Review Boudica (PREVIEW)

Boudica
by Tristran Bernays

No Man's Land
http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/

Many of us (ok, TLT and her own metallic chariot) had previously only the vaguest impression of a Celtic  warrior queen Boudica with flowing locks taking on allcomers and emerging victorious.

The life of Boudica, whose image has varied according to the world picture of those who wrote about her, had a more tragic trajectory than we realised and is now the subject of a vigorous new verse play by Tristan Bernays filling the Shakespeare's Globe stage.

It's certainly an apt and clever choice, for it feels like a Shakespearean story, a proud Queen uniting the British tribes against the might of the Roman Empire.

However, it also feels appropriate to wonder if Shakespeare's pen would have chided her for hubris and unfeminine behaviour in more certain terms than the imperial Victorian image of the queen of Iceni tribe handed down more recently.

The Queen is a historical figure wrapped in a myth and probably an appropriate heroine for our double edged Brexit age. In the present version, it's woman power but also with a certain amount of questioning and a non pejorative modern slant.

But of course before Brexit there was Game Of Thrones and various swashbuckling mythological and historical TV serials in a Hollywood genre which has enjoyed a revival of popularity in recent times.

Directed by Eleanor Rhode, Boudica's life  makes for an epic re-telling, often in verse, with plenty of energy. If it is a tad unsubtle in its television-like structure and modern mash up, it still demands to be taken on its own terms as a tale of adventure and betrayal.

The writer himself says in the programme he wants to make a blockbuster action film onstage with battling women at its centre. And just as much as colonialization, it is a dramatic discussion of war including a hint of Cold War as defeat closes in.

Again it may not always be subtle, baldly questioning when defence becomes attack in a debate over the nature of conflict in post Second World War terms. But reiteration in the baldest terms suits the energetic style and there's a pleasing working of the audience as the British tribes rally.

Preceded by a drumming soundscape and  narrator (Anna-Maria Nabirye) dressed in the uniform of African rebels and child soldiers, the martial widowed Boudica (Gina McKee) and her two daughters, clad in robes with weapons at their side, make their regal entrances.

They have arrived to claim their share of the kingdom of the Iceni. Their husband and father had enjoyed favours including loans,  as a client king, from the Roman conquerors.

However expediently for the colonizers including the fey procurator Caius Deciamus (Samuel Collings) in a knatty brocade coat, suited and booted in cuban heels, Roman law only recognizes primogeniture and there's not a male heir in sight. 

Far from recognizing the danger and a hierarchy where woman are not even recognized as minor players, the Queen protests and is bound and lashed with a whip by soldiers while her daughters Blodwyn (Natalie Simpson) and Alonna (Joan Iyola) are given as trophies of empire to the troops and raped starting a cycle of rebellion and revenge.

The action takes place on a plain but versatile wooden stage, designed by Tom Piper, with ladders against the Globe's pillars backed by a stockade with simple but effective extras coming in as they are needed.

There may not be an especially complex subtext and we wondered whether rape was defined then in the same terms as now. The modern colonial elements are signposted a mile (or is that 1,609 metres?!) off,  but historical and mythical movies and TV series have conditioned us to such mash ups and artistic licence.   .

There's some zombie choreography (choreographer Tom Jackson Greaves)  lots of clashing swords, a spectacular aerial attack, a seering curse and bloody revenge.

The chief of the Belgics (Abraham Popoola),is a charasmatic huge punk tree trunk of a man, "There's madness and there's Badvoc!". The uneasy unification of the tribes under Boudica is sealed by Cunobeline (Forbes Masson), another chieftain who overomes his doubts,  with  a rock concert rendition of The Clash's London Calling.

The jokes are sometimes of the Monty Python/Blackadder genre but with more swearing: "Honey of course he's got news, he's the f******g messenger!". Boudicca  may not be the most complicated of characters, written as veering between the military and motherhood, but gives a stirring mix of Elizabeth I and Henry V rhetoric standing in front of the microphone to urge her troops.

There may be a risk of the lines descending into the parodic when we hear, "What has Rome done to you? and there are shades of the musical Salad Days in a scifi deus ex machina as Boudicca falters. However another piece of action makes sure the audience just takes in the visuals and doesn't stop to think too much.

Another softer dynamic is introduced through the younger daughter Alonna. A meeting with the enemy general (Clifford Samuel) ends in a glimmer of more civilised behaviour when he promises honourably he will insure she leaves free of harm.

It's clunky, perhaps trying to pile in too many issues,  but also funky and the cleverest thing about it is a reversal of the TV genre, which draws on classic literature, back into Shakespearean stage terms. It certainly could also work in even bigger venues and it's not often TLT would say that,, so it's an amber/green light!

Review King Lear (PREVIEW)

King Lear 
by William Shakespeare

Pop Up Britain
http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/

Would the rain hold off? That was the question in TLT's mind as she slalomed her way through the crowd towards the edge of the Globe stage with its pillars swathed in tarpaulin for Shakespeare's play of fractions and factions.

Of course a storm at the appropriate time would be nature's seal of approbation for one of the then Jacobean playwright William Shakespeare's most famous scenes - the storm scene both inciting and reflecting the madness of King Lear in the play first known to be performed in 1606.

Kevin McNally, best known for his role as Joshamee Gibbs in the Pirates Of The Caribbean movie franchise,  takes on the title role in the Shakespeare's Globe production directed by Nancy Meckler.

He's a very neat, one could almost call him dapper, Lear with a snowy white manicured beard and designer tattoos.

This Lear dresses in a not-quite-a-military uniform as if he were a corporate man with a penchant for vodka shots who has turned to a fashion choice of freshly laundered and ironed jacket and trousers in shades of khaki brown and beige.

There's a huge KEEP OUT daubed on the nailed up doors of the stage (designer Rosanna Vize) torn down by the motley crew of performers invading the stage with their shabby suitcases and creating a makeshift pop up Britain for this King Lear.

A goods trolley roll container from a warehouse (maybe in the age of the internet it's also warehouse Britain) lies on its side ready for them.

So these squatters zip up their windcheaters, turn their baseball caps, pull their beanies down over their ears. And lay a golden cloak and golden circlet crown on the ground for Lear, King of the Britons.

The daughters of Lear stand on crates, ready for their father to address them while the King's Fool (Loren O'Dair)  is a delicate Pierrot musician with a tear painted on her cheek, playing the violin.

Gloucester (Burt Caesar) is a credulous complacent astrology-believing  senior courtier in an Edwardian red velvet smoking jacket whose good and bad sides are embodied in his sons, all-too-gullible Edgar (Joshua Jameson) and driven, bitter illegitimate Edmund (Ralph Davis). 

The Duke of Kent becomes "Our Lady Of Kent" (Saskia Reeves), a bespectacled sensible woman politican in white jacket, skirt, blouse and court shoes, holding a large black book of accounts or minutes of the Royal court proceedings  or maybe a version of the Domesday Book, a book of land deeds.

She narrowly avoids a throttling when her position is ripped from her after she dares to question Lear's wisdom in giving up his kingdom in favour of his daughters and, more pertinently for a patriarchal monarchy, his sons-in-law.

There's Goneril (Emily Bruni), thin and sallow with pursed red lipstick lips, hair scraped back in a bun, a small cape around her bony shoulders.  Regan (Sirine Saba), black hair streaming down her back, is fleshier, more voluptuous in a silky white halter neck, a fur pagan pelt stole and long velvet skirt.

They pile on the flattery.  Cordelia (Anjana Vasan) famously says nothing, a small figure in over sized, virginal white high waisted robe and silver adornments,  all ripped from her by her angry father to reveal a plain slip which could pass equally for a 1960s dress.

This is a solid, vigorous flat cap production with clear verse speaking - ideal for exam students who, despite cuts, want to hear the text. At the same time, it didn't blow TLT or her own automotive courtier away.

The use of  the cage-like warehouse roll goods container for the tearing out of Gloucester's eyes by  Cornwall (Faz Singhateh), the changing of Edgar and the pitting of sister against sister over their deceitful lover Edmund felt rather laboured.

The best things about the production?

Saskia Reeves's sturdily loyal Kent with extra resonance when disguised she answers the question, "How now, what art thou?" with "A man, sir".

 And  Joshua James's loose-limbed scampering Edgar, the only character who via a lunatic vagrant disguise, really gets low down and dirty truly gaining the sympathy of the audience and credibly transforming into a thoughtful statesman by the end.

Otherwise it's altogether too clean and laundered and  a lacklustre mash up of the traditional and the modern in dress and delivery.

This otherwise conventional production of King Lear does extract a fair amount of comedy out of Lear's contradictions and his realisation of his two elder daughters' treachery, but it does feel this is at the expense of power and pathos.

Having said this, there is a gesture towards homelessness in a corporate Britain, with a courageous military soul drained into pointless voilence, and the Kingdom's division did make us think of the union, Brexit and the implications for the island of Ireland.

The rain held off and, while this wasn't top notch for us, this brisk and admirably clear (and maybe televisual?) version of Lear is still an excellent upper range amber light introduction for those coming fresh to the Bard.

Review Much Ado About Nothing (Preview)

Much Ado About Nothing
by William Shakespeare

Once Upon A Time In Mexico
http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/

It's Mucho Ado About Nothing with sombreros, ponchos and cigarillos at Shakespeare's Globe set in the midst of the Mexican Revolution in the early years of the 20th century.

The steam clears revealing wooden slatted railway wagons spanning the stage, a  means of moving people and supplies from and to the home encampment.  

The grubby rebels, the leader Don Pedro (Steve John Shepherd),  lanky, moustachioed Benedick (Matthew Needham) and young puppy rebel Claudio (Marcello Cruz) arrive on horses, cleverly evoked by riders on stilts and wire horses' heads.

Here the women stride around with rifles and belts of bullets criss crossing their female apparel. 

In the chauvinist rebel camp environment, there is also Don Pedro's sister, the saturnine Juana (Jo Dockery). It's a gender swap from the original Shakespeare text and the male machismo surrounding her gives some motivation for her bitterness and jealousy.

Directed by Matthew Dunster, it all works surprisingly well. Don Pedro is a slightly insecure Pancho Villa figure at a time when several factions were fighting for dominance in Mexico. The tough Leonato (Martin Marquez in a fine performance), complete with  black eye patch, is still slightly vulnerable when it comes to family honour.

Beatrice (Beatriz Romilly) is his slightly older niece, a slightly more careworn woman than her hardy but still more than slightly fragile cousin Hero (Anya Chalotra).

The music from composer James Maloney and the three-strong band led by Zands Duggan with Matt Bacon on guitar and Miguel Gorodi on trumpet, conjures up a hot, dusty and vibrant Mexico. But it also works dramatically, signalling the mood of the oncoming action and enabling fluid, clear scene changes for the audience.

Anna Fleischle's design keeps it simple: The train wagons from the National Railways of Mexico  provide the backdrop. On one side stands a blue and white tiled pillar with an altar and a Madonna shrine. On the other side, a pillar has a wooden bench curving round as a seat and a perch for the beer bottles.

Away from the main stage is another island platform in the midde of the groundlings, serving as a second stage. 

The tricks played on Beatrice and Benedict make sense in the boredom of the anti-climactic periods between fighting.  The easily-swayed males and their vulnerability, alongside machismo, makes sense of the savage rejection of Hero, not only by Claudio but also Don Pedro and her own father Leonato. 

The place names are changed to suit Mexico. The currency of course is the peso and the masked ball with Fleischle's flamboyant brightly colouried Mexican costumes  becomes a lusty but formalised celebration of the bull and virility. 

In this version, Dogberry becomes Dog Berry (Ewan Wardrop), an American movie director who mangles words in translation. 

His box camera footage helps uncover the villain of the piece and if the storyline feels a little strained, that's more the nature of Shakespearean comedy than this production. 

For a Hollywood newsreel and movie director really did accompany Sancho Panza in real life and there was even a contract, if a little less spectacular and prescriptive than some implied.

It's an earthy, bright and gaudy Much Ado with the music effortlessly flagging up the comic and serious moments.  

Very much an ensemble piece from Beatrice and Benedick, through Don Pedro, Juana, Hero, Claudio and Hero, to the sweetly-singing child soldier (Lucy Brandon), it's a green light for a mucho enjoyable Much Ado About Nothing.  

Review Twelfth Night [Preview]

Twelfth Night
by William Shakespeare

All Aboard The Love Boat!
http://www.shakespearesglobe.com

After Emma Rice's triumphant exotic production of  A Midsummer Night's Dream, she now tackles  Shakespeare's later comedy Twelfth Night, a tale of literal shipwreck and shipwrecked identities. In this case, plus hornpipes, kilts, arran sweaters and golf clubs.

The Shakespearean mash up of the Balkans and England in the Kingdom of Illyria is transferred, Ealing Comedy style, hook, line, sinker, cakes and ale to its very own fantasy Scottish island  1970s' mash up with disco party cruise ship and lifebelts proclaiming the SS Unity Love.

There's also a further touch of the Ealing Comedies in this production. The poshies, the Duke Orsino (Joshua Lacey)  - think Ian Botham complete with mullet hairstyle,  and the Countess Olivia (Annette McLaughlin)  who starts off in  Jackie Kennedy-style with a veiled pill box hat, speak English English.

Sebastian (John Pfumojena, full of soul) and Viola (charmingly wide-eyed boyish Anita Joy-Uwajeh)  make a fetching washed-ashore pair of neatly-turned out, easily mistaken twins in their cruise ship white uniform, with and without their gold-buttoned jackets. 

Meanwhile most of  the lower orders  - morally so in the case of Olivia's uncle kilted, knee socked golfing Sir Toby Belch (a splendid pot-bellied Tony Jayawardena) - all have a Scottish burr.  Maria (Carly Bawden) is a scheming ladette maid with lusty vocals while Fabian (Nandi Bebhe) is a well-defined factotum in Downton Abbey tails.

Feste (Le Gateau Chocolat) is a bearded drag queen master of ceremonies rather than a jester. Clad in a gold lamé Demis Roussos robe, black patent  platforms and fishnets and a vibrant shade of turquoise eye shadow on his lids, his operatic bass tones resonate out from this showboat.

Lez Brotherston's initially deceptively simple set tips, slips and slides with the tide into a three tiered set with a gangway leading down to the households under, eventually, a huge moon.

The space below alternates as a 70s' boxing ring where snack munching Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Marc Antolin) swaps Argyle sweater for silken boxer shorts and gown, the two households and  a ship's hold which becomes a prison for Malvolio (Katy Owen). 

Yep, the director Rice's trademark lighting (Malcolm Rippeth) is there and maybe sometimes this Twelfth Night seems a little too self-knowing, occasionally limiting the audience's delirium. And exactly where the on and off shore households of Orsino and Olivia begin and end, we weren't quite sure.

But really it doesn't matter. Just as red-haired Kiplingesque Malvolio slips from Scotch to another UK accent with a touch of Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em. But Owen's frail androgynous figure importantly does also manage to channel the comedy and the pathos.

In between, there's plenty of fine verse speaking and singing of the famous lines including music being the food of love.  And talking about music, there's original material by composer Ian Ross with additional text and lyrics by Carl Grose with more than a sprinkling of disco hits (it would be churlish to give them away!) with sweet use of blanched morse code flags.

With the descent into and ascent from misrule, there's plenty of visual and verbal humour  (a Bonnie Prince Charlie row boat and an ingenious bit of audience interaction comes to mind) to please the Globe's international audience. We saw an early preview but the show was already in pretty good nick and will doubtless sharpen up.

It's all done in a distinctly less hierarchical fashion than in many a production and nicely ties up echoes of other Shakespeare plays.

Above all, Rice lives up to her promise in the programme to let loose the farce structure of the play while keeping some of the more disturbingly cruel elements and it's a green light for a festivity lovingly crafted with flares.  

Review Romeo and Juliet

Romeo And Juliet
by William Shakespeare

Verona In Voodooland
http://www.shakespearesglobe.com

They've gone down the rabbit hole in Verona and emerged in a dystopia where, it seems, friends are the new family. And the families are feuding.  For it's as if the flatmates have become family and Verona has become the new dressing-up and party capital.

The inhabitants of Verona are like bored Big Brother contestants who strive to have fun in their family units. The Prince (Paul Rider) is the disembodied TV voice dispensing justice. So Juliet (Kirsty Bushell) is a world-weary modern spinster, way past her teenage years but not ready to play the maiden aunt.

Romeo (Edward Hogg) is maybe younger, Bip The Clown with words, even to the point of presenting a single flower at one point but also part of the grunge generation.

Soutra Gilmour's set design is minimal, black netting above, a patch of bright green grass at the front of the stage. The props, clown make up, furniture and music further maketh the concept. Verona has become a kidult's playground - the prologue comes through a loudspeaker with a chorus of kids' voices echoing the adult.

This is also a production that has everything thrown at it and some of it sticks. But some of it just wanted to make TLT and her automotive sidekick roll their eyes and headlights in that middle class way of theirs and toot out, "Oh, reeeeally?!!!!"

Now we're all for having our bourgeois expectations shaken up. However when a newcomer to Romeo and Juliet might well believe, having seen this show, that the lovers don't die and that the tragedy is an out-of-this-world episode of Dr Who - well, to mix our metaphors in the same way, Houston, we have a problem.

On the other hand, there's some value of the concept of an older Juliet and Romeo eternally stuck in pretend student mode before meeting each other and experiencing something real amidst the chaos.

Blythe Duff makes a distinctive Scottish nurse in white face war paint - part Elizabethan Queen and part 18th century duchess gone to seed.

The relationship between Romeo and the female Mercutio (Golda Rosheuvel) and Mercutio with a credulous Benvolio (Jonathan Livingstone) in a Goth daisy chain of family connections gives a certain backbone to the household. Romeo's verse speaking still had a clear lyrical quality which broke through the kerfuffle around him.

But this was a hard-working production trying to do what? The story (has director Daniel Kramer never read Robert McKee. dahlink? ;)) is lost in the gimmickry.

A chorus of Village People's YMCA while dressed in a dinosaur costume? Tick! A piebald faced. chained actor (Ricky Champ) bounding on as the dog of Capulet (Gareth Snook)? Tick! Lady Capulet (Martina Laird) like a tottering black-robed Alice In Wonderland character with a glass of whisky in hand? Tick!  Lots of screeching and screaming and kicking of Doc Martens? Tick!

It's certainly once more unto the the breach - if it weren't marketed as Romeo and Juliet but a play about a process with its cutting and splicing and editing, we might have felt more sympathetic.

But, while we think we understand some of the reasoning behind this rendition of the play, (this is the serious bit) it also seems to take away the very reason for watching a play by William Shakespeare. The love, violence and death is not felt but laughed at. That is the breach with the play and its language.

And, most egregious of all, it felt too long. The schoolkids around us gasped at times and giggled, but  were also bemused - maybe as to whether this was story they had studied. It seemed to make them unsure and uneasy, but not, we think, in a good way.

Anyway, enough of our possible projections on to the younger generation. We like good actors even in an ill-thought-through production but we give a red/amber light.

Review Imogen (William Shakespeare's Cymbeline Renamed And Reclaimed)

Imogen
William Shakespeare's Cymbeline Renamed and Reclaimed

Romans (Rap) In Britain
http://imogen.shakespearesglobe.com/

As far as TLT could recall from her dim and distant past of Shakespeare studies, Cymbeline is a bit of a ragbag of Shakespeare's Greatest Hits. Echoes of King Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night abound.

It's also part of that loose association of plays in lit crit which are known as "problem" plays (but also a romance or tragicomedy) with its improbable plot and eponymous character who is out of the picture for much of the play's running time.

Director Matthew Dunster's adaptation focuses instead squarely on the character of Imogen, daughter of  kingpin drug dealer Cymbeline, who in any case always has the most lines in the play, far more than the King of the Britons, her father.

In fact, TLT's little but learned hatchback reminded her there are only four Shakespeare plays with women in the titles. Like joint bank accounts, the male name automatically comes first in Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet and Troilus and Cressida and it's only in The Merry Wives of Windsor where women stand merrily alone.

Cymbeline (Jonathan McGuinness) is Britain's most powerful drug dealer running a gang producing a factory conveyor belt's worth of Class A substances. Meanwhile far off Rome is home to a rival white tracksuited bling drugs' gang.

One of Cymbeline's lieutenants Belarius (Martin Marquez) is falsely accused of treachery and in revenge for unjustified exile steals Cymbeline's two sons Aviragus (William Grint) and Guiderius (Scott Karim)  bringing them up as his own. Only Imogen (Maddy Hill) remains within the drugs' gang compound.

Previously, Cymbeline had brought Posthumus (Ira Mandela Siobhan), the son of another of his lieutenants, who had been murdered into his inner sanctum. With gangland members as nannies Imogen and Posthumumus are brought up together eventually getting it together and secretly making  it legal as wife and husband.

But Cymbeline has married again and the new Queen Bee in the drugs' gang (Claire-Louise Cordwell) has a definite sting. She and Cymbeline want Imogen to marry her cocky son Cloten (Joshua Lacey) from a previous marriage. So when Cymbeline discovers the marriage of Imogen and Posthumus, he banishes the latter to keep them apart.

Before he goes into exile to Rome, Imogen and Posthumus exchange love tokens: He gives her a bracelet and she gives him a diamond ring.

The rest of the play pivots round a bet with devious Giacomo (Matthew Needham), placed against Imogen retaining her virtue which Posthumus is lured into and tricked by whilst in exile,  Imogen escaping Cloten's clutches in disguise as a boy, the Romans and Brits in gang warfare and how Cymbeline's family is reunited,  the fortunes of Belarius and finally Posthumus restored and the latter coming to see how wrong he has been about Imogen's supposed adultery.

With its rather awkward mix of pantomine, fairytale, Britain's mythic history and revenge tragedy-like gruesomeness, it's already a romcom which  fits with a certain modern cinematic sensibility.The updating of Cymbeline to embrace gangland culture isn't entirely new.  There's a 2014 US movie set in biker culture directed by Michael Almereyda ending with Imogen and Posthumus riding off into the sunset on a motorbike and freedom.

But this is set in current day London, including a historical nod to West Side Story and The Long Good Friday, with its transparent butcher's shop curtains, rap, hip hop and electronic music  - Skepta's Man, Daft Punk's Get Lucky amongst others - and gangland honour culture. Branded tracksuits are the gang uniform in an interpretation, cutting out much of the supernatural gumph, giving the story in some respects recognition and clarity for modern audiences.

It's also literally an electric show - the Globe stage is flooded with artificial light and miked and electricity is bound up with the drugs' gang concept of the show (design by Jon Bausor and lighting by Lee Curran). That's to say the hydroponic drug "farms" with their steep electricity bills.

At the same time, there's a certain cost to the balance of the play. Rather than Imogen as a Renaissance babe (ok, maid) emerging with untutored virtue out of barbarous Britain, Imogen, although clean of drugs, ends up as a potential narcotics' gang matriarch.

That's not to say this version of the play does not work on its own terms It does. It's loud and it's brash. There's some clever, punchy updating of the text through pauses and modern speech patterns giving new meaning to old words.

There's a little too much hand gesturing and self-conscious feel to Maddy Hill's Imogen, more comfortable on the Globe stage when she dons her male disguise and becomes an active figure rather than the previously more passive recipient of bad news.

There's also a notable playful and tender performance from Grint's Averagus with deaf signing feeling a natural part of the play. Nevertheless the updating doesn't have the rigour and attention as this season's other problematic play "The Taming Of The Shrew".

It flattens Cymbeline into a gangland tale and the comedy and violence no longer form part of a delicate Shakespearean meditation on inherent nobility threading together the pastoral, the court and the supernatural in its concerns, language and dramatic contrasts.

Without these skeins giving the possibility of a more idealistic existence, it also feels rather lengthy. But - and in these days, it's a big (positive) but - the dancing (choreography Christopher Akrill), blunt black comedy, music, aerial acrobatics and choice use of pauses to twist lines into current speak may still find an appreciative audience, especially those who come to Cymbeline for the first time in this version focussed on Imogen. An amber light for an electric performance which, despite its flaws, still leaves many in the audience on a high.

Review The Taming Of The Shrew

The Taming Of The Shrew

by William Shakespeare

Plaything Of The Irish World

http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/

It's now the second Shakespeare in the new season at The Globe and a tough nut to crack this time. The Taming Of The Shrew is a play we'd only read rather than seen but, even on reading, it jumped out as a particularly sadistic piece on a par with The Merchant of Venice.

So Caroline Byrne's always interesting production with an all-Irish cast has grasped the mettle by setting it in 1916 southern Ireland, then still part of the British Empire. This gives "the shrew" Katherine a specific position as an educated woman in Irish society but also a wild young radical at what could, and should, have been a turning point for the equality of women in Ireland.

For Irish women who took part in the battle for Irish independence soon found themselves undermined, in a kind of compounded parallel to women in England forced away from jobs they carried out when the men were away in the First World War.

Now, for those who, unlike me, have not seen  Kiss Me Kate ;), a quick rundown of the play.

Katherine (Aoife Duffin) is the eldest daughter of Baptista (Gary Lilburn) and has intentionally put herself on the shelf with her shrewish behaviour.

Two suitors stolid Hortensio (Colin Gormley) and an elderly dandy-about-town, Gremio (Raymond Keane)  eagerly court her younger sister, the more agreeable Bianca (Genevieve Hulme-Beaman), but the catch is their merchant father Baptista won't release his younger child for marriage until the elder, his main heiress, is fixed up.

Meanwhile university student Lucentio (Aaron Heffernan), also smitten with Bianca, in league with servant Tranio (Imogen Doel) concocts a cunning plan. Lucentio is transformed into a mortar-boarded schoolmaster with James Joycean round glasses to tutor his beloved, while Tranio agrees to play his own master,  wooing Bianca with a deceived Baptista's consent, keeping the other suitors at bay. (Takes a breath!).

Meanwhile, rough and ready Petruchio (Edward MacLiam), having come into his inheritance after his Pa's death, arrives in town from his country estate, accompanied by servant Grumio (Helen Norton) ready to find a bride and wed. He separately comes to a compact with Bianca's suitors Hortensio and Gremio to marry and "tame" Katherine.

This version has blackened stage and a versatile, sometime symbolic, black and white split staircase designed by Chiara Stephenson and a band of Gaelic musicians (musical director Mark Bousie) on the balcony with traditional pipes, drum, mandolin and violin  

It cuts tinker Christopher Sly and the play-within-a-play from the start of the original The Taming Of The Shrew. Instead  we are faced with a wispily fragile and pained Katherine in white laundered high collared blouse and black skirt with velvet chevrons  perched on the front edge of the stage. She  sings a lament, bringing a note of Celtic haunting despair and almost a supernatural element.

Later labelled "stark mad or wondrous proud", she regrets the sidelining of women in the lyrics (by Morna Regan) as "not numbered in the song". This is the Ireland of James Joyce and John Millington Synge when the latter used folklore and subverted the caricature of the Irish peasant stereotype in his plays and where young middle and upper class women joined the men in political activism.

As her father Baptista enters, Katherine is seated on the floor against a pillar, a shock of hair drawn back from a peaky face, legs akimbo in her skirt - reading the Irish Times.  

And so it goes, her uncouth finger poking in her ear, a readiness to spit when moved to anger and, maybe far more deliberately and provocatively, a mannish propensity to scratch her front nether quarters.

But then she is not the only woman breaking boundaries. While Lucentio's servant Tranio is very much the cheeky man/boy with the Irish caricature profile, Petruchio's sidekick Grumio seems far more a woman disguised as a Sancho Panza servant.

As Petruchio's treatment of Katherine worsens, after her relieved father has forced her into marriage and her husband bundles her in a proprietorial cowhide to his rural cottage, Grumio seems more the housekeeper in trousers, obeying but not relishing her part in taming the slim wisp of a city girl.

The transposing of the play to Ireland on the brink of independence is carefully thought through and, on the main, works well. The Joycean men about town always willing to take a wager and the doltish peasants reminiscent of a Synge play and the Irish Literary Revival.

The Widow in conservative Catholic black (Amy Conroy) who finally gets her reward,  has also been sidelined but is hardly an ally of Katherine. Bianca, a far more womanly Ann Miller type, has her own schemes.

It does not make the starving of Kathrrine,  a wraith-like creature after her wedding kept in her white tattered bridal dress torn from its skirt hoops,  less sadistic. Indeed the womanly Grumio with her sad eyes comments mutely on the sorry situation.

But the city girl is given a nasty dose of life as a wife in rural Ireland,  with its dependence on the  beef trade and with a water well in the cottage floor. All this  to rid Katherine of her presumption in hindering the trade in marriage and dowries and daring to take part in newspaper debate.

Her new husband Petruchio is both the swaggering leather clad fighter farmer and the rueful awkward less educated lad, nevertheless always conscious he has the physical, and in his status as male, the upper hand, even when doubts assail him.

Meanwhile there's still plenty of bold costuming, visual comedy and slapstick played at a cracking pace. Plus surreal props such as an outsize mercantile abacus, Hortensio disguised as a Go-Compare violin tutor, Lucentio's father (Louis Dempsey)  becoming a victim of deliberate mistaken identity as his son's plans misfire.

Maybe the transposition is a little strained at times. After all, the feminist women of Ireland were more than one and there were men such as Francis Sheehy Skeffington  who took the part of the women.

But this is a mostly coherent take on The Taming Of the Shrew with Petruchio's and the men's boisterousness gradually turning to shame during Katherine's final speech of plausibly literate and carefully-chosen words, seemingly advocating subservience to the husband. It all mirrors perhaps the complex relationship of the Irish to their then colonial masters with its violence and compromises.   

In a not-quite-reversal even now as part of an independent state, Irish citizens resident in the UK have a vote in the EU referendum and the split staircase of Eire and Northern Ireland still poses a conundrum to be solved. So for this vivid and touching re-imagination of The Taming Of The Shrew, it's a green light from TLT.

[This was a preview performance] 

Review A Midsummer Night's Dream PREVIEW

A Midsummer Night's Dream
by William Shakespeare

Monster Midsummer Mash Up 
http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/ 

A joyful beginning to Emma Rice's tenure at The Globe for a gender-crossing xx best exotic Marigold xx A Midsummer Night's Dream where TLT and her garlanded companion found themselves groundlings in a wonderland just outside of Hoxton.

The tone is set from the start as tambourine-shaking parishioner Rita Quince (bespectacled Lucy Thackeray), in Globe volunteer uniform, clambers on the stage from white-tableclothed restaurant tables, introducing Nick Bottom (Ewan Wardrop) Health & Safety Officer.

Up above is the sitar-playing Sheema Mukherjee perched on a balcony and this parish has obviously now gone global in search of funding as is the wont of parishes nowadays ...   

*Flashback Alert!* 

We must confess to loving AMND (as we will shorten it from now on) since having our first magical experience at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre. Not without it's Indian tinge too, since one of the co-directors was Kashmir-born David Conville (along with Richard Digby-Day, a partnership still it seems going strong, and Christopher Biggins!)  But at the time we were chiefly excited by seeing pre-Big Brother, post Rock Follies Rula Lenska as Titania and Liver Bird Elizabeth Estensen as beanpole Helena. 

Anyway fast forward to the present!  

*End of Flashback Alert!*  

It's a hybrid AMND (hold on to that acronym!), a trifle self-conscious but none the worse for that. A cross between Bollywood, 1960s' Performance (without the gore), Sgt Pepper, Ugly Betty, trademark Kneehigh puppetry and aerial  flourishes (although also playful gestures to Peter Brook's legendary "Empty Space" AMND with Alan Howard and Sara Kestelman) 

Fresh from the "blow up sex doll" Measure for Measure (doncha just love the TLT blog archive, just to be able to say and link to that?! Put that in your pipe and smoke it, broadsheets!;)), Zubin Varla is a middle-aged Indian Mick-Jagger-type (parentheses and acronym alert, wait a moment Mick Jagger is now an OAP!) gangster cum restaurateur cum Duke Theseus.

He has captured the initially Scottish Hippolyta (Meow Meow clad in leopard skin slinky dress and coat) from a rival although she, by the end of the play, having brought her stilletos to the conference table, changes nationality.

A Glasto Indian sixth-former Hermia (AnjanaVasan) and an indy Brit wannabe Kerouac cum Brando cum Calvin Klein pecs' Lysander (Edmund Derrington) plan to elope. While a Brooks Brothers' (we really should get sponsorship for this!) ambitious smoothie Demetrius (Ncuti Gatwa), rather sinister in setting his sights on Hermia, is pursued by his old flame (and first aider - don't ask, go see!) Helenus (no. it's not a spelling error, it's Ankur Bahl!).

Bottom is the male cock of the walk surrounded by lady volunteers (*Minor Quibble Alert* he could insure he has a few all-eventualities' put-downs for good-natured heckles when he poses rhetorial questions to the audience!). 

And they are a comely bunch of variously talented am dram menials from Bottom's vainglorious would-be Olivier, via Snout's (Alex Tregear) ingeniously "wittiest partition" cereal packet wall to the rather proficient Thisbe/Flute (a hard call to make clear an amateur is really rather good but Margaret Ann Bain pulls it off). 

But wait - we can't forget the faerie world and mischieviously Puckish (surely a tautology?!) Puck (Katy Owen) - part Pinocchio, part Tinker Bell - who also transforms herself into stern father in a wheelchair Egeus cum gangsta ?music producer with Sophia Loren sunglasses. 

Voodoo zombie fairies (Nandi Bhebhe, also Metro-reading Starveling) and Cobweb (Tibu Fortes), amongst others, do Oberon and Titania's bidding with Varla and Meow as is usual doubling up the royal roles. 

We're past the time of phrases such as "unashamedly populist" (why should it be anything else?). There have been enough updatings and adaptations of Shakespeare to make even a Globe in-joke about "fidelity to text" a wee bit dépassé when it's now broadcast in your own series or be damned in the groves of academe. But it's all none the worse for that. 

Maybe Bottom's transformation into an ass scene - seen by your Pen and Tell twosome in broad daylight - could have been more magical but, again, that's a minor quibble (we've had enough of alerts - once used they're no longer a novelty!). 

A great bubble of laughter and little toots of pleasure from TLT's sidekick engulfed The Globe (with even a bit of Bowie and was that a touch of cod Sondheim?!) in this first production of a new regime. Tanika Gupta's lyrics  and dramaturgy including a smidgeon of John Donne acknowledging the new Globe's American origins and Stu Barker's music prove charming crowd pleasers. 

So we take away a green light served up by The Globe's "wedding special" menu and wish the happy coupling well!

Review The Heresy of Love

The Heresy of Love

By Helen Edmundson

Sister Act

http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/theatre/whats-on/globe-theatre/the-heresy-of-love

What an intriguing premise – a portrait of a seventeenth century nun and not just any nun. Juana Ines de la Cruz (Naomi Frederick). A Super-nun! 

Renowned female scholar, poet and playwright in Mexico, then a colony of the Spanish Empire. Born into racial and hierarchical complexity, she was one of six illegitimate children from a Criolla (of mixed race ancestry) mother and two different Spanish soldier fathers.

Helen Edmundson’s 2012 play, The Heresy Of Love, inspired by a staging of Sister Juana’s Baroque comedy House of Desires eight years earlier,  first surfaced to great acclaim at the RSC’s smaller space, The Swan,  in a season alongside Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure and David Edgar’s St James’s Bible anniversary play Written on the Heart.

Now directed by John Dove, it is part of Shakespeare’s Globe Justice and Mercy season.

So TLT, not having seen the earlier incarnation, emerged from her cloister with her scarlet carriage looking forward to a major historical drama centred on a phenomenally-gifted woman writer constrained by contradictory and shifting circumstances of Church, Court and Empire.

Despite only few undisputed facts of Sister Juana’s life, there is certainly enough there to provide a meaty dramatic discussion in the context of our twenty first, as well as seventeenth century, preoccupations. Except that for TLT and companion, that discussion never came.

Maybe it was swamped by the much larger proportions of The Globe's thrust stage with grilles at the back, extended into the audience, we fancy, in the shape of a cross (design: Michael Taylor). However the piece’s linear telling of Juana’s story, use of Baroque  play structure with some cod-Shakespearean devices, stayed firmly within the stereotype for us.

There were tantalizing lines and possible story lines. 

The need to earn a living from commissions. The relationship with other nuns equally imprisoned by their sex and class, manoeuvring their lives, wealth and intellects within the confines of “New Spain” politics and the dreaded Inquisition. 

The wife of a powerful patron still subjugated by the need to produce son and heir. The illegitimate babies. The scholar nun, still very much maintaining the caste system by owning a mulatto female slave, but licensed briefly to hold her salons of secular as well as religious learning within the convent. 

The secret courts and selective record keeping.

But all this seemed thrown away and much of the history recounted outside character. Sister Juana herself seemed curiously marginalised and muted with the weak and trapped Father Antonio (Patrick Driver)  and the true-history plotting of Bishop Santa Cruz (Anthony Howell) leaving the more conflicted imprint on the play. 

Juana’s battle for her career and finally her life against the Archbishop Aguiar y Sejas (Phil Whitchurch as sour as the lemon he held in his hand) is allowed to fizzle out. It seems heresy to say it but the male scheming from the very beginning of The Heresy Of Love pulls the play itself away from its female subject and gives it whatever dynamism and rhythm comes through.

This is a shame as the Golden Age Of Spanish drama during Sister Juana’s lifetime not only allowed her plays to be published and staged to great acclaim in Spain and its empire, but also permitted female actors to play female characters when boys still monopolised such roles in England. 

There are some more lively, if rather obvious, moments with Vicereine patroness (an elegant Ellie Piercy), slave confidante Juanita (rumbustious Sophia Nomvete) and Juana’s niece Angelica (a fetching Gwyneth Keyworth) plus a final visual design transformation of Juana in her downfall gives a hint of more depth and subtlety.

Maybe in a smaller space, or even on screen, the granting of leeway for women in theatre and cloister, the dramatic possibilities of interplay between the excesses of the Baroque form and censorship, the illegitimate babies and the fatal real-life theatricality of male dominated church and state could bring a much more intricately human and open ended reading of the same piece.

This play certainly opens up a subject which we knew nothing about but at the same time only just about scrapes through into an amber light. 

Still, writer Helen Edmundson appears to be on a roll with an upcoming play on Queen Anne at the RSC and an adaptation of Zola’s Therese Raquin for Keira Knightley on Broadway. 

In the meantime, for those interested, Sister Juana is championed by poet Octavio Paz in his 1982 biography, the subject of a couple of early twenty-first century plays by American-Mexican playwrights Estela Portillo and Karen Zacarias  and a 1990 biopic from filmmaker Maria Luisa Bemberg.