Boudica

by Tristan Bernays

seen at Shakespeare's Globe on 12 September 2017

Eleanor Rhode directs Gina McKee as Boudica queen of the Iceni (a tribe in what is now East Anglia) in this new play with Joan Iyiola and Natalie Simpson as her daughters Alonna and Blodwynn, Forbes Masson as Cunobeline and Abraham Popoola as Bladvoc, kings respectively of the neighbouring tribes of the Trinovantes and the Belgae.

The sources for Boudica's story are fragmentary, and the earliest are of course in Latin and based on a Roman point of view hardy sympathetic to a rebellious queen who for a short time posed a threat to the province of Britannia - although of course after her demise she could be safely used as a rhetorical device to point up contrasts between barbarian integrity and the corruption of the imperial court.

Hamlet

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, on 5 April 2016

Simon Godwin directs the RSC's first 'black' Hamlet with Paapa Essiedu as Hamlet, Tanya Moodie as Gertrude, Clarence Smith as Claudius, Cyril Nri as Polonius, Natalie Simpson as Ophelia and Hiran Abeysekera as Horatio. Only Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, even more out of their element than usual, were played by white actors as callow and tactless European visitors to Denmark re-imagined as an unspecific African state.