Month: April 2024

The history of the playing of Shylock on stage is, in some ways, the history of attitudes towards Jews in different times and countries, particularly in Europe, over the last 400 years; he has been a monster, a pantomime villain and an innocent victim of evil Christians, but all of these distort Shakespeare’s play in… Continue reading The Merchant of Venice 1936

When it comes to a Big Top circus, they don’t come any bigger than the one that nestles between the legs of Blackpool Tower. Now, as it approaches its 130th year of entertainment, the world’s oldest permanent circus arena can also boast one of the longest ‘summer’ seasons as well. This year’s started at February… Continue reading Blackpool Tower Circus

Magical, mystical, magnificent… Philip Glass’s Akhnaten (1983/4) returns to the Coliseum for its first ENO revival since 2016. I have seen it three times and the score still spins its mesmerising spell on me. Baroque, lyrical, minimalism moderated, Akhnaten is a spiritual meditation. Sung in Egyptian, Hebrew and Akkadian with no distracting surtitles, (the libretto is printed in the programme)… Continue reading Akhnaten

More than fifty years since Nobel-prize-winning Dario Fo and his wife Franca Rame wrote Accidental Death of An Anarchist, amazingly not much seems to have changed regarding police corruption. The Italian partisan protest song “Bella Ciao”, closing and opening the acts, is a nod to the play’s origins. And a call to arms? A co-production… Continue reading Accidental Death of An Anarchist

Magnus and Ben are not the first brothers brought to a reckoning by their father’s death—witness any number of plays, films or books. In activist playwright Anders Lustgarten’s The City and the Town, the siblings meet up on the morning of the funeral after 13 years apart, and their conversation inevitably dances around Magnus’s anger… Continue reading The City and the Town

After a forced exit from Germany during the Hitler years, Brecht completed The Good Person of Szechwan in Santa Monica in 1941. Nina Segal’s “brilliant new adaptation” breathes life into existing versions of the text and provides contemporary relevance at a time of economic concern. The fable introduces Wang the water carrier who encounters three… Continue reading The Good Person of Szechwan

The Importance of Being Earnest has delighted audiences for almost 130 years. Therefore, one wonders why nobody has previously sought to write a sequel. After all, there is a ready-made audience and a series of beloved characters waiting to be mined for laughs. That has changed thanks to Alice Scovell and the producers at New York… Continue reading The Rewards of Being Frank