Posted on

TV Review: Shakespeare Lives – The Works

 
“Make me acquainted with your cause of grief”

The Works is a short film written and directed by Elliot Barnes-Worrell that rather ingeniously explores life for a group of young people on a Peckham estate using only the words of Shakespeare. Barnes-Worrell has worked his way through the Complete Works and woven together his own story by splicing diverse characters and speeches into one powerfully effective whole.

So when tension erupts into a fight between rival factions (“Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?”), a nearby do-gooder called Portia intervenes to break them up (“The quality of mercy is not strained…”), breaking off from a chat with her girlfriend Celia (you always knew that, right?!) and so on and so forth. Barnes-Worrell is endlessly inventive in the way he cherry-picks the source material but it isn’t always immediately clear who is who in the power structures on this estate. Continue reading “TV Review: Shakespeare Lives – The Works”

Posted on

Review: Blood Wedding, Courtyard Theatre

“There’ll be blood again”

Lorca’s writing is suffused with the heat and passion of his Spanish homeland and his 1932 play Blood Wedding is one of his most famous and oft-performed works. Aria Entertainment’s production uses Tanya Ronder’s recent translation but director Bronagh Lagan often struggles to combine the lyrical poetry and brutal realities of this play, introducing a too-wide range of elements that crowd the essential simplicity of the story.

The show is at its best when it allows simple but striking images to emerge – Miles Yekinni’s Death – a presence haunting the action from the off – appearing unexpectedly from behind a door; the true desire of the Bride breaking free in the middle of a densely choreographed wedding dance; the erect pride with which the Mother conducts herself at all times. And in these moments , this tragic tale of love and betrayal captures the right level of magic realism. 

Continue reading “Review: Blood Wedding, Courtyard Theatre”

Posted on

Review: The Legend of Captain Crow’s Teeth, Unicorn Theatre

“All stories are based on some kind of truth”

The Legend of Captain Crow’s Teeth haunts the campsite where nine-year-old Will and his four brothers have spent many a family holiday. And at the Unicorn Theatre near London Bridge, Matthew Lenton has devised a family-friendly, if not just a little spooky, adaptation of Eoin Colfer’s novel of the same name which provides a welcome opportunity for a family trip during the Easter holidays.

Will’s holiday is largely spent negotiating his pesky younger brothers and their Haribo-hiding ways and trailing in awe of his older brother Marty who is awfully fond of a ghost story, especially around the glowing rocks known locally as Captain Crow’s Teeth. But the tale of the angry pirate ghost searching for the 9 year old cabin boy who killed him 300 years ago lingers long in Will’s mind and as he happens to be 9 as well, he’s more than a little anxious. Continue reading “Review: The Legend of Captain Crow’s Teeth, Unicorn Theatre”

Posted on

Review: The School for Scandal, Barbican

“You can indeed each fear remove,
for even scandal dies if you approve”

Commencing before the curtain ‘rises’ with a futuristic-Georgian fashion show, complete with gossiping fashionistas, it is clear from the outset that Deborah Warner’s production of Sheridan’s The School for Scandal is no stately Peter Hall-esque costume piece, but rather something completely different. Employing much of the same visual language employed in her 2009 Mother Courage for the National, the Brechtian feel is very much here in the deconstructed pieces of set lying against walls, stagehands visible onstage and placards announcing the scene changes.

At a time of ever-increasing tabloid gossip, injunctions, superinjunctions and Twitter, Warner is clearly keen to draw direct comparisons between Sheridan’s Georgian London society (who presumably twittered rather than tweeted) and the shallower end of our own contemporary society obsessions with celebrity and consumerism. This is done in the most heavy-handed of ways, so the scandalous intrigue and politics that surrounds the plot of romantic entanglements, debated inheritances, saucy liaisons, unhappy marriages is dressed in designer shopping bags, a thumpingly loud soundtrack and all sorts of modernities. Continue reading “Review: The School for Scandal, Barbican”