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Showing posts from April, 2025

"Much Ado About Nothing". Royal Shakespeare Theatre

It’s Sicily in Stratford-upon-Avon, and this week it certainly feels like it. It’s 23 degrees at 4pm. As the evening descends, the sunlight softens and grows warm. Minutes stretch uncaged across the lawns outside the theatre. The swans on the Avon make hardly a ripple in the stillness, and the bronze statue of Shakespeare, palm outstretched and polished shiny as a pope’s ring, generates an inner warmth as day gives way to dusk. On such a night as this do young men’s minds turn to love… and football. It's part of a critic’s job to go into every production with an open mind. But with this Much Ado About Nothing the RSC has been so open about Director Michael Longhurst’s concept that it’s hard not to embark on it without some preconceptions. ‘Shakespeare’s original rom-com set in the world of top-flight football and celebrity culture, where scandal-filled rivalries are the hottest new thing and lads and WAGs collide’ says the website. It sounds fun, but what’s got into the RSC? They ...

"The Rocky Horror Show". New Theatre

The Rocky Horror Show is a musical about an alien creature from the planet Transsexual, who tries to fit in on planet Earth while being true to their own sexuality. Ultimately they are destroyed. Heteronormativity triumphs, but it's a hollow victory, as the one character who brought vivacity, imagination and pure raunch to their party of unconventional conventionalists has paid the ultimate price. It’s a tribute to trans rights. The show is over half a century old. Have we learnt nothing in those years? Supreme Court, take note. Audiences in the early 1970s were the young, the rebellious and the open-minded. To them, Frank N. Furter's hedonistic philosophy, 'Give Yourself Over To Absolute Pleasure', was a doorway that opened into gardens of delight and heightened awareness. I'm not sure it has the same resonance in 2025. The audience at the New Theatre were middle-aged cosplayers out for a singalong. The absolute pleasure they came for was to see an old nostalgic f...