How has The Alchemist remained funny, slick and bang-on social target for four hundred years? Well imaginative productions like this one directed by Polly Findlay certainly help burnish its reputation. Essentially, however, Ben Jonson’s play will continue to be comic gold, as long as there are greedy, lustful and gullible people in the world.
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To commemorate Anthony Trollope’s 200th birthday, Craig Baxter was commissioned by the Trollope Society to write a dramatized version of Lady Anna. Seldom read today, this is a conventional Victorian tale of a young woman of noble birth who must choose either to be wedded off to a young earl who matches her in social status but whom she does not love, or to marry her childhood sweetheart, a poor tailor. . . a very inventive and often amusing way of breathing new life into an old story.
Read MoreOnce again the Theatre Royal Bath throws the cards up in the air in an act of artistic bravado in the hope and belief that they will land in some sort of winning hand. As an agnostic in these matters I was not sure of the value of taking a bunch of tender plants and forcing them to fruit in a very short twenty-four hours – the time span from blank page to performance. The idea is not to give six playwrights a day in which to come up with a coherent structure, each writing a scene unseen of the rest . . .
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A woman with uncanny similarities to the legendary Nina Simone locks herself away for three days of cleansing and the audience watch, entranced, as she regales a photograph of her late father with stories not only from their shared past but the things she kept quiet. The premise of Black is the Color of My Voice is wonderful. Fortunately, it is executed well, too.
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Michael Pennington has been around for as long as many of us can recall being interested in the theatre and the eventual coming to Lear seemed a good fit. Whilst not lacking in regal authority, his Lear is, naytheless, more a seeming politician used to getting his own way and thus tipped into senility by an uncontrollable temper no longer packing the authority to frame events . . . This is a thoroughly creditable production with a central performance that shines as a collector’s piece with a unique take on the role
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Theatre company Spymonkey takes each of the 75 onstage deaths from Shakespeare’s plays and acts them out over a couple of hours. The production asks questions about the nature of theatre, and why we attend plays – to be entertained, or to be intellectually stimulated. . . The annoying thing was that I really wanted to like it. Shakespeare doesn’t want us to be reverential about his work; he wants us to poke fun and be snide and irreverent and play with new ideas and be a bit silly.
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