling eternally on: I’d love to distil a little feel-bad atmosphere with another rapturous review of Sam Kenyon’s musical about titan of theatre, director Joan Littlewood. Sadly – and it’s hard to take a minority view, it left me more exasperated than enlightened.
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