Reviews

When Paapa Essiedu stepped on stage at Stratford earlier this year, Dominic Cavendish of the Daily Telegraph noted that he was the first black actor to be given the role of Hamlet since the RSC’s inception in 1961. It is difficult to fathom if this move should have been celebrated or met with an exclamation of incredulity that we have had to wait for over half a century for it to happen. Likewise this version, with adapted text by Mark Norfolk, hangs its main selling point on the fact that this is the very first time an all-black cast has

The legal Latin of the title translates as ‘You might have the body’ and a theme which recurs throughout the play is that there is too much emphasis placed on the body, and especially its sex drive, compared with the emotions and other aspects of what it is to be human. Typically, Bennett is attacking the prevailing attitudes of the time, with mockery as his weapon of choice. Is it a farce? Not in the Ray Cooney sense, although trousers are dropped, identities are mistaken and there are jokes about laxatives. It relies for its laughs much more on the

‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of

Jez Butterworth’s eerie and enigmatic 2009 play is set in a remote log cabin high above a river where, on a dark, moonless night, a somewhat obsessive man has invited his latest girlfriend along to share in his passion for trout fishing. Although no time span is given, it quickly becomes obvious that we may be observing events that have taken place over at least a couple of years, as the woman who leaves at the end of one scene is invariably not the same person who enters in the next. This is Raven Arts’ debut production and the company’s

At the end of the first section of this concert, the man sitting next to us pronounced it as ‘awesome’; he was correct, and it became even more awesome as the evening progressed. This is why, half an hour after I arrived home, I’m still reeling and wondering just what words I can possibly use to adequately describe just how absolutely outstanding this evening was. A concert of show songs is fairly common among musical societies, but BMT is not just any old musical society – actually it’s not old at all, but a mere babe of three years –

John Buchan’s adventure story has had several re-incarnations since its original format as a serial in Blackwood’s Magazine back in 1915. It is the first of five novels featuring Richard Hannay, an all-action hero with a stiff upper lip and a miraculous knack for getting himself out of sticky situations. Since the original story, it has been adapted for the radio and re-made as several films (including Alfred Hitchcock’s famous 1935 version), as well as different stage versions. One of the more recent versions is a comedic adaptation by Patrick Barlow for just four actors, and it is this version