The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

McKellen. Finney, O’Toole, Peck, Williamson, Pryce, Stamp, Jacobi, Howard, Sher, Hicks, Stewart, Cumming, Branagh, McAvoy, Fassbender, Eccleston, Kinnear, Washington, McArdle, Fiennes… Tennant. There have been great Macbeths and dire ones over the last 47 years. But no one has come close to the naked revelation of internal suffering, the universal pain of saucy doubts and fears, that Ian McKellen and Judi Dench laid before a tiny audience on a bare stage in The Other Place at Stratford in 1976. Until now. David Tennant may be our greatest living Shakespeare actor. He has an uncanny ability to make the text sound poetically pellucid: beautiful, and at the same time as if it’s newly minted, everyday conversation. In his mouth, the most complex sentence structures and the most obscure metaphors are instantly understandable. He democratises Shakespeare. In this Macbeth one of my favourite moments was the scene where he persuades the two nervous murderers to waylay Banquo. Sitting round a...

Prokofiev's original version of Peter and the Wolf is a charming paean to Soviet values, as brave little Peter skips dauntlessly through life and the forest, subjugating Nature as he goes. He’s the ultimate boy scout, the Young Pioneer, all resourcefulness and optimism, flouting his old Granddad's outdated pre-Bolshevik ways. (Don't you just want to slap him, in the same way he slaps his thighs?) Isaac Mizrahi's rendering of the story uses the same music, the same plot, and the same characters. But rather than making it a masculine mission statement for Stalinist supremacy, this production is a vibrant illustration of inclusivity in action. If Prokofiev's agenda was making little commie supermen, Mizrahi's is to help make the under-10s of New York appreciate the diversity of modern society. It might be anathema to Moms For Liberty, but on the Upper East Side it's very much at home. The key to Mizrahi's interpretation is one deceptively simple idea: he h...