Edward II

by Christopher Marlowe

seen at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 12 March 2019

Nick Bagnall directs Tom Stuart as King Edward II, Katie West as Queen Isabella, Jonathan Livingstone as Young Mortimer, and Beru Tessema as Piers Gaveston, with a supporting company of seven taking the other parts, in Christopher Marlowe's play about the disastrous career of the king who fatefully places a selfish desire for personal pleasure above the recognised responsibilities of a medieval ruler.

Marlowe, often seen as a histrionic, not to say bombastic, playwright in contrast to the more nuanced Shakespeare, is well served in the candlelit intimacy of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, where the lyrical aspects of his language can be appreciated as much as the dramatic turns of the plot. In particular, the intense, and intensely physical, relationship between Edward and Gaveston is expressed by high-flown but not insincere poetry, which has a more personal resonance in the smaller acting space of this theatre.

Carmen Disruption

by Simon Stephens 

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 2 May 2015

The play, directed by Michael Longhurst and designed by Lizzie Clachan with music by Simon Slater, dramatises the predicament of a Singer (Sharon Small) whose sense of self is unravelling as her commitments to sing the role of Carmen take her from place to place with no connection to the world outside taxis, briefly rented apartments, and the opera theatres of Europe. Four other characers in a particular unnamed city are also adrift in loneliness - a rent boy named Carmen (Jack Farthing), a female taxi driver Don José (Noma Dumezweni), a young student Micaëla (Katie West) and a futures trader Escamillo (John Light). Viktoria Vizin prowls the stage dressed as a conventional Carmen, singing snatches of the opera, or other lyrics, to the accompaniment of two cellists (Jamie Cameron and Harry Napier). 

Hamlet

by William Shakespeare

filmed live performance from the Royal Exchange, Manchester, seen 23 March 2015

Directed for the stage by Sarah Frankcom and for the screen by Margaret Williams, this production featured Maxine Peake as Hamlet with John Shrapnel as Claudius and the Ghost, Barbara Marten as Gertrude and Katie West as Ophelia.

The Manchester Royal Exchange theatre is in the round, providing an intimate and potentially claustrophobic space to play out an intense and emotionally charged production of 'Hamlet'. Interest inevitably focusses on Maxine Peake, a woman playing the main character. With close-cut pale blond hair, she can look both boyish and beautiful, but the question of the character's age is left ambiguous. Around this Hamlet, both Ophelia and Laertes are young while Horatio is a youngish man with greying hair; Gertrude is not a young woman at all, and Claudius is in late middle age at best. As for Peake's characterisation, her Hamlet is intelligent, volatile, generous to the trustworthy (Horatio and Marcella), and increasingly cold to the mercenary. She has a tendency to display anger at the outside world and Hamlet's own self-disgust by shouting, a trait which has diminishing returns and which runs the risk of being merely histrionic rather than nuanced. All in all, though, it is a powerful and commanding performance.