The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

Live Wire and Roughhouse Theatre's travelling, one-woman adaptation of Jane Eyre is a perfectly serviceable introduction to one of the greatest, most well-known (and most frequently adapted) novels of all time. But it's not an 'inventive exploration of the status of women in society', as the publicity claims. It's more like a frenetic, 80-minute episode of Jackanory . Alison Campbell plays all the parts with charm and dedication. In fact, the next time an audiobook of Jane Eyre is being recorded, she would do a fantastic job. The only trouble is that, unlike the book, the show itself feels depressingly short on original ideas, theatrical inventiveness or deep insight into the text. Minor characters like Mrs Fairfax, St John Rivers and his two sisters become northern stereotypes rather than rounded individuals. Campbell pushes a luggage trunk around the stage to create different scenes, but each of them simply looks like a luggage trunk from a slightly different an...

Emily Burns’ version of the ultimate ‘problem play’ is, in many ways, the perfect Shakespeare production. It’s bursting with creativity and original interpretations, but not a single one of them feels forced or capricious. Burns finds a modern relevance for the play which is not hung on it like an arbitrarily chosen, ill-fitting suit, but rather brings new depths of understanding without stretching credulity. It has deep respect for the original text, but doesn’t shy from playing fast-and-loose with it when it needs to. In short, it’s completely brilliant. Opening with a sequence of video clips including Epstein, Trump, Clinton, Prince Andrew and Harvey Weinstein, there’s no doubt from the very start what this Measure will be calling to account. The modern setting feels not arbitrary but urgent, vital, current and accusatory. Burns has stripped away the parade of minor Viennese characters – bawds, cutpurses and sexworkers – that make parts of Measure For Measure feel like a sixteenth...

There’s no actual evidence that Shakespeare and Marlowe ever met. But inklings down the ages have tickled the imaginations of authors and scholars for generations. There’s Shakespeare’s fanboy tip of the quill in As You Like It , where he addresses his mentor directly: ‘Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might: who ever loved that loved not at first sight?’ As well as betraying familiarity with Hero and Leander , that line positions Marlowe as a fondly remembered figure of respect and authority. Thematic links abound too, with Barabbas from The Jew of Malta paralleling Shylock, Dr Faustus preparing the ground for Prospero, and even Edward the Second casting an effeminate glow on Richard II. In 1998’s Shakespeare in Love , Rupert Everett’s Marlowe gives Joseph Fiennes’ Shakespeare a few tips on how to improve his play Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter , thus setting him on the path to greatness. Most significantly, in 2016, the New Oxford Shakespeare for the first time declared M...

Topol died two years ago, having played Tevye the Dairyman over 3,500 times in 42 years of Fiddling on the Roof. That lame horse of his never did get better, but at least he became a rich, if not idle-didle, man. Topol cast a huge shadow over this role. He defined it. He vanquished London audiences in the late 1960s with his swaggering, staggering, Yiddish dance-stride and his mellifluous baritone, rich and fruity as persimmons from the plains of Sharon. At that stage he couldn’t even speak English, and learnt the entire script phonetically. The film producers gave him the part in 1971, whipping it from under the nose of an outraged Zero Mostel, and the rest was history. Of course Fiddler on the Roof goes back even earlier than Topol and the 60s. Its roots are in the tales of Sholom Aleichem and the Yiddish cinema of the 1930s – especially Maurice Schwartz’s 1939 classic Tevye , which in turn was a reworking of an even older Yiddish film from 1919, Khava . Khava was long thought to b...