AUDITORIUM

✮✮✮ 1/2 Shakespeare's Richard III Bell Shakespeare | Sydney directed by Peter Evans Born ugly, Richard never understood what it is to be loved, and his story details the effect on a person when rejection is a constant and central defining experience. Coupled with what we now term privilege, his aristocratic life places him in a position of power in spite of that perpetual derision, and what results is a bitter thirst for the reciprocation of inhumanity that knows no bounds. ​

✮✮✮✮ Shakespeare's Roman Tragedies Barbican Theatre | London directed by Ivo van Hove Politics can be murder. In the current climate of Brexit and Trump, we’ve seen first hand the effects of politics on the ‘people’, two camps, two sides, two stories and no real winners. Placards in hands, petitions, riots, uprisings we have a voice and we want it heard (even if we don’t get what we want). The Toneelgroep’s spectacular 6-hour epic, Roman Tragedies, is about neither but oh doe

✮✮✮ Shakespeare's Hamlet Almeida Theatre | London directed by Robert Icke Nothing quite divides the camps like a starry Hamlet, and the past few years have seen many. Battle lines seem to be drawn along whether it is the star or the vehicle, the man or the machine, that takes precedence. Shakespeare’s greatest play is indivisible from its title role, yet the world of the play matters to an audience – if we don’t believe in it, we can’t believe Hamlet’s torturous relationship

✮✮✮✮ Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream Young Vic | London directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play within a play, or in Joe Hill-Gibbins visceral and visual reimagining a dream within a nightmare. This production delves head first into some of the more uncomfortable themes within the text, dark, disturbing and violent. It doesn’t hold back. The stage (superbly realised by Johannes Schütz) is a muddy-pit, uneven, wet and dirty – not dissimilar from

✮✮✮✮ Shakespeare's King Lear Barbican Theatre | London directed by Gregory Doran Glenda Jackson's must-see Lear at the Old Vic may be getting all the headlines right now, but Greg Doran's Stratford-to-London RSC transfer is the better production. I'd rank Doran's husband Antony Sher above even my two favourite Lears of recent years: Jonathan Pryce at the Almeida and Derek Jacobi at the Donmar. Also, I've never seen the play's complicated sub-plots staged with such compelling

✮✮✮ Shakespeare's King Lear The Old Vic Theatre | London directed by Deborah Warner Glenda Jackson is King Lear! Two-time Oscar winning actress turned politician returns to the stage after 25 years to play King Lear. However, the worrying feeling is that maybe the rest wasn’t so well thought out. ​ In a nutshell King Lear is to split his kingdom between his three daughters, the parts will be divided up based on how much they love their father. Goneril and Regan (Celia Imrie a

✮✮✮ Shakespeare's Othello Bell Shakespeare Company | Sydney directed by Peter Evans As the saying goes, “well behaved women seldom make history”. Desdemona and Emilia are slaughtered by their respective husbands after displaying only wifely devotion, as well as prudent decorum to all and sundry in Othello. It is not a battle of the sexes in the play, for there is nothing that resembles a level playing field, but an examination of tyrannical brutality against women, and the tr

✮✮✮✮ Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream Sydney Theatre Company | Sydney directed by Kip Williams Characters get up to a lot of mischief in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but what can be construed as humorous, can also be seen as menacing. The play features deception, sabotage, humiliation and misogyny, subversively, and surreptitiously, framed within a category of conventional comedy, leaving the depths of its darkness unacknowledged. One of Western theatre’s most well-known

✮✮✮ 1/2 Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream Southwark Playhouse | London directed by Simon Evans A little too self-congratulatory at first, director Simon Evans’ two-hour panto-esque entertainment about a comically inept production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream gets better the longer it goes on, and by the end few in the audience will have laughed as loudly at any Shakespeare comedy they've seen before. A few lucky individuals (or poor souls) will also have never been pluc

✮✮✮ Shakespeare's King Lear Sydney Theatre Company | Sydney directed by Neil Armfield Lear finds himself rejected by all his daughters, and loses his mind. Redemption is eventually found when he discovers grace and purity. But what remains of interest is the rationale behind his torment. In King Lear, we look at issues surrounding mortality, kinship and honour, and examine how it is that good people can turn bad. The provocative difference between the elder “vicious sisters”