We’re in (pretty much literally so in this most intimate of venues) an Edwardian sitting room, time hanging heavily in the air, gentility almost visibly fading before our eyes.
That Shakespeare speaks to his audiences anew with every production is a cliché, but, like so many such, the glib blandness of the assertion conceals an insistent truth. The Thane of Glamis has had some success in life, gains preferment from those who really should have seen through his shallowness and vaulting ambition – he even says the phrase himself – and achieves power without really knowing what to do with it.
If you want to get a hit show on American TV, you could do a lot worse than recruit Taylor Sheridan to create it for you. Special Ops: Lioness, a bruising trip into the innards of a CIA counter-terror unit, follows a string of successes which have made Sheridan a towering presence in film and TV.
After the pantos, the movies (epic, camp and animated) and the television series, is there anything new to be mined in the story of Robin Hood? Probably not, as this messy, misjudged show takes that hope and fires an arrow through its heart.
“Darkly comic thrillers” (as they like to say) set in Ireland tracking how families, or quasi-families, fall apart under pressure are very much in vogue just now. Whether The Banshees of Inisherin will garner the Oscars haul it hardly deserves remains to be seen, but set 60 years later in a different Civil War, I suspect Under The Black Rock will not be troubling theatre’s award ceremonies next year.
Buildings can hold memories, the three dimensions of space supplemented by the fourth of time. Ten years ago, I started every working week with a meeting in a room that, for decades, had been used to conduct autopsies – I felt a little chill occasionally, as we dissected figures rather than bodies, ghosts lingering, as they do.
For many years, I would ask groups of students to vote in elections because “it’s important to honour those who gave up so much to ensure that the likes of us can”. Some would nod, others would shrug, a few might have inwardly scoffed – too cool for school, innit?
A play’s title can be an almost arbitrary matter – there’s no streetcar but plenty of desire in that one for example – and it might have crossed Kim Davies’ mind to call her play Ms Julie, since it is a reimagining of August Strindberg’s 1888 masterpiece, Miss Julie.
Bald, barrel-shaped and pugnacious, Doron Kavillio (Lior Raz) could have been conceived as the anti-Bond or the un-Ethan Hunt. But as action heroes go, Doron can mix it with the finest as he tracks down terrorists with his comrades in Israel’s Mista’arvim Special Forces team.
If All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida have earned the sobriquet "‘problem plays", what price Titus Andronicus? Does a director seek out a Saw vibe for the horror? Do they go for a deadpan Spinal Tap’s disappearing drummers for the demises? Do you go hard and locate the murders within the atrocities being committed on European soil right now?