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Posts Tagged ‘Samuel Creasey’

A Winter’s Tale – Shakespeare’s Globe

Posted in Theatre, tagged , , , , , , , on February 17, 2023| Leave a Comment »

This is one of Shakespeare’s oddest plays. Ostensibly about jealousy and it’s consequences, it veers into fantasy, taking us to two very different locations, Sicily and Bohemia. It must be the only play ever written featuring a sheep-sheering contest, though no actual sheep appear!

They’ve performed the same play / production in both theatres separately before, but for the first time both the candlelit playhouse and the outdoor theatre are used for the same performance, one for each location, in Sean Holmes’ production. An inspired idea, even if you have to spend an hour outdoors on a cold winter night! Well, it is called A Winter’s Tale.

All seems fine in the court of Leontes in Sicily. His wife Hermione is pregnant with their second child and his best friend Polixenes is on an extended visit from Bohemia. Then he gets it into his head that his wife and his best friend have been having an affair and Polixenes has fathered the baby. His jealousy becomes all consuming. Polixenes departs to avoid murder by Leontes, who exiles the newborn child. Leontes tries Hermoine, but despite ‘evidence’ from the oracle refuses to accept her innocence. His young son dies of distress at his mother’s treatment by his father, and Hermoine soon dies herself.

In Bohemia, a shepherd and his son find the baby, taken there and left by Antigonus at Hermoine’s request. They name her Perdita, and their family bring her up as their own. Jump forward sixteen years and Polixenes’ son Florizel has fallen for Perdita, much to his father’s disappointment as a shepherd’s daughter is well below his station. They all meet at the sheep-shearing contest / festival, where they find out her true heritage and head for Sicily where they find Leontes deep in remorse. A statue of Hermoine is unveiled and comes alive, thus reuniting the family. See what I mean by odd?!

The madness which underpins Leontes’ jealousy has greater emphasis in this production. The play is famous for its stage direction ‘exit pursued by a bear’ which here has two appearances, the latter milked with an elongated exit. The shepherds festival veers a long way from Shakespeare, but with Ed Gaughan’s comic masterclass as Autolycus it’s impossible to resist. The final scene did have a particular poignancy lit by just a handful of candles.

With the trip between theatres, it does lengthen the play, particularly challenging on wooden benches partly outdoors, but I enjoyed much of the evening. Samuel Creasey continues to impress, here as the shepherd’s son, and Nadine Higgin made much of the role of Paulina. Grace Smart’s dining room design for first part was lovely. The Bohemia set was a bit ramshackle, but when lit brightly came into its own.

Productions of this play don’t come around often, and this one is well worth a visit.

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The Best Theatre of 2021 (well, the last half)

Posted in Classical Music, Dance, Opera, Theatre, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 1, 2022| Leave a Comment »

I didn’t bother with a ‘Best of’ last year as my theatre-going, apart from a handful of open air shows, came to a standstill after just over two months. 2021 started as badly as 2020 had ended, but I managed to see something like 65 shows in the last half of the year, so it seems worth restoring the tradition.

There were nine new plays worthy of consideration as Best New Play. These include Indecent at the Menier, Deciphering at the New Diorama, Camp Siegfried at the Old Vic and Best of Enemies at the Young Vic. Something that wasn’t strictly speaking a play but was a combination of taste, smell and music, and very theatrical, was Balsam at the Greenwich & Docklands International Festival. Out of town, in the Reading Abbey ruins, The Last Abbot impressed. Three major contenders emerged. The first was Grenfell: Value Engineering at the Tabernacle, continuing the tradition of staging inquiries, verbatim but edited, very powerfully. The remaining two had puppetry and imaginative theatricality in common. Both Life of Pi, transferring to Wyndham’s from Sheffield Theatres, and The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage at The Bridge were adaptations of books, but were thrilling on stage, and both had star performances from Hiran Abeysekera and newcomer Samuel Creasey respectively – I couldn’t choose between them.

The leanest category was New Musical, where there were only a few to choose from. I liked Moulin Rouge for the spectacle, but it was really just spectacle, and I enjoyed Back to the Future too, but it was the sense of tongue-in-cheek fun of What’s New Pussycat? at Birmingham Rep and the sheer energy of Get Up Stand Up at the Lyric Theatre, with a towering performance by Arinze Kene as Bob Marley, that elevated these jukebox musicals above the other two.

More to pick from with play revivals, including excellent productions of Under Milk Wood and East is East at the NT, The Beauty Queen of Leenane at the Lyric Hammersmith and two Beckett miniatures – Footfalls & Rockaby – at the tiny Jermyn Street Theatre. GDIF’s Belgian visitors staged Blue Remembered Hills brilliantly on wasteland in Thamesmead, and Emma Rice’s Brief Encounter had a great new production at the Watermill near Newbury, but it was Yeal Farber’s Macbeth at the Almeida, as exciting as Shakespeare gets, that shone brightest, along with Hampstead’s revival of Alan Plater’s Peggy For You, with a stunning performance from Tamsin Greig, which ended my theatre-going year.

The musical revivals category was strong too, probably because we needed a dose of fun more than anything else (well, except vaccines!). I revisited productions of Come from Away and Singin’ in the Rain, though they don’t really count as revivals, likewise Hairspray which was a replica of the original, but I enjoyed all three immensely. Regents Park Open Air Theatre brought Carousel to Britain, in more ways than one, and the Mill at Sonning continued its musical roll with an excellent Top Hat. It was South Pacific at Chichester and Anything Goes at the Barbican that wowed most, though, the former bringing a more modern sensibility to an old story and the latter giving us Brits an opportunity to see what Broadway has been getting that we’ve been missing in Sutton Foster. If only we could detain her permanently.

In other theatrical and musical forms…..there were dance gems from New Adventures with Midnight Bell at Sadler’s Wells and the Royal Ballet’s Dante Project at Covent Garden, and a beautiful concert performance of Howard Goodall musical of Love Story at Cadogan Hall. There were lots of classical music highlights, but it was the world premiere of Mark Anthony Turnage’s Up for Grabs at the Barbican, accompanying footage of his beloved Arsenal, that packed the hall with football fans and proved to be a refreshing and surreal experience I wouldn’t have missed for the world (and I’m not a football fan, let alone an Arsenal one!). Somewhat ironically, most of my opera-going revolved around Grimeborn and Glyndebourne and it was a scaled down but thrilling Die Walkure at Hackney Empire as part of the former that proved to be the highlight.

Let’s hope its a full year of culture in 2022.

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The Book of Dust – La Belle Sauvage

Posted in Theatre, tagged , , , , , , , on December 13, 2021| Leave a Comment »

The 2003 stage adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy was a highlight of Nicholas Hytner’s period at the NT, now the first book of his next trilogy is one of the best things the Bridge Theatre has done since it opened in 2017. Pullman has said the Book of Dust trilogy is not a prequel, the second part jumping forward twenty years, but this first part is. Bryony Lavery’s adaptation worked for a friend who’d read the book, another who hadn’t read any Pullman, and me – a devotee of HDM with this book waiting to be read, another lockdown failure.

It concerns the baby Lyra, daughter of Mrs Coulter and Lord Asriel and the subject of a prophesy, and the battle for her guardianship / fate up to the point she takes refuge in Jordan College. Malcolm, the 12-year-old son of the landlady of the Trout Inn seeks to protect her, with the aid of the pub’s helper Alice, one order of nuns, rebel leader Boatwright, academics Dr. Relf & Lord Nugent, a good witch and her father, whilst the all powerful Magisterium, another order of nuns, a rogue academic and her mother have other plans! It races along, but I thought it was very clear storytelling.

Bob Crowley’s design relies upon the extraordinary projections of Luke Halls, which move you from pub to convent to college and many more locations, and create rivers, storms and floods that take your breath away. With a thrust stage and a back rake this is at times intimate and at times epic. A visual treat. The daemons are puppets, the smaller of which sit on their host, with the bigger ones manipulated by actors, some of whom speak.

The exceptional cast include actors of the stature of Dearbhla Molloy, John Light, Naomi Fredericks, Pip Carter, Holly Atkins, Nick Sampson and Julie Atherton (who gamely covered Malcolm’s daemon Asta on the night I went), but it’s Samuel Creasey as Malcolm and Ella Dacres as Alice who carry the play. This is Creasey’s stage debut, one of the most impressive I’ve ever seen, with newcomer Dacres shining alongside him. The chemistry between them is superb.

I thought it was a captivating evening of storytelling, family theatre at its best. Don’t miss.

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