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Book Series
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Book
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Chapter
Sir Thomas More
“Sir Thomas More” is finally making its American bow at the Globe Playhouse… Phoebe Wray added a few references to Henrys clash with the Pope… “Sir Thomas More” is a mildly interesting testimonial, but not muc...
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Edward III
Dick Dotterer met the challenges of the play’s double structure, its compressed history, and its stylized battle sequences with skill and energy… As King Edward, Edward Dloughy convincingly embodied the aura o...
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Julius Caesar
Garrard is one of a 10-man cast for Julius Caesar—extremely large by Second Floor standards, but unusually small to handle the play s 49 speaking parts. The size of the cast, though, is an intentional part of Bet...
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Henry IV Part One
From the moment King Henry (Douglas Rain) raps out his crisp, hard, opening soliloquy, this is whip-cracking theatre with barely a false step… But this was a night for shocks, all of them pleasant. Stephen Rus...
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Henry VI Part One
Mr. Vaughan’s staging-straddled across Ming Cho Lee’s most handsome and adroitly appropriate permanent scenery, a set for all seasons-stresses … the action and the spectacle … Nicholas Kepros makes a diffident...
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Henry VIII
Perhaps some excisions were needed. Certainly the Prologue’s promise of “two short hours” should have been omitted from a production that ran over three… Four stories … emerge from this confusion of plenty… A ...
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King John
Ricky Weiser… altered [the Folio text of King John] less than I have ever seen a text altered. The result was a clear and open reading (along with a stunning production)… The actors spoke the text and managed a g...
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Richard II
“Richard II” is offered in three different versions, with three pairs of actors alternating as Richard and as Bolingbroke… [T]he one “Richard II” that I was able to see benefits from its leading actors. Frank ...
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Titus Andronicus
Titus Andronicus was a dual first: its first production at Stratford and Brian Bedford’s debut as director. He brought to it the qualities associated with his acting—acute intelligence, a close scanning of the te...
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The Winter’s Tale
The Winter’s Tale was a bleak, Nordic affair. Two years ago Trevor Nunn set the RSC production somewhere near the Arctic Circle. Robin Phillips’ concept was different yet related. Sicily was a court of Eastern Eu...
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All’s Well that Ends Well
David Jones, on leave from the Royal Shakespeare Company, has directed [the play] without flamboyance and with an acute sense of where the play s real strength lies. It is not in the young people, despite all ...
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The Two Noble Kinsmen
Directed by Walter Scholz, this seldom-produced work shone with unexpected brilliance among the more familiar and accepted plays of the canon. Scholz chose to project plot and character largely through use of ...
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As You Like it
The strength of this Stratford production was clearly its stressing the realism of the play’s sentiment against the poetic pattern of its form, and in this Mr. Hutt and his cast were generally successful Unfor...
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Henry V
One thing is certain, this is an unusual Henry V and it raises as many problems as it seeks to resolve. To its credit, the actors speak the text carefully and clearly, if uninterestingly. The stage is cleared of ...
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Coriolanus
“What is the city but the people?” No other Coriolanus I have seen has seized on this as the key line. Brian Bedford founded his production, not on the title role, but on the perception of the Roman people as ...
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Henry IV Part Two
On the upper stage… Rumour began 2 Henry IV with no tongues painted on his costume but a gaggle of gossips’ tongues whirring on the main stage below him. He told us Northumberland was “crafty sick.” How does one ...
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Henry VIII
Henry VIII served up a feast of spectacle, Tudor spectacle. The designers turned to portraits by Holbein and his contemporaries for the styles worn by Henry, Katharine, Cromwell, Wolsey, and others. While the cas...
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Henry VI
Davis Hall’s performance as the emerging pacifist king is filled with the affectations of Shakespearean acting at its most stereotyped, emerging as a series of teary-voiced, sing-song declamations and recitati...
