Tag: Marc Brenner

How to eat your muffins with aplomb

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In ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, written by Oscar Wilde in 1899, it is the fresh directness of the set, and the articulate and unequivocal performances of the cast – in their bustles, snakeskin suits and all – that make it sing with a mix of cynicism, middle-finger-to-society chutzpah and sheer joy.

Something brutal this way comes

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PLACE THEATRE DIRECTOR Yaël Farber and Shakepeare’s Macbeth on the same page and you may, in your mind’s eye and heart, picture a bloodbath of gargantuan and subtle proportions, replete with screams of agony and wails of horror. You won’t be completely wrong. Indeed, in Farber’s direction of […]

Of rude vessels, mediocrity and gods

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FILM REVIEW: AMADEUS AT THE NATIONAL THEATRE. THE CURIOUS FLAW in this almost mythic tale of maverick talent, jealousy and the celebration of mediocrity, is how it is hinged on ostensible fact. Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play Amadeus took some fuzzy hearsay around the life and death of 18th […]

Whirligig revenges and yellow stockings

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THEATRE REVIEW: TWELFTH NIGHT Humour is easily one of the most difficult genres to uphold: it dates; what may have been pants-wettingly hilarious in the 1500s, might be simply boring or perplexing today. In the hands of Simon Godwin, however, the gender fluid wildness of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth […]