The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

Are we in a new era of Falstaffs? In a recent interview in The Times , Ian McKellen said that he’d never ‘got’ Falstaff in the past. The standard, jovial ‘fat-man Toby-jug’ had never struck him as particularly funny or adorable. I felt the same. The Elizabethans’ fondness for this down-at-heel Father Christmas always seemed like something I’d have to accept, rather than experience for myself. But then McKellen realised that Falstaff is in fact thoroughly objectionable: a liar, a hypocrite, a glutton, a drunk, an emotional manipulator and a thief. It was a revelation. Once he stopped worrying about trying to make the audience love him, and instead embraced the character’s dark side, Falstaff came to life – and, paradoxically, also became more appealing. John Hodgkinson, in Blanche McIntyre’s hysterically funny and inspired production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, has clearly come to the same conclusion. His Falstaff is never jovial. He cuts a sinister shape. Rather than being a Bunt...

This review appeared originally on The Reviews Hub . For a swashbuckling tale of bloodthirsty adventure on the high seas, there is something muted, almost cerebral, about this production. Forget the classic image of Captain Ahab’s lifeless corpse, festooned in his own ropes and lashed to the flanks of his nemesis. In Simple8’s production, Moby-Dick is but a whale of the mind, proceeding from Ahab’s vengeance-oppressed brain. Moments of intense violence are hinted at, but replaced by blackouts. Pain, exhaustion and suffering are expressed not through sweat, toil and action, but through the lyrics of an almost constant soundtrack of old sea-shanties, gently bewailing the losses and privations of a life at sea. Instead of howling winds and creaking boards, there’s a lone violin making scratchy sounds. Muted is fine. But is it effective? Partly. Herman Melville’s massive fish tale – the book is about the size of a baby whale itself – has never lost its power to thrill. Like Mary Shelley’s ...

If Pink Floyd is an important cultural phenomenon of the late 20 th Century – and it is – then all of their music matters. Not just the big hits like Wish You Were Here , Another Brick in the Wall and Comfortably Numb . This is the band that made its name with music so experimental and spaced-out that the BBC got them to play live in the studio while Apollo 11 set its controls for the heart of the Moon. But over the decades, in concert, they have confined themselves to the post- Dark Side era. (That, and taking each other to court of course.) Lazy. Greedy. There may never have been a band that so completely erased Chapter One of its own story. But the world is full of Floyd fans who cherish those early tracks just as much as the stadium standards. And for years they’ve been forced to watch the Greatest Hits over and over again... …Until drummer Nick Mason decided he’d had enough. Mason, the mild-mannered Derek Smalls of the group, wanted to dig out the psychedelic odysseys that the...

When Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s masterpiece, The School for Scandal , opened at Drury Lane Theatre in 1777, the sound of the audience laughing was so loud that passers-by in the street thought the building was falling over. William Hazlitt adored it, declaring, ‘Besides the wit and ingenuity of this play, there is a genial spirit of frankness and generosity about it, that relieves the heart as well as clears the lungs.’ Even as recently as 1995 one reviewer wrote that it is ‘such a superbly crafted laugh machine, and so timeless in delivering delectable comeuppance to a viper’s nest of idle-rich gossipmongers, that you’d practically have to club it to death to stifle its amazing pleasures’. Tilted Wig’s touring production doesn’t club Sheridan to death, but neither does it breathe much life into this most joyous of satires. On the plus side, passers-by on Beaumont Street can wend their way home safe in the knowledge that the Oxford Playhouse isn’t about to fall over. On the minus side...