More stories

  • in

    A Challenge for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s New Leaders

    The Royal Shakespeare Company’s co-artistic directors have put together a challenging debut season. But many visitors come to Stratford-upon-Avon seeking something more traditional.Outside peak tourist season, there’s something a little uncanny about Stratford-upon-Avon, the English market town famous as William Shakespeare’s birthplace and home. On a visit last week, with only a trickle of foreign sightseers and a few locals around, the town’s cobbled streets, mock-Tudor pubs and quaint tearooms were eerily quiet. The occasional flock of schoolchildren on a field trip provided the closest thing to bustle.And yet this tranquil place is home to one of the most venerable institutions of British cultural life: the Royal Shakespeare Company. Founded in 1961, with a mission to bring Shakespeare’s work to a contemporary audience, the company is renowned for its diverse and forward-thinking repertoire: It presents modern spins on Shakespeare’s plays alongside works by other playwrights, with a strong, craft-centric ethos geared toward nurturing emerging talent. With a roster of alumni that includes Judi Dench, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren, the company’s global prestige transcends its modest environs.But when summer comes, the tourists will, too — and this presents a perennial challenge for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s leaders.A lot of those visitors will want to see classical, period-dress productions that transport them to a picture-postcard England of yore, in keeping with Stratford’s kitschy trappings. But contemporary treatments of Shakespeare’s texts — eschewing naturalism, foregrounding psychological elements and topical resonances — are more in vogue. This is the conundrum facing Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey, the troupe’s new co-artistic directors, as they embark on their first season in charge.For the first few decades of its existence, the company had one foot in Stratford and the other in London. It abandoned its London base in 2001, when the artistic director at the time, Adrian Noble, dismantled its permanent acting troupe in favor of a flexible model, with performers on short-term contracts.This made it easier to sign up big-name stars, but it upset actors’ unions and some theater purists, like the theater historian Simon Trowbridge. In his pointedly titled 2021 book “The Rise and Fall of the Royal Shakespeare Company,” Trowbridge argued that the company should have ditched Stratford, and instead made its primary home in London, where Britain’s largest theater audience is, only deploying the Stratford theaters during the busy summer season and perhaps at Christmas.But the symbolic allure of Shakespeare’s hometown was too tempting to give up. When I met Evans and Harvey for an interview, they made a persuasive case for the merits of keeping a base in Stratford. Harvey previously spent seven years as the artistic director of Theatr Clwyd, an arts center in Wales; Evans, a former actor with two Olivier Awards to his name, enjoyed fruitful spells at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1990s and 2000s, and was the artistic director of the Chichester Theater Festival before taking his current job.From left: Brandon Bassir, Luke Thompson, Abiola Owokoniran and Eric Stroud in “Love’s Labour’s Lost.”Johan PerssonThrough a window in one of the Stratford rehearsal rooms, Evans said, “you can see the church where Shakespeare was baptized and is now buried, and through another window you can see the school he went to, and through another you can see the house he bought for his wife and family later in life.”“Having rehearsed myself as a young actor in that space,” he added, there was something to “relish and savor about coming to make theater in the place where you can see and experience those things — not in a way that is touristic, but in a way that brings you closer to the source.”Harvey said that there was a “thing that happens when you are in a place that is not your everyday existence — the focus that comes from that, and the sense of company. Which is something that we can offer that London theaters can’t. It’s a very American model in some ways: America has an extraordinary network of theaters outside of major metropolises.”There has always been a strong U.S. connection to the theater at Stratford. In the Victorian era, the town’s burgeoning tourist industry was sustained by a constant flow of trans-Atlantic Shakespeare pilgrims.“It was actually Americans who first got it,” Harvey said. In the 19th century, when two local brewery magnates, Edward Fordham Flower and Charles Flower, proposed building a theater in Stratford, “the British public and the British theater world essentially said ‘that idea’s nonsense,’” Harvey said. The duo then “went across the Atlantic, and it was American philanthropists and supporters who got the idea, and came on board, and made it possible,” she added. The result was the Shakespeare Memorial Theater, built in 1879 and later renamed the Royal Shakespeare Theater.Today, that playhouse is the Royal Shakespeare Company’s flagship. Elsewhere in Stratford, the company also runs the 400-seat Swan Theater and a small studio theater called the Other Place. A new outdoor auditorium, the Holloway Garden Theater, will begin hosting outdoor performances from June.The program for Evans and Harvey’s debut season includes a Ukrainian production of “King Lear” and an abridged, 80-minute outdoor “As You Like It.” A period-dress “Othello” in the fall will cater to more conservative tastes. The non-Shakespeare offerings include a retelling of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1777 aristocratic comedy, “The School for Scandal,” and new plays on themes such as environmental politics (“Kyoto”) and language lessons (“English”). The key, Evans said, was “balance and variety.”The season began in April with a spirited take on Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labour’s Lost.” In this early comedy, regarded as something of an anomaly because of its bathetic, unresolved ending, Ferdinand, the king of Navarre (Abiola Owokoniran) and his three favorite noblemen (Luke Thompson, Eric Stroud and Brandon Bassir) undertake a vow of abstinence — “to fast, to study, to see no woman.”From left: Ankur Bahl, Bettrys Jones and Dee Ahluwalia in “The Buddha of Suburbia.”Steve TannerThat is promptly derailed by the arrival of a princess (Melanie-Joyce Bermudez) and her retinue (Ioanna Kimbook, Amy Griffith and Sarita Gabony). In contravention of their oath, the men make advances on the sly and the wary women prank them to test their mettle. Cue a medley of exquisite tomfoolery, featuring bawdy badinage, dubious love-poems, mistaken identity, visual gags, a chaotic play-within-a-play and lots of linguistic whimsy.In this production, directed by Emily Burns and running at the Royal Shakespeare Theater through May 18, the principal characters are reimagined as 21st-century tech mogul types, and the setting is a Hawaiian island retreat. It’s a clever update, not least because the men’s masochistic undertaking — to forego pleasure for the sake of an obscurely defined idea of personal advancement — prefigures the self-optimization fetish that today’s social media gurus are hustling.But the production doesn’t strain too hard for relevance, and needn’t jar with more traditionally minded audiences. (And the nuts and bolts of seduction haven’t changed all that much in 500 years.) Ultimately, it’s the script, ably brought to life by a talented group of actors, that does the work. Thompson (of “Bridgerton” fame) is the pick of the bunch as Berowne, one of the king’s noblemen, delivering his lines with satirical brio and a wonderful range of complacent smirks. He has one of those faces that suggest mischief, even when at rest.The Royal Shakespeare Theater, which seats over 1,000 people, was built in the 19th century. It reopened after a major revamp in 2010.Mary Turner for The New York TimesYouthful yearning is also on the menu at the Swan Theater, in a new adaptation of the British writer Hanif Kureshi’s coming-of-age novel, “The Buddha of Suburbia,” directed and adapted by Emma Rice with input from Kureshi himself. Set in late-1970s London, against a backdrop of political turbulence and racial strife, it follows a young British Pakistani man, Karim, as he grapples with the emotional fallout of his parents’ failing marriage while negotiating his passage to manhood — through music, drugs and heartbreak — before he finds his calling in the theater. (The show plays in repertoire through June 1.)Rachana Jadhav’s set is a cross-section of a ’70s suburban dwelling, featuring an orange-red sofa, a floral-patterned stair tread and several mirror balls. When we first meet Karim’s yogi father, Haroun (Ankur Bahl), he is wearing nothing but a pair of Y-fronts. His very first action, removing a piece of fluff from his bellybutton, sets the tone for this playful and irreverent romp. The sexual content — of which there is plenty — is rendered with disarming, pantomimic silliness: bananas to suggest erections; party poppers let off to signify the moment of climax.Dee Ahluwalia is well cast as Karim, with just the right blend of pretty-boy looks and callow impudence. When he periodically breaks off into first-person, audience-facing narration, he has the winking, conspiratorial aspect of an experienced crooner working the crowd between songs. Ewan Wardrop is outstanding as the creepy theater director who takes him under his wing, and Bettrys Jones excels in two very different roles: affectingly poignant as Karim’s long-suffering mother, Margaret, and riotously eccentric as his mercurial love interest, Eleanor.Though the play touches on somber topics — racist violence, the fragmented lives of the migrant diaspora — it is anything but earnest, with a jaunty, naïve quality that echoes the reckless esprit of early adulthood. “The Buddha of Suburbia” doesn’t have the sentence-level brilliance of the Bard — it’s more Ealing Comedy than Shakespeare — but there is something of his spirit in its ribald energy, and it doesn’t feel out to of place in Stratford. There was lots of laughter, and the mood was buzzing as people filed out.Both of these shows revolved around youth, and both went down well with a predominantly senior audience. Their freshness and exuberance augured well for the coming season. The hope must be that the more traditional audiences will move with the times, and come around to new visions. You can’t please all of the people all of the time — but you can do your best to take them with you. And if not, there are always the tearooms. More

  • in

    Royal Shakespeare Company Names Two Directors for Top Job

    In an unusual move for a major British theater, Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey will jointly helm the major British theater troupe.Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey will start work as the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new artistic directors in June.Seamus RyanLONDON — Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey were named early Wednesday morning here as joint artistic directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the major theater ensemble based in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace.The pair is replacing Gregory Doran, who stepped down from the company in April after leading it for almost a decade. He will remain with the company as artistic director emeritus until the end of 2023.Shriti Vadera, the chairwoman of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s board, said in a news release that a selection panel — including the theater director Nicholas Hytner and Mark Thompson, deputy chairman of the company’s board and a former chief executive of The New York Times — chose Evans and Harvey from “an exceptionally strong field of candidates.” Vadera added that Evans and Harvey “bring a brilliant track record of artistic achievement with a strong commitment to education, communities and championing diverse talent and voices.”The decision to split the top job between two individuals is unusual for a British theater so steeped in tradition. It has happened only once before at the company, when Trevor Nunn and Terry Hands shared the role from 1978 to 1986. It is a more common practice in Germany where it is seen as allowing each office holder to focus on contrasting areas of expertise.Evans, 49, the artistic director of the Chichester Festival Theater in southern England, is the better known of the two, having had a high-profile career here as both an actor and director.In a 2011 interview with The Guardian, Evans said visits to the Royal Shakespeare Company as a teenager had sparked his interest in theater. He began his acting career there, too, and later went on to appear in numerous classical and experimental plays in London, including the debut of Sarah Kane’s “4:48 Psychosis” at the Royal Court. He also became known as a star of Stephen Sondheim musicals. In 2008, he was nominated for a Tony Award for his performance in the lead role of Sam Buntrock’s Broadway revival of Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Sunday in the Park With George.”At Chichester, he has been praised for directing new plays, including “Quiz” by the playwright James Graham as well as hit musicals such as a revamped “South Pacific.”Harvey, 44, is the artistic director of Theatr Clwyd, in Mold, a town in Wales. She also has a long history with Shakespeare — in 2004, she directed an all-female “Much Ado About Nothing” at the Globe in London — but her recent work has been varied, including last year’s online production of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” updated for the Instagram generation.On Friday, Harvey is premiering “The Famous Five” at Theater Clwyd, a new musical based on a series of children’s books by the English author Enid Blyton that features a puppet dog. It is scheduled to transfer to Evans’s Chichester Festival Theater, in October. The pair have worked together before, on a 2015 production of “Pride and Prejudice” and a 2017 production of “Uncle Vanya.”A spokeswoman for the Royal Shakespeare Company said no one was available for an interview about how the pairing will work. In a news release, Harvey said that she and Evans both believed the company could be “a home for radical, relevant theater made by artists from across the U.K. and the wider world.”Evans and Harvey will take up the post in June 2023. Erica Whyman will continue as the company’s acting artistic director until then, and is scheduled to announce details of the company’s 2023 season next week. More

  • in

    Review: A Selfie’s in the Picture for This ‘Dorian Gray’

    Oscar Wilde meets Instagram in a slick, shrewd and screen-filled update, the filmed collaboration by five British theaters.Of the Olympus-style pantheon of dead writers toasting with whiskey and Benzedrine in the heavens, Oscar Wilde, I’m willing to bet, would have the most Insta followers. C’mon, the guy had style.That’s why a dark new social media-themed adaptation of Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” feels like a raffish sibling to the 1890 novel. That is, when it doesn’t get too absorbed in its slick production techniques and moralism, a sticking point for those familiar with Wilde’s satirical eye, which was more about poking fun than proselytizing.In the original, the beautiful, innocent young title character is the subject of a painting by his friend Basil. Wishing that his youth could be preserved as it is in the portrait, Dorian is corrupted by a charismatic hedonist named Lord Henry Wotton. As he grows more cruel, his portrait changes to reflect the ugliness of his thoughts and actions. Dorian remains beautiful but tortured by guilt and self-disgust.Joanna Lumley as Lady Narborough, one of Dorian’s many admirers.via Barn TheaterThe modern-day adaptation, a five-theater coproduction written by Henry Filloux-Bennett and directed by Tamara Harvey, makes Dorian (a winsome — and, yes, effortlessly handsome — Fionn Whitehead) a meek university English major who quickly erupts into a social media star.The piece is framed as a documentary, set in a world online and isolated by the pandemic, about the character’s rise and fall. Stephen Fry, underused as the film’s interviewer, asks Dorian’s friend and admirer, Lady Narborough (Joanna Lumley), for her account of what happened.But they aren’t in the same room. She speaks to Fry via a laptop screen, one of the myriad technologies — FaceTime, security cameras, YouTube videos and text messages — through which we view the action. It gives the story an unsettling sense of voyeurism.Her account begins with Dorian’s 21st birthday, when his friend Basil (Russell Tovey, present only as a face and a voice) gifts him not a painting but software that captures his image — via pictures and videos — at his youngest and most beautiful. Our Narcissus becomes enamored with the software, and also falls for a young actress, Sibyl Vane (Emma McDonald), whom he eventually rejects when she can’t match the ideal of perfection he holds in his head.All the while Basil and his libertine friend Harry Wotton (a dandified Alfred Enoch, positively sluiced with seductive charm) helicopter around Dorian — enamored, protective and possessive of him all at once.Alfred Enoch as Harry Wotton, who is unusually possessive of Dorian’s attentions.via Barn TheaterWilde’s figures translate seamlessly to the world of bitmojis and social media chatter. But the language shimmers most when it pivots between “lol” textspeak and the grandiloquent pronouncements that recall the Romantics. This Dorian quickly goes from firing off a quick expletive to relaxing into the ornate poetry of a desperate request: “Sear me with all the lines of suffering and thought you want. Sallow my skin. Dull my eyes. … let me keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness of youth that this magic gives me.”This is all accentuated by the polished quality of the production itself, which mesmerizes like a Twitter scroll, thanks to Ben Evans’ digital imaging and Holly Pigott’s set and costume designs, a combination of modern and Victorian clever enough to intrigue the most fashion-forward Insta user.Most of the film happens on screens, as characters like Dorian share messages and videos.via Barn TheaterBut also like a Twitter timeline, the glut of information can be overwhelming: the nested viewing experience of watching videos within videos and screens within screens effectively enacts our digitally driven pandemic lives, but before too long the production feels overwrought.It also presents the question: Does this show, though co-produced by the Barn, Lawrence Batley Theater, the New Wolsey Theater, the Oxford Playhouse and Theatr Clwyd, still count as theater? (It’s a question my colleague Alexis Soloski also asked of the last team-up of many of these theaters, “What a Carve Up!”) The reliance on these slick production techniques with prerecorded, thoroughly edited performances would suggest no, not so much.I won’t quibble over the medium, especially when the pandemic has smudged the line between theater and film, but I will dispute this adaptation’s moral shift. In Wilde’s novel characters die as direct or indirect victims of pride, or ego; here social media, and cyberbullying in particular, is the culprit.That’s fair, but “Dorian Gray” — with its awkward coronavirus references and warnings of the prevalence of fake news, Dorian’s spiral into conspiracy theories and Basil’s YouTube video on mental health — too often tiptoes into didacticism.It’s the central relationships — everyone attracted to Dorian, his toying with their affections — that build up the most alluring drama, of how beauty and innocence can be perverted by the world and even wielded as weapons. I would have liked, for example, to see more of Harry’s complicated bond with Dorian and Dorian’s messy codependency with Basil, who, in this version, is older, predatory and closeted. The fascinating nuances of that sexual, emotional and power dynamic get short shrift.“Beauty is a form of genius,” Wilde memorably wrote in the novel. He wasn’t talking about theater, but he could have been. The beauty we encounter in nature is exquisite in part because it is incidental, oblivious to the looker, oblivious to any language we may try to use to describe it. The beauty of performance is the beauty of contrivance: tailored specifically to the looker, meant to elicit their words and feeling.There’s plenty of beauty, and even a little genius, in “Dorian Gray,” but most of all when it doesn’t get trapped by its own gaze.The Picture of Dorian GrayThrough March 31; barntheatre.org.uk More