Findlay’s production of The Merchant Of Venice, like all great productions of Shakespeare, is brimming with ideas, spoken with assurance and intelligence, and illuminates the text insightfully and vigorously. Refreshing and fascinating. Findlay breathes complexity and assuredness into Shakespeare’s play by focussing on sex and greed. But there is no shortage of hatred either.
Sadly this fine adaptation has a very brief run – I do hope another theatre can be persuaded to allow us to experience this play with this cast once more – and soon…..It deserves to be seen for its own qualities, for the fresh insights it brings to a work we think we know all too well, and for what it tells us of Wilde as well. It showcases in exemplary fashion the jostling, unstable and ultimately tragic combination of talents and aspirations that comprise Wilde’s unique persona. As usual, he perceived the truth ahead of all the critics: ‘Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry is what the world thinks me: Dorian is what I would like to be – in other ages, perhaps.’
I and the Village may be the best piece of new writing you’ll see at a pub theatre this year.
If the Chef was a type of food it would be a selection of pre-dinner canapés – small but perfectly formed. However, ultimately you are left wanting a little bit more…
This then is a play about memory and a sense of homeland, and the inter-generational consequences of the Holocaust and Jewish Diaspora. Clearly this is well-trodden ground and anyone approaching it really needs to calculate a new, oblique angle of approach in the way that – for instance – The Hare with Amber Eyes was successfully organised around the history and travels of the netsuke collection owned by the family rather than a full-on narration of the personal fate of the people. There are indications of such an approach here focused on the different meanings and experiences of the untranslatable term Heimat or ‘homeland’, but it is never fully sustained across the play as a whole. Moreover while there are many intriguing connections developed between the six characters none of them really catch light or come to a resolution, so that at the end we are left with a frustratingly inconclusive trajectory. Not that there is anything wrong in leaving plot-lines open-ended, but in the end we are simply not given enough material to care about any of the characters and how they come to be who there are, despite the best efforts of the cast.
Reality follows a group of fame-hungry youngsters who get a final recall for The Hostage, a new reality TV show which they hope will get them closer to fame and fortune. The wannabe stars are put through a series of increasingly sadistic and unnerving tasks by unhinged producer Oscar (Jack Stimpson) in order to prove that they’ve got what it takes.
This is Oresteia, not The Oresteia, the trilogy of plays (Agamennon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides) which won Aeschylus a prize in 458BC and which is considered the “original family drama” and the launching pad for all modern drama, but the free-wheeling, self-indulgent, filmic, and loose “adaptation” by Robert Icke which is now playing at the Almeida, kicking off Rupert Goold’s Greeks season. There are some wonderful images, some potent exchanges, some brilliant flashes of inspiration – but, overall, it does not hold together dramatically. For a production which lasts three hours and forty minutes, many many minutes are spent biding time.
Not A Game for Boys was a fantastic night out, with some stellar performances and a brilliant script – certainly worth making a racket about!
