STEVEN ANDREW is moved beyond words by a historical account of mining in Britain made from the words of the miners themselves
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Word perfect
GORDON PARSONS wonders at a near perfect production of Shakespeare’s eloquent fairytale
Cat White (Helen), Conor Glean (Cloten), Marcia Lecky (Dorothy), Peter De Jersey (Cymbeline) and Alexandra Gilbreath (The Queen)
CAILEAN MCBRIDE welcomes a refreshing and timely study of the way officialdom creates structures that exclude LGBT+ rights and humanity
The bard mourns the loss of comrades and troubadours, and looks for consolation with Black Country Jess
CHRIS MOSS relishes the painting and the life story of a self-taught working-class artist from Warrington
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a star-studded adaptation of Ibsen’s play that is devoid of believable humanity
GORDON PARSONS is fascinated by a unique dream journal collected by a Jewish journalist in Nazi Berlin
Borrowed Time: Lennon’s Last Decade, Parthenope, Where Dragons Live and Thunderbolts* reviewed by MICHAL BONCZA and MARIA DUARTE
Cymbeline
The Royal Shakespeare Theatre
MODERN directors of Shakespeare often appear to start with the question, what do we want or, at best, encourage the play to say? To be fair many of his plays lend themselves to this drive for “interpretation”.
For his return to the theatre he has worked at for 30 years and the company he has led since 2012, the grandly named artistic director emeritus, Greg Doran, has recalled one of the central tenets of the RSC’s founders.
When Peter Hall and John Barton established what was to become a leading world theatre company in 1960, they centred their work on the language of the plays. The actors must not only pursue a surgical analysis of linguistic meaning but understand that the communication of the plays lay in the shape and rhythm of the blank verse.
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