A Midsummer Night's Dream, Globe Theatre

Deep in the forest there are dark things: horned half-men and furry beasts, creatures of English myth. Dominic Dromgoole’s production is populated by animalistic fairies with antler crowns, green men and women, wreathed in leaves and daubed with earth. There’s a carnality to them too, these creatures; Titania’s desire for Bottom is hot and hungry – you can almost see the steam rising – while the bare-chested Oberon will occasionally envelop his Puck in a long, lingering embrace.

The forest seems to taint the four young lovers too, creeping around their ankles like ivy, encircling them. Each time they appear on stage, they have shed one more layer of finery; their shirts come untucked and their stockings straggle, their faces become increasingly caked in dirt. The forest infects them and there becomes less and less to distinguish them from the fairy folk.

This sense of pastoral unease is off-set by the broadly comic mechanicals scenes. They’re first seen tip-tap their way onto the stage in a kind of clog dance (a recurring device). Pearce Quigley’s magnificent Bottom manages to be both gentle and understated in his delivery while simultaneously stealing every scene he’s in like a child scrumping apples. His is a melancholic Bottom, though also rather vain and touchy, prone to strops. He makes a show of never remembering Peter Quince’s name and likewise refers to the play they are putting on as the tragedy of Pyramus and Thingy. The final performance of the play, in all its tragical mirth, sees the company erect a teeny theatre, a kind of rickety mini-Globe onto which they all cram, a structure which requires regular mid-scene repairs, the stage hand slithering between Bottom’s legs as he attempts to address his chink.

Michelle Terry is a lustful, rich-voiced Titania but also an intriguing Hippolyta, full of ambivalence for Theseus, shrinking from his touch and enjoying the disruptive antics of the mechanicals rather too much (there’s also a fascinating essay by Terry on Hippolyta and the Amazons in the programme, which is well worth reading). John Light is a bounding, bearded Oberon, clambering about the stage and swinging from its pillars, while Matthew Tennyson’s Puck is lanky and somewhat adolescent in energy, his sudden fits of energy giving in to shoulder-shrugs and inattentive yawns, a creature in need of distraction. Luke Thompson, making his professional debut as Lysander, stands out among the love-struck quartet, consumed by this sudden surge of new feeling, grinning like a little boy.

While the comic scenes are a source of revelry with every potential joke sniffed out and made much of, with each mechanical granted their moment, whether it be the wall’s trousers escaping or Bottom’s inability to remember his lines, the Pyramus and Thisbe sequence does feel rather over-extended. Though the laughs duly come, there are times when the jokes feel laboured and you can practically see the performers striving and straining, steering the play away from the twilight magic of some of the earlier scenes in the process. Though there are some pleasing subversions, particularly the way the company approaches the final, almost obligatory, jig, Dromgoole’s production is most potent when evoking a sense of mystical menace, the forest not as lovers’ playground but as a world of hunter and hunted.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Hamlet at the National Theatre

Rory Kinnear is a very cerebral actor. It’s often possible to see the things clicking and connecting behind his eyes, but here in his long-mooted Hamlet for the National Theatre, this only works in his favour.

He speaks with a clearness of tone and freshness of voice, as if the words were just occurring to him, and, even when he is still, a sense of inner desperation remains.

His Hamlet is a mercurial figure, sometimes self-pitying, sometimes hard-edged and cunning; a young man pinioned by circumstance. When, rather self-consciously shamming insanity, he curls himself up in his trunk and pulls down the lid, there’s a palpable feeling that he wishes he could stay like that, balled up with a book, secure and safe, and shut out the hell he’s found himself in.


The production belongs to Kinnear. Nicholas Hytner’s direction is solid and polished but also rather safe and occasionally uninspired. The overriding sense is of a watched world: dark suited men with earpieces glide through anonymous corridors, people listen behind doors and silent figures can often be glimpsed through windows or submerged in shadow. It is impossible to be truly alone in this environment – there is always someone looking on or listening in.

Kinnear is first glimpsed in his mourning suit, looking stiff-spined and awkward as people buzz around him, an afterthought in his own home. Claudius’s first speech has become an on-camera address and once it’s all wrapped up everyone visibly slumps while Gertrude reaches for the first of many glasses of bubbly. The playing out of events for public consumption is a recurring theme and Hytner’s production contains visual echoes of The West Wing as well as touches of something more sinister and Soviet.

Patrick Malahide is a sly and understated Claudius while Clare Higgins plays Gertrude as a groomed and glossy political wife, crammed into a pencil skirt and high heels, masking her complicity with drink; but, in a production of great clarity, her motivations remain the haziest of all the characters and Higgins rarely allows the audience a handle on what she is feeling or thinking, a barrier remains in place.

Ruth Negga is a sparky Ophelia and has a real sense of sibling warmth with Alex Lanipekun's Laertes but, as is often the case, comes unstuck with the mad scenes, and just seems silly gliding round the stage on an overly symbolic shopping trolley papered with her dead father’s image.

Vicki Mortimer’s design enhances this idea of the ‘corridors of power’; the palace is an elegant but anonymous space, sparely furnished, chilly and shifting, with Hamlet’s book-strewn and messy quarters standing out in contrast. Though Hytner’s production can be a bit obvious, a bit blunt in places, and some of the innovations seem misplaced – the matching T-shirts whipped out to accompany the players’ performance are a case in point, stretching credulity – it’s very well-paced and has real dramatic propulsion, thanks in large part to Kinnear.

Kinnear’s somewhat studenty Prince is pitched into a hellish mess and made to confront himself and his world for what seems the first time; his is a very human Hamlet, smacking his hand against a desk with such force he hurts himself, smoking through his soliloquies. It’s his performance that sticks, that roots itself deep, a thoughtful portrayal that never feels mechanical, always fresh, considered and touchingly real.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Measure for Measure at the Almeida

Measure for Measure is often categorised as one of Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays’, meaning it doesn’t easily fit into the boxes marked ‘comedy’ and ‘tragedy’, but falls awkwardly in between. It’s a morally muddy piece that raises as many questions as it answers. A better way of viewing it is as a challenge rather than a problem; it takes clarity of vision and some strong assured performances to pull it off with any degree of success, something Michael Attenborough manages with his modern dress production at the Almeida.

The first few minutes are full of writhing and thrusting bodies, a gaggle of prostitutes tottering about in quim-skimming skirts, which rapidly serves to establish the Vienna of the play as a place riddled with vice and corruption.


The Duke, who seems keen to clean things up, decides it’s necessary for him to view society from a different perspective, his identity concealed under a friar’s cowl. He appoints the uptight Angelo to be his deputy in his absence, a man who at first seems up to the task; he is rigid and diligent, excessively so, and quite able to send a man to his death for having sex out of wedlock.
Isabella, a novitiate nun, clad from neck to ankle in black, comes to plead for her condemned brother and Angelo is knocked off course by the mere sight of her. She taps into some dark seam within him and he attempts to use his new authority to claim what he suddenly, feverishly needs to possess.

Rory Kinnear is superb as Angelo. To begin with he is socially awkward, a bit of a nebbish in his specs and cheap suit. There is something almost endearing about the way he frets about Isabella’s imminent arrival, putting in his contacts and tidying his desk, but this is quickly undercut by his sweaty-palmed pawing of her and his very indecent proposal, his actions charged with lust and frustration. Yet he seems almost as shocked as she is by his behaviour, by the aggressive, scheming individual he finds himself becoming, a man driven by urges he has perhaps not felt before and can’t process in any normal way. As played by Kinnear, he’s a conniving hypocrite but not a monster.

Anna Maxwell Martin is clear-eyed and determined as Isabella, perfectly plausible as a woman who would consider sacrificing her brother’s life in order to maintain her chastity. Her inner struggle is evident but there is also a slight trace of petulance and self-righteousness to her sheen of dignity.

Ben Miles’s Duke Vincentio remains an enigma. He seems slightly uncomfortable within his own skin, nervy and troubled. Though clearly unsettled by the murky world he finds himself in, he takes some pleasure in the complex string of machinations and deceptions he instigates and his motivations are never quite clear. Returned to his ducal finery he seems oddly exposed and inadequate.

Though his is a far broader performance, Lloyd Hutchinson displays sound comic timing and judgement as the manipulative wide boy, Lucio, playing both sides against each other and revelling in the chaos, though his punishment for his behaviour seems excessively harsh.

The seedy, red-light aesthetic evoked by Lez Brotherston’s set doesn’t always sit comfortably with tone of the piece. The clash is too dramatic. Yet, for the most part, Attenborough’s production manages to achieve resonance whilst still fully conveying the play’s complexities. The cast are a joy to watch and when the production hits its stride the whole things sings.

Reviewed for musicOMH.