REVIEW: Hamlet, Barbican Theatre ✭✭

Benedict Cumbernatch as Hamlet

The play’s the thing – wherein to catch the conscience of a King. And the hearts of an audience. Turner needs to pay more attention to the play and the actors. At the moment, to slightly misquote Hamlet, “Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of Shakespeare’s greatest play.”

REVIEW: Light Shining In Buckinghamshire, Lyttleton Theatre ✭✭

Light Shining in Buckinghamshire by Caryl Churchill at the National theatre

There is an acute fascination in watching the richly intense banquet give way, bit by bit, to the advances of the common folk, to see the lavish table become stripped bare, and then transform into a place for measured debate instead of entitled excess. The wonderful lighting from Bruno Poet only accentuates the lush transition, as does Mary Chadwick’s atmospheric music. The hint of the regally attired Charles and his retinue, like a gorgeously detailed ghost, hovers in the background – there, but not there.