Running in rep alongside Henry VI: Rebellion (a.k.a. Henry VI, part two), the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Royal Shakespeare Theatre is also currently home to Henry VI, part three. As with the previous part, this third play in Shakespeare’s first Henriad has been renamed – going under the title Henry VI: Wars of the Roses.
‘This exhilarating production makes you wonder why the play is often so overlooked’: HENRY VI: REBELLION – Stratford-upon-Avon (RSC)
The story begins with Henry welcoming his new bride, Margaret of Anjou, with a boisterous feast that isn’t exactly suited to his calm and reserved temperament – though Margaret immediately feels at home.
‘There is a real ensemble feel to the piece’: MEASURE FOR MEASURE – RSC (Online review)
This is Measure For Measure in a production by RSC supremo Greg Doran and set in turn of the 20th century Vienna. It is and remains a difficult play to pin down but the contemporary resonances remain inescapable.
‘Best appreciated by students & Shakespeare enthusiasts’: MEASURE FOR MEASURE – Barbican Theatre ★★★
Greg Doran has translated the play’s Viennese setting to the 1900s, but while there has clearly been an imaginative attempt at a credible interpretation of the yarn, this production is hamstrung by too much mediocrity.
‘It’s a gorgeous way of presenting one of the Bard’s most quoted plays’: AS YOU LIKE IT – Barbican Theatre ★★★★
Director Kimberley Sykes embraces the playful text of As You Like It with a diverse and tuneful cast so at ease with the text that off-the-cuff moments and audience interaction are plentiful.
THE TEMPEST – Barbican Theatre (RSC)
In a literally magical production, the London transfer of Stratford-upon-Avon’s 2016 hit sees Simon Russell Beale as Prospero shipwrecked on an enchanted island in the Med.
LOVE IN IDLENESS – Menier Chocolate Factory
The rehabilitation of playwright Terence Rattigan has surpassed even the stage when not only are his best plays regularly revived, but also his less good work now reaches a large audience. So last year his masterpiece The Deep Blue Sea was at the National Theatre, while the enterprising Kenneth Branagh revived Harlequinade for the West End in November 2015.
LOVE IN IDLENESS – Menier Chocolate Factory
The rehabilitation of playwright Terence Rattigan has surpassed even the stage when not only are his best plays regularly revived, but also his less good work now reaches a large audience. So last year his masterpiece The Deep Blue Sea was at the National Theatre, while the enterprising Kenneth Branagh revived Harlequinade for the West End in November 2015.
NO MAN’S LAND – West End
Every once in a while the theatrical planets align to create a pairing of such fine actors that it may well be unmatched for a generation. So it is with Harold Pinter’s absurdist gem No Man’s Land, a work that’s always best played by starry knights.
NO MAN’S LAND – West End
Revival of Pinter’s 1975 classic is a model of clarity, but raises questions about the validity of modernism.
King & Country – Barbican
The RSC’s opening to Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary year could neither have been more extraordinary nor ambitious: the full cycle of the Henriad performed as an entire historical epic.
HENRY V – RSC, London
In a time of celebrity cast Shakespeare productions, it is a pleasure to observe Greg Doran’s take on Henry V and see not so much a band of brothers, but rather a company of craftsmen offering one of the most intelligent interpretations of this complex play in recent years.
HENRY V – RSC, Stratford & London
In a time of celebrity cast Shakespeare productions, it is a pleasure to observe Greg Doran’s take on Henry V and see not so much a band of brothers, but rather a company of craftsmen offering one of the most intelligent interpretations of this complex play in recent years.
VOLPONE – Stratford-upon-Avon
Trevor Nunn’s production of Volpone at the RSC’s Swan sagely contends that the sins of greed and avarice are timeless. With Ben Jonson’s 17th century comedy set squarely in a modern Venice, if some of Ranjit Bolt’s occasional script revisions are schoolboy clumsy (silly references to Greece and the Euro pop up), they can be forgiven in a plot in which incredible complexities may not have weathered the test of time as much as the brilliant observation of the flawed human condition that makes this play so entertaining.
Death Of A Salesman – Review
Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon
*****
Written by Arthur MillerDirected by Greg Doran
Harriet Walter and Antony SherTo read my interview with Harriet Walter and her analysis of the role of Linda, click here
Death Of A Salesman not only marks the centenary of Arthur Miller’s birth, but in Greg Doran’s production being staged over Shakespeare’s April birthday, is also the RSC’s jewel in its 2015 crown.
Widely acclaimed as the greatest American play, we witness a meticulous dissection of the last 24 hours of Willy Loman’s life. His sales are flagging, buyers won’t see him anymore and he has been reduced to “commission only” by his young and ruthless boss Howard, a man who (in one of many moments of Miller’s cruel perception) Willy has watched grow up from boyhood to inherit his family’s business. The mounting finance bills on car (and hellishly, even the refrigerator) remind us of the domestic pressures that Antony Sher’s Willy can never escape.
As guilt and failure take their toll on Loman, we see early on how wise his wife (Harriet Walter’s Linda) is to his confusion. “Your mind is overactive, and the mind is what counts, dear.” But she is being kind. As act one unfolds, Harriet Walter delivers one of the most devastating female performances, telling sons Biff and Happy that not only is she fully aware of Willy’s suicidal depression, but that she cannot let him know that she knows, for such a revelation would destroy him. Linda’s strength as a wife and mother, desperate to glue her family together is a recognisable pain and as Walter spoke, the sobbing around the auditorium was profound.
Miller is merciless as he twists the knife into Loman’s last desperate hours. As Biff again disappoints him, the true depths of Willy’s guilt and shame are revealed, whilst Happy (Sam Marks convincing as the shallow even if ultimately loving son, too easily led by his trousers) is happy to desert his desolate father in a restaurant, as he heads off in pursuit of women.
Loman’s descent will be recognised by all and quite possibly be familiar to many and yet along the way he encounters everyday kindnesses too. Linda’s love for her husband breaks our hearts, whilst Charley (a beautifully weighted performance from the lugubrious Joshua Richards) provides one of the most touching definitions of friendship ever penned. In the play’s Requiem, Charley’s eulogy echoes Horatio’s “now cracks a noble heart” speech from Hamlet, as the old New Yorker says of Willy:
”He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back — that’s an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished.”
Nowhere else in the canon has the so-called “American dream” been so concisely revealed as the nightmare that it can so easily become.
Besides the faultless text, it is Doran’s company that mark this production as one of the greats. Sat at his kitchen table, the shoe-shining Sher defines Miller’s anti-hero for a new generation and as his mind unravels, Sher’s Loman is as brilliantly desperate as he is pitiful.
In a pairing that has seen Alex Hassell play Hal to Sher’s Falstaff, so is the younger man now Biff. Magnificent throughout, it is late into act two when Hassell, with minimal dialogue and outstanding acting, portrays a young man watching the rock that he had previously believed his father to be, crumble before his eyes. Watching the equal despair of the humiliated father and his devastated son, both now destroyed, is almost unbearable.
Stephen Brimson Lewis’ powerfully overbearing set depicts a tenemented Brooklyn, the Lomans’ home, where nothing grows anymore – and as Miller has the play’s action flash between the years, so too does the staging mirror Loman’s muddled mind. Credit also to Tim Mitchell’s lighting and Paul Englishby’s music, both perfectly enhancing time and place.
In 1979 Miller described Warren Mitchell in Mitchel Rudman’s National Theatre production, as “definitive”. I saw the NT show more than once and Greg Doran’s version shares that pantheon.
A tragedy that is timeless and epic and yet also everyman, Death Of A Salesman plays at Stratford, before an immediate transfer to London. The production is unmissable. Drama does not come better than this.
Plays at Stratford until 2nd May 2015. Then plays at the Noel Coward Theatre from 9th May until 18th July 2015