Review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
A carnival riot of joy – with enough misdirection to evoke moonshine
Genre: Classical and Shakespeare
Review: As You Like It
A heartwarming revival. Jack Laskey, Bettrys Jones and Nadia Nadarajah have made a space for this As You Like It well beyond its initial moment last year.
Review: Romeo and Juliet – One Man Musical
A bravura and daring interpretation of this Shakespeare classic
Review: The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys and The Laments
In nearly every way an outstanding pair of productions.
Review: The Flies
There’s nothing like the Exchange’s approach: their bi-lingual virtuosity burns questions.
Review: Henry IV Part 2 or Falstaff
The triumph of this newly-energized production is bringing the darker Falstaff to a diverse audience
Review: Henry IV Part 1 or Hotspur
A soaring remix of how the play settles a succession on congealed blood.
Review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Enormous clarity, much heart and more than a pinch of magic. With marvellous singing.
Review: Return to the Forbidden Planet
It’s a must-see. Whatever warp factors you have to go through.
Review: Caliban’s Codex
a superbly realised piece, vying with Carding’s own outstanding Quintessence.
Review: Creditors
We’re unlikely to see a better production of this still rarely-performed disturber of ourselves.
Review: Miss Julie
It’s unlikely we’ll get a cleaner version, or a more absorbing production any time soon
Review: The Lady From the Sea
A groundbreaking production. Even outside its unique terms it’s outstanding.
Review: The Merry Wives of Windsor
Sparkling, a sassy, sexy, sure-footed revival. On its own terms, could it really be bettered?
Review: Romeo and Juliet
This Romeo and Juliet has all the pace and heart any production, modern-dress or period, demands. Karen Fishwick’s radiant Juliet is the soul that imprints itself on it.
Review: Antony and Cleopatra
Supremely worth it to see a pair so famous weighing equal in their own balance, perhaps for the first time.
Review: The Little French Lawyer
Make friends with this troubling, deeply fascinating, vitally sour play.
Review: Measure for Measure
The most thoughtful and thought-provoking recreation of a Shakespeare play this year.
Review: Antony and Cleopatra
Supremely worth it to see these characters weighing equal in their own balance, perhaps for the first time.
Review: The Wits
Exhilarating and fresh, this comedy shows just how singular Davenant is, deserving full-scale revival. You’d go far to find as spirited and sure-footed a cast as this.
Review: The Merry Wives of Seoul
Refreshing, engaging take on Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Review: Romeo and Juliet
This Romeo and Juliet has all the pace and heart any production, modern-dress or period, demands. Karen Fishwick’s radiant Juliet is the soul that imprints itself on it.
Review: Believe As You List
A work rich in a few characters and poignant recognitions touching some of Massinger’s greatest. It’s the larky stoic Berecinthius though, who adds a dimension to the Caroline stage.
Review: Hamlet
In Michelle Terry’s quicksilver, quick-quipping Hamlet, much has been proved, from interpretive to gender fluidity in tragic action, that sets a privilege on being in at a beginning.
Review: The Merchant of Venice
Exceptional in many things, it’s almost a classic production and definitely worth a detour for.
Review: As You Like It
A ripping discovery, a spontaneity and transparent skin to the process makes this thrilling. An As You Like It for the moment, certainly. But a moment of change.
Review: The Winter’s Tale
If Sicilia and its dense expressive syntax could rise elsewhere, this might be altogether remarkable. As it is, enjoy its slow burn.
Review: The Comedy of Errors
This is a light-footed, thump-fisted, limp-wristed and eye-poppingly uproarious production.
Review: Sir Thomas More
This the second RND this year easily maintains the bar set so high by Eastward Ho! It’s fleet, superbly characterised in major parts but inevitably John Hopkins takes the palm for centring a superbly-realized portrayal.
Review: The Two Noble Kinsmen
We’re looking at a bright Book of Hours. Barrie Rutter’s done it profound service, adding a warmth and agency that opens up this pageant. This is hopefully just the first of many such he’ll bring to the Globe.
Review: The String Quartet’s Guide to Sex and Anxiety
A melange of music, spoken word and performance, musing on mental health.
Review: The Tempest
A superb, fleet outdoor Tempest. What it has to lack in quiet subtlety, it more than makes up in fleet humour with dispatch, keen wit, warmth, and truth.
Review: She Wolf
So what did Harvey Weinstein and the fifteenth century European ruling classes have in common? Exactly. A lot. English has achieved a phenomenal amount. She co-ordinates everything as she directs and manages her own minimal props.
Review: Eastward Ho!
This is one of the most exuberant and superbly orchestrated Read Not Deads I’ve seen.
Review: Macbeth
There’s a visceral intent and bravery, a willingness to tear though every received nostrum, some wild use of the revolve with an admittedly frantic cast trying to catch a magic roundabout, that suggests something magnificent could be made of it all. The rationale’s an urgent one: in a post-Trump post-Brexit post-climate-refugee state we could even be looking at this world soon.
Review: The Way of the World
A triumphant revival. What’s striking isn’t just the clockwork plotting but the amplitude, even insouciant luxury Congreve allows his characters to unfold in. It comes together in this rich, endlessly self-fascinated masterpiece from a master of self-effacement.
Review: The Country Wife
A dazzling revival. If you don’t know the finale, with its superb resolution, this 1920s-style production is a memorable way in, with its clarity, its comedy and its last dangerous kiss. Stunning. Do see it.
Review: Three Sisters
Poignantly well balanced exploration of the themes of a Chekhovian classic by a disabled company perfectly able to produce quality theatre
Review: Julius Caesar
Together with several definitive and newly-founded interpretations, it’s Hytner’s lithe political thriller that emerges by contrast as a physical assault on the senses. From out of the smoke and flashes of this outstanding production, there’s jumpings-on and off as participants run up from all sides and even jostle people out of the way.
Review: The Woman in the Moon
This superb production has shifted our sense of Lyly’s pre-eminence still further. Lyly hugely influenced Shakespeare like no other writer. Lyly remains the Globe’s Read Not Dead greatest rediscovery, and this production underscores that more fully and emphatically than even before, in unexpectedly to this bold, necessary reading.
Review: Electra
As a gifted exploration of Electra’s themes and a transposition of them to 21st century values, this is as exhaustive, detailed and convincing as you’d wish.
Review: Medea Electronica
Like the recent Suppliants, in a very different way, Medea Electronica asks just what we mean by Greek tragedy, what our conceptions of drama without music are. An essential experience.
Review: All’s Well That Ends Well
This is an All’s Well to believe in, and plucks, just this once, a happiness Helena so richly deserves with a husband who equally doesn’t.
Review: Titus Andronicus
The nadir in this ‘wilderness of tigers’ of late Rome is laughter. It’s devastating. Tears can’t express it any more. The production restores the centrality of Titus’ and Lavinia’s suffering against a moral and military decay about to sweep a ruined country. It’s a land where decent military advisors can no longer operate. We don’t need to look far for parallels in a world where this drama’s unpredictability seems everyday news. A Titus for our times, yes but this Titus fits all times, and restores the terrible to stare back at us. It’s what we hope to avoid, which makes it essential.
Review: Antony and Cleopatra
This is above all Josette Simon’s play as Cleopatra, with Antony Byrne nobly matching her by the hilt of something at least. Even at a late stage, Shakespeare dissolves all our previous assumptions. This production allows us to see them plain. It’s worth the illumination.
Review: Julius Caesar
Andrew Jackson’s backgrounding of current events in his production is shrewd: by suggesting film-sets with subtle obliquity he backs us into the glare of a Trump stadium, those overarching lights playing on all of us. It’s a superb conception, in some respects outstanding; in one, definitive.
Review: The Bashful Lover
What this production enjoys in particular is a fizzing energy: nothing sags in Eastop’s expert cut and parry of Massinger’s final flight. The actors’ cracking pace reflects the martial tang of the play. Finally it’s the mutual understatement and mobile intelligence - etched on their faces – of Wicks and Eyre that make this already crackling reading treasurable.
Review: The Suppliant Women
In one of the most radical productions ever mounted of Aeschylus indeed any Greek tragedy we’re literally taken to its roots: as in Greece, a community chorus of fifty, twenty-one of them the suppliant women of the play’s title. In this outstanding production, everything to resurrect this astonishing vision has been invoked.
Review: Coriolanus
It’s a Coriolanus memorable for its patient elaboration of the political as well as personal forces the central character’s torn apart by, and an active interrogation of the nature of democracy. We’re left with a broken Coriolanus between the twin pillars of what he loves most.
Review: The Great Duke of Florence
This is one of the very finest RNDs and with the consummate cast and minimal props, Morell makes more than an embryo production of this extraordinarily fine play. It’s like a brilliant, vividly realised sketch of something that could run.
Review: The Unnatural Combat
To experience this play in these surroundings is a special occasion. It’s certainly graced by one of Massinger’s most remarkable plays, and with Frances bestriding his part and leading the company, it’s a winning combination.
Review: Antigone
This Antigone is outstandingly conceived, and for the most part executed. Chittenden projects tensile expectations, stillness and a powerful arc in her work. With such a cast anything might be expected.
Review: Summer’s Last Will and Testament
It might be Summer’s Last Will and Testament, but whether Summer’s or Will Summers Henry VIII’s fool, is a riddling not only Nashe but the superb Edward’s Boys from King Edward VI School Stratford determine on our guessing. An extraordinary production. It’s good to know these Edward’s Boys are preserved on DVD.
Review: The Elder Brother
Like Shakespeare and as we now know with Middleton in Measure for Measure, Fletcher and Massinger enjoyed a posthumous collaboration. It’s powerful, stellar in imagery and reach, something rare in comedy and perhaps only found in Shakespeare.
Review: Sappho and Phao
It’s the conversations that make this courtly piece delectable. It’s Selina Cadell though who seals the quality of this revival. Her magically inflected words occasion a running benediction; it’s fitting she centres the curtain-call.
Possibly the longest title of any play associated with the scribblings of Shakespeare.
