The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

This review was written for Daily Information, and appears on their website . Is there anything more British than sitting in a municipal park on a summer’s evening, getting soaked to the skin watching Shakespeare? There’s a magic to it. Sure, balmy sunsets with whispering zephyrs are nice in their way. But listening to Beatrice and Benedick harangue each other while the water pools in the folds of your kagoule and the diverted freight trains chunder past every fifteen minutes is so quintessentially part of the English summer that I think I actually prefer it. You get your tan from standing in the English rain. And by the end there’s a sense of community in the audience, almost a Blitz mentality, that means we all go away having shared a taste of Shakespeare that hasn’t changed for four hundred years. Much Ado About Nothing contains a line that blatantly embraces the pitfalls of outdoor performances (as of course all the earliest productions would have been). Borachio says to his partn

Trevor Nunn is the last generation’s Sam Mendes: equally at home with frivolous (or serious) musicals as he is with the classical repertoire. In 2004 he followed up Hamlet with Acorn Antiques the Musical , and both were nominated for Olivier awards. He brought us Cats and Les Miserables as well as Judi Dench’s once-heard-never-forgotten scream of despair as a sleepwalking Lady Macbeth. And now he brings to the stage, in musical form, the film regularly voted greatest British movie of all time, The Third Man . Graham Greene and Carol Reed’s thriller about an innocent American getting caught up in a crime ring run by his erstwhile best friend in post-war Vienna doesn’t seem the most obvious candidate for musical adaptation, but then, neither did Carrie . I was slightly trepidatious on the way in. The film of The Third Man has a unique and distinctive tone: tongue-in-cheek while still affording glimpses of the deserts of vast eternal despair that lie in the pasts and futures of its ch