MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
Theatre Review: As You Like It
There’s little to like in this Shakespearean comedy which, played relentlessly for laughs, ignores its sexual ambiguities
Playing for laughs: Lucy Phelps (Rosalind) and Amelia Donkor (Silvia)
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
A New Awakening: Adventures In British Jazz 1966 - 1971, G3, and Buck Owens
JAMES WALSH is moved by an exhibition of graphic art that relates horrors that would be much less immediate in other media
As You Like It
Royal Shakespeare Theatre
Stratford-upon-Avon
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, no great Shakespeare fan, claimed sardonically that children would enjoy the virtue and philosophy in As You like It while adults would be delighted by the pageantry and wrestling.
Kimberley Sykes’s production, opening the new RSC season, certainly delighted an audience determined to enjoy something in these gloomy Brexit days.
Anchoring the show around the much-quoted line “All the world’s a stage,” she sets the play seemingly backstage with the action resembling a rehearsal session for an upcoming pantomime. The main prop is a costume rack from which the cast members appear to have made their own choices.
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GORDON PARSONS meditates on the appetite of contemporary audiences for the obscene cruelty of Shakespeare’s Roman nightmare
GORDON PARSONS recommends an ideal introduction to the writer who was first to give the English a literary language
GORDON PARSONS welcomes a graphic biography of George Sand, the most popular French novelist in 19th-century Britain
