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      ‘Hamlet’ Review: A Dirt-Eating Danish Prince, Born to Be Wild

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      Thomas Ostermeier’s production of “Hamlet,” presented as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave festival, unleashes more madness than what Shakespeare has already offered.“Hamlet” is a work of excesses: an endlessly philosophizing hero, a play within a play and enough casualties that by the end the stage looks like a horror film, scattered with corpses.And yet it is still possible to out-“Hamlet” “Hamlet,” to create a production with even more spilled blood, more graveyard dirt and more madness than what Shakespeare has already offered. For better or for worse, this is Thomas Ostermeier’s production of “Hamlet” for the Schaubühne Berlin, presented as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave festival: the Danish prince unleashed, like a rabid dog, onto the stage.At the start of the production, running in BAM’s Harvey Theater through Nov. 5, a few figures gather, Last Supper-style, at a long table with a white tablecloth. Their expressions are unclear: They’re not only behind a curtain, but also sitting far from us, upstage. Downstage is a plot of dirt, where a coffin is being lowered into the earth. They’re at a wedding table for Hamlet’s mother Gertrude’s marriage to his uncle Claudius. Hamlet (an unpredictable Lars Eidinger), crouched in a corner, begins his “to be or not to be” speech (yes, a whole two acts early), speaking into a camera he holds close to his face, which is projected large onto the curtain for us to see. (The video design is by Sébastien Dupouey.) A gravedigger fights a coffin — the coffin of the late King Hamlet, who died under mysterious circumstances — into the ground in a long sequence of daffy physical comedy set to a swelling barrage of percussion, strings and guitar. Gertrude, in a white cropped shirt and white slacks, wears a long white veil and belly dances seductively for her brother-in-law-turned-husband.In other words, the performance has begun.Thomas Bading as Claudius and Jenny König as Gertrude kissing at their wedding table, with Eidinger’s Hamlet capturing the moment, which is projected onto a curtain.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis German-language production with supertitles (the German translation is by Marius von Mayenburg) was first staged in 2008 and has toured internationally since then. It takes a Brechtian approach, self-consciously nodding to the performance as a performance. In that way it’s not unlike, say, James Ijames’s thrilling “Fat Ham,” which ran at the Public Theater this spring — shows that push back against both the text and the fourth wall.This “Hamlet,” however, has neither the same poetry nor grace, which isn’t to say it’s unsuccessful. The production exhibits cleverness in its puckishly untamed and untidy circus act, but tips over into excess as it tries to make its spectacle of spit, dirt and trash into a masticated art piece with Shakespeare’s great work as its fodder.The cast of characters is condensed; a six-person ensemble plays 11 parts (everyone except Eidinger takes on two roles). The pairings are cleverly thought through: It makes sense that the actors who play Horatio (Damir Avdic), Hamlet’s closest confidante, and Laertes (Konrad Singer), Hamlet’s peer, also play the prince’s treacherous friends Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, offering opposing views of what Hamlet’s relationships look like. Claudius (Thomas Bading, on this evening) crumbles in a heap on his wedding table, in a drunken stupor, but then rises, as if from the sleep of death, as the late king’s ghost.Robert Beyer takes on two fools: Osric and Polonius. (He delivers an especially fine performance of the inane royal adviser Polonius, not as the clown productions often make him to be, but as a more realistic yet still comical daft uncle who isn’t as wise as he lets on.) Jenny König is left with the play’s troubled women — Queen Gertrude and the ill-fated Ophelia — though they are at least as ill-served in this production as in so many others. The fact that they are conflated here wisely calls to Hamlet’s psychosexual fixation on his mother’s eroticism and Ophelia’s innocence. But these female characters are also reduced to a seductress tongue-wrestling with her dead husband’s brother and a tragic nymphet whose arc is cut even shorter in this adaptation of the story; Ophelia is barely introduced before she is killed off.In the middle of a flurry of action, like a force of nature, is Eidinger, who retches, eats dirt, face-plants into the ground, tumbles, break-dances, twitches, hoots, spasms, shrieks, cross-dresses and wanders into the audience as he pleases. He throws empty drink cans, kicks around plates and flatware, sprays a hose of water across the stage (audience members in the first few rows, beware the splash zone), takes breaks to drop contemporary music references and pop culture jokes in English and to D.J. Though this production relentlessly trims down the text, it’s bloated back up with improv that steers the show to a nearly three-hour running time.König and Robert Beyer as Polonius in the play, which is presented in German and features a muddy graveyard increasingly littered with empty beer cans and other detritus.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd what we get is a show stripped of its pathos; Eidinger’s performance is as vibrant as it is off-putting and as aloof and performative as it is fascinating. This “Hamlet” is no longer a classical Greek-style tragedy of vengeance, mortality and fate but rather a tragedy of a man undone by his own solipsism.In “Hamlet” we see a production that sometimes succumbs to one of the frequent pitfalls of experimental takes on classic works: It feels more attuned to inherited ideas about and traditions of the play as opposed to being attuned to the material itself.Ostermeier’s direction is confrontational, from Eidinger’s interactions with the audience to the occasionally piercing, cinematic music (Nils Ostendorf). The lighting design, by Erich Schneider, takes us from horror to comedy, and occasionally targets the audience when Ostermeier starts to lean against the fourth wall. A nimbly choreographed fencing match (choreography by René Lay) so convincingly recalls the casually deadly jabs you’d see from two boxers in a street fight.One of my many favorite lines in the play is when Hamlet tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that he sees his country as a prison. Rosencrantz challenges him, suggesting that he is trapped in his own mind. Hamlet replies, “I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space.” In Ostermeier and Eidinger’s “Hamlet,” the characters, setting and details become less important; the whole world we have is the chaotic space between Hamlet’s ears. Though being trapped in Prince Hamlet’s mind offers us a new perspective that some will find freeing, others will see only bedlam and madness.HamletThrough Nov. 5 at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn; bam.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      ‘Hedda Gabler’ and ‘The Winter’s Tale’: 2 Takes That Shout Subtext

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      Irreverence can be illuminating. But Bedlam’s energetic productions of classics by Ibsen and Shakespeare lose insight in the process.Forgoing subtlety onstage has its advantages. Exaggeration leaves little room for doubt, obvious feelings burn hot, and in-your-face humor doesn’t‌ risk flying over your head. At least, that’s the idea. But in the Bedlam theater company’s productions of Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” and Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale,” now playing in repertory at the Irondale Center in Brooklyn, subtlety isn’t just dead, it’s the devil in need of exorcis‌ing.Take the newlywed Hedda Tessman, sunk low in a chair, coolly lighted at center stage as the 1891 play that bears her maiden name begins. Portrayed with viscous, palpable disaffection by Susannah Millonzi, she is a woman so unsuited to domesticity that her chair is leopard print. And when Hedda greets her doting, unrefined aunt (“Visiting us so early — that’s so very… kind of you”) her expression of good manners, which Ibsen soaked with subtext, becomes overtly sarcastic, subverting the play’s careful attention to the ways people use language to hide or reveal themselves.Bedlam, now in its 10th anniversary season, has built a reputation for reinterpreting classic texts, like “Sense & Sensibility” and “The Crucible,” with stripped-down, energetic stagings and a modern touch. Under the direction of the artistic director Eric Tucker, many of these revivals have sought to expose the essential bones of familiar works. Here, Tucker, who directs and acts in both productions, seems to be reacting against received ideas about the texts, resisting what’s expected of these classics with an exceptionally playful hand. But it’s a tricky gesture that, in each case, tends to obscure more than it illuminates.Using a colloquial adaptation of “Hedda Gabler” by Jon Robin Baitz, the production recasts the drama of betrayal in captivity as a daffy but dour comedy that happens to end in death. If Ibsen is known for his design of psychological interiors and subconscious intentions, here every room is turned inside-out, with feelings and attitudes sprung in the open. Rag-tag vintage furniture is pressed against the periphery of the stage (set design is by John McDermott), suggesting the drawing-room realism that Ibsen fathered has been deliberately cast aside.With a Hedda this sour and cunning from the start, her union with Tucker’s chipper, oblivious Tessman can only come off as a farce, its absurdity radiating outward. Line readings defy logic; one moment Tessman is shouting to Hedda as if she’s on the roof, the next he’s surprised to find her right beside him. Innuendo turns literal, as when Judge Brack (Ryan Quinn) all but humps the legs of Hedda’s chair. Dialogue and action are mismatched, as when Hedda claws meat off a roast chicken in the fridge, though she purports to be reading a letter. (She’s a woman of appetite, remember?) ‌‌The consequence of so much funny business is that there’s not much to ponder about the characters’ inner lives, which makes Ibsen far less interesting to watch. And the lighting (by Carolina Ortiz) and sound (by Jane Shaw) are heavy handed, indicating when the mood turns serious and sincere. With Hedda’s misery so loud and clear upfront, modulation also becomes a problem. By the time her foul deeds come to a head, she is throwing up, slapping the walls and hollering in a way that seems unsuited to a woman averse to public scandal.Lisa Birnbaum as Hermione and Eric Tucker as Leontes in “The Winter’s Tale,” the most unwieldy of Shakespeare’s plays, with a bear attack and a statue that comes to life.Ashley GarrettThe transgression of social bonds — between husbands and wives, fathers and sons, leaders and citizens — links the repertory pairing and seems to make Bedlam’s case for its resonance in the present.Suspicion of infidelity kicks off “The Winter’s Tale,” in which Tucker’s volatile, and obtuse, patriarch Leontes rules over a frat party-style royal court. With its swing from apparent tragedy to roving rom-com, and its grab bag of devices (a bear attack, a 16-year time jump, a statue that comes to life), Shakespeare’s play is an unwieldy beast to wrangle onstage, and one of the most amenable to bold and wacky interpretations. ‌‌Leontes and the neighboring king Polixenes (Elan Zafir) start out demonstrating their brotherly affection by slapping each other across the face with flour tortillas between shots of cheap liquor. But when Leontes suspects the queen Hermione (Lisa Birnbaum) is pregnant by Polixenes instead of him, the jig is up in a flurry of banishments and deaths that leaves him without his wife, child and friend.A cast of seven (some of whom appear in both productions) double and triple up roles in “The Winter’s Tale,” with only slight changes in the ’80s thrift-store costumes by Daniele Tyler Mathews to help viewers distinguish between them. The most impressive juggling act comes from Zafir, who plays both father and son in a confrontation at the altar of young love. Karen Alvarado, as faithful servant Camillo (and the ardent, naïve Thea in “Hedda Gabler”) is a standout in both, a rare anchor of earnestness and ease. But not everyone is as comfortable, especially with Shakespeare’s verse; under Tucker’s direction, some of the actors fall into the trap of gesturing at rather than conveying the meaning of words.There is something to be said for a company clearly having a blast — several, including Tucker, broke character cracking up at Mike Labbadia’s Clown (modeled after his pop culture moniker Chad, or loathsome alpha male), a laugh that might have been more fun were everyone in on the joke.Improvised bits of modern dialogue and a variety of acting styles give the productions a sense of a particularly collaborative rehearsal process. Challenging the form and style of revered material is what keeps them alive. But neither revival makes easy work of identifying cohesive or incisive arguments about the texts while also allowing the audience to follow along.If less can be more, as previous Bedlam productions have shown, “Hedda Gabler” and “The Winter’s Tale” suggest that more can also be too much. So much exuberance can demonstrate a breach of trust in the material, and the audience’s ability to understand it. As Ibsen and Shakespeare both point out, underestimating people comes at a cost.Hedda GablerThrough Nov. 19 at the Irondale Center, Brooklyn; bedlam.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.The Winter’s TaleThrough Nov. 20 at the Irondale Center, Brooklyn; bedlam.org. Running time: 3 hours. More

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      Review: In ‘Peerless,’ Elite College Admissions Are Something Wicked

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      The playwright Jiehae Park’s sly and polished adaptation of “Macbeth” transports the characters from the Scottish heath to the halls of a Midwestern high school.Toil and trouble? That’s how you brew a witch’s charm — and gain admission to elite schools. M has perfect SATs, a zillion Advanced Placement credits and extracurricular activities for days, but her application to her dream college has been rejected. So what’s a girl and her scheming sister to do? Commit murder. Maybe more than one.These are the broad outlines of “Peerless,” the playwright Jiehae Park’s sly and polished adaptation of “Macbeth,” which is being presented by Primary Stages at 59E59 Theaters. Transported from the Scottish heath to the halls of a Midwestern high school, “Peerless” places the tragedy’s moral quandaries into the mouths and miniskirts of M (Sasha Diamond), a senior, and L (Shannon Tyo), her twin. L is a junior, having stayed back a year to increase their chances of getting into what they refer to only as “The College,” which accepts only one student from their school per year. But those plans go awry when The College accepts their classmate D (Benny Wayne Sully) instead. D has a lower G.P.A., but he is Native American. Though M is a girl and Asian American — “double minority,” as she puts it acidly — she believes that D outranks her in terms of racialized admissions policies.From left, Diamond, Benny Wayne Sully, and Tyo. The play is content to absorb the themes of “Macbeth” without providing corollaries for each of its plot points.James LeynseSmartly — because Park is very smart — the play is content to absorb the themes of “Macbeth” without providing corollaries for each of its plot points. There’s no Birnam Wood here, no spots to out. Macbeth’s bestie, Banquo, is now BF (Anthony Cason), M’s barely there boyfriend. Instead of the three witches and Hecate, there’s only a single classmate known as Dirty Girl (Marié Botha, delightful), costumed by Amanda Gladu in a witchy black trench coat. The set, by Kristen Robinson, shows a school hallway at an angle, with cutouts for a living room and a bed, as needed, while Mextly Couzin’s flashing, deep-hued lights nudge the environment toward the uncanny.In place of Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter, Park writes in sharp, staccato rhythms, with short lines that drive through the scenes a few syllables at a time. The actors, under Margot Bordelon’s direction, tear through them like so many high-carb snacks. (This is a feature of the adaptation: Who needs a dagger when you have a victim with a tree-nut allergy?) They’re having a very good time. In the case of Sully’s manic, excitable D, arguably too good of a time. Bordelon gives her young cast the trust and space to show what they can do, which, in a homecoming scene, includes some very silly dance moves.Not every part of “Peerless” works. There’s a lot of talk about M and L’s twinness and their ability to switch places, but Tyo, excellent in “The Chinese Lady” and nicely malign here, and Diamond, a fine actor last seen in “Once Upon a (korean) Time,” look very little alike. And as Park spends a lot less time than Shakespeare probing psychology and motive, the characterizations come across as thin.At times, the production suggests a richer and spikier play about the ways in which members of Gen Z rehearse, perform and weaponize identity, and about the sacrifices that we make in the present to secure an increasingly insecure future. There are arguments — fruitful, if undigested — about prejudice, both external and internalized. But “Peerless,” nasty and glossy, lives mostly on its impish surface. It’s something wicked, certainly. It could be much more.PeerlessThrough Nov. 6 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      ‘Rosaline’ Review: O Romeo, Romeo, Thank U, Next

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      Kaitlyn Dever plays Romeo’s snarky ex-lover in this Shakespeare reimagining, which crosses its source material with present-day sensibilities.For never was a story of more woe than this — and I’m not talking about the trysts of Romeo. “Rosaline,” Karen Maine’s hapless Shakespeare reimagining, stages history’s most famous romance from the novel perspective of Rosaline, Romeo’s jilted ex. It’s a clever enough gimmick. But in playing out the reverie, the movie epitomizes a du jour Hollywood adaptation style that’s nothing short of agonizing, planting one foot in the source material and the other in a cheeky 21st-century sensibility.Like other half-modernized classic works, “Rosaline” strands its irreverent millennial characters in a stuffy olde world. Think “Enchanted” in reverse: Clad in opulent chemises, bodices and waistcoats, Rosaline (Kaitlyn Dever) whines, cusses and flails through Verona, egged on in her diablerie by her world-weary nurse (Minnie Driver) and sassy sidekick, Paris (Spencer Stevenson). When Romeo (Kyle Allen), Rosaline’s then-paramour, tries to woo her with blank verse, she squints and cuts in, “Why are you talking like that?” The engine of this movie is snark, and Dever, overtaxed with carrying the comedy, brings a dauntlessness to the role, even during more daft moments.Romeo snubs Rosaline for Juliet (Isabela Merced). Paris proposes. The Montagues clash with the Capulets. You know much of the rest, though Rosaline’s courtship with a local hunk named Dario (Sean Teale) and a puerile, eager-to-please third act are some of the movie’s bigger breaks with tradition. Shall I compare the screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (“(500) Days of Summer”) to the Bard? I’d rather not.RosalineRated PG-13. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      In Paris Plays, What It Would Be Like if Shakespeare Was Female

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      Several Paris theaters geared up to open their seasons with the most famous English playwright. How would the plays be tackled if a woman’s name were attached to them?PARIS — When the hero of Shakespeare’s play “Coriolanus” likened himself to a “lonely dragon” in the early 1600s, the adjective “lonely” was still a new addition to the English language. Based on surviving records, “Coriolanus” was probably only the second time it appeared in print. The first? In “Antonius,” a 1592 translation of a French play by Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke.This tiny, almost insignificant detail is one of many listed in “Sweet Swan of Avon: Did a Woman Write Shakespeare?,” a 2006 book by the scholar Robin P. Williams — and now brought to the stage by the director Aurore Evain. In both, Williams and Evain argue that the little-known Sidney, an extraordinarily well-educated and high-achieving noblewoman, could have penned Shakespeare’s canon.It is a relatively new answer to the “authorship question,” as the long-running debate about the identity of the writer is known. While most Shakespeare scholars still believe that William Shakespeare, the man from Stratford-upon-Avon, was the main author of the works published under his name, suspicion that someone used him as a cover arose in the late 18th century.His humble origins and apparent lack of advanced education are factors, because the author of the plays appeared to be versed in a number of languages as well as in aristocratic habits. Additionally, no complete original manuscript by his hand is known to have been found.Bard worship is such in theater worldwide that it’s easy to put any doubts down to gaps in Shakespeare-era historical records. Going into Evain’s “Mary Sidney, Alias Shakespeare,” an absorbing staged conference presented at the Théâtre de l’Épée de Bois, in the suburbs of Paris, I expected little more than a pleasantly quirky intellectual exercise.Yet over the course of two hours, with just two lecterns and a few projections, Evain, who is also a theater historian, presented such a wide range of circumstantial evidence drawn from Williams’s “Sweet Swan of Avon” — as well as potential rebuttals, with vivid help from the actress Fanny Zeller — that I started questioning my own beliefs.Fanny Zeller in “Mary Sidney, Alias Shakespeare.”Charline FauveauHere are a few assertions they offer. “Lonely” is one of several dozen words Sidney introduced into the English language that Shakespeare later used. She provided patronage to Pembroke’s Men, one of the early companies to perform plays that were later attributed to Shakespeare. Sidney’s extensive library included many of Shakespeare’s sources, and she was familiar with pursuits as varied as falconry, alchemy and cooking, whose vocabulary Shakespeare drew on.Shakespeare’s First Folio, published about seven years after his death, is dedicated to Sidney’s sons, William Herbert and Philip Herbert.After the performance, other audience members flocked to Evain, expressing their shock at how reasonable Sidney’s authorship suddenly sounded to them. Over the years, speculation has centered mostly on a handful of men, namely Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, Christopher Marlowe and Francis Bacon.Yet, as Evain put it convincingly onstage, unlike many other contenders, Sidney had a very good reason to hide her identity: She was a woman. While Sidney ran an influential literary salon, the Wilton Circle, and published translations and original verse, it would have been considered improper at the turn of the 17th century for her to show plays of her own, let alone works with occasionally bawdy language and violent themes.And what if a woman had actually written Shakespeare’s works? Beyond the whodunit — and neither Williams nor Evain claims to have definitely solved it — the implications are fascinating, because very few women were afforded the opportunity to have careers as playwrights until far later.As several Paris theaters geared up to open their seasons with Shakespeare, I started wondering how differently the plays would be tackled if they had a woman’s name attached to them.Let’s say the Comédie-Française, France’s prestigious theater company, was presenting Sidney’s “King Lear,” in lieu of Shakespeare’s. That would certainly have turned the German director Thomas Ostermeier’s interpretation on its head: In a playbill essay, Ostermeier wrote that Shakespeare’s work was “part of a 1,000-year-old culture that ties the representation of power to the masculine,” and suggested that he had tried to go “against” Shakespeare to give the female characters greater “legitimacy.” (What this means remains to be seen: Press performances of “King Lear” were delayed because of Covid-19 protocols.)What of Sidney as the author of lonely “Coriolanus”? The idea felt comical at the Théâtre de la Bastille, which is playing host to a tacky, histrionic production by François Orsoni. This “Coriolanus” couldn’t have telegraphed more crudely its laddish credentials. As the Roman leader at the heart of the play, Alban Guyon, dressed in either leather pants or a tracksuit with a gold chain, swaggers and shouts to exhausting effect.From left, Alban Guyon, Estelle Meyer and Thomas Landbo in “Coriolanus,” directed by François Orsoni at the Théâtre de la Bastille.Vincent BérengerThe two main female characters, Volumnia and Virgilia, are combined and played by Estelle Meyer with over-the-top, vampy energy. Pascal Tagnati goes for Johnny Depp-adjacent levels of parody as a pirate version of the Volscian leader Aufidius, and the entire play takes place under “CorioLand” signs that read like advertisements for racing cars.Would this staging have seen the light of day if “Coriolanus” was known to be the work of Sidney? It’s doubtful, but then again, many would most likely also have trouble believing that this grim and bloody historical play was penned by a woman.One prolific 19th-century French writer knew the benefits of publishing under a male-sounding pseudonym: George Sand, born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin. While she wrote multiple plays, they are rarely performed today. Instead, this season, the director Laurent Delvert opted to adapt one of her novels, “Gabriel,” for another of the Comédie-Française’s stages, the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier.While Delvert’s dark, pared-down production is workaday, with electronic sound effects that feel more like tics, it is a very welcome reintroduction to Sand. Gabriel de Bramante, her central character here, is a woman who was raised secretly as a man for reasons of inheritance; her grandfather can’t bear the idea of his title going to what he sees as a less deserving branch of the family.From left, Yoann Gasiorowski, Elisa Erka and Claire de La Rüe du Can in “Gabriel,” directed by Laurent Delvert at the Comédie-Française’s Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier.Vincent PontetClaire de La Rüe du Can brings delightful artlessness and honesty to the character of Gabriel, who learns of the deception when she comes of age. As she sets out to make things right with her relatives, she falls in love and starts living part-time as a woman, only to fall victim to a man’s irrational jealousy.Sand’s style is exactingly clear as she weighs the ways in which gender norms shape the experience of love and moral dilemmas — something Shakespeare wasn’t too bad at, either. We may never know what some women truly achieved when they couldn’t express their talents fully, but Sidney and Sand, no longer lonely in their pursuits, make for gratifying stage company.Mary Sidney, Alias Shakespeare. Directed by Aurore Evain. Théâtre de l’Épée de Bois.Coriolanus. Directed by François Orsoni. Théâtre de la Bastille, through Oct. 7.Gabriel. Directed by Laurent Delvert. Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, through Oct. 30. More

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      Royal Shakespeare Company Names Two Directors for Top Job

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      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

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      Shakespeare or Bieber? This Canadian City Draws Devotees of Both

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      For nearly 70 years, Stratford, Ontario, has attracted legions of theater fanatics to its Shakespeare festival. About a dozen years ago, a very different type of pilgrim began arriving: Beliebers.STRATFORD, Ontario — It’s a small city that practically shouts “Shakespeare!”Majestic white swans float in the Avon River, not far from Falstaff Street and Anne Hathaway Park, named for the playwright’s wife. Some residents live in Romeo Ward, while young students attend Hamlet elementary. And the school’s namesake play is often performed as part of a renowned theater festival that draws legions of Shakespeare fans from around the world, every April to October.Stratford, Ontario, steeped in references to and reverence for the Bard, has counted on its association with Shakespeare for decades to dependably bring in millions of tourist dollars to a city that would otherwise have little appeal to travelers.“My dad always said we have a world-class theater stuck in a farm community,” said Frank Herr, the second-generation owner of a boat tour and rental business along the Avon River.Then, about a dozen years ago, a new and typically much younger type of cultural enthusiast began showing up in Stratford’s streets: Beliebers, or fans of the pop star Justin Bieber, a homegrown talent.William Shakespeare Street in Stratford.Brett Gundlock for The New York TimesA star dedicated to Justin Bieber outside the Avon Theater where he would busk as a child.Brett Gundlock for The New York TimesResidents don’t have much trouble telling the two types of visitors apart. One clue: Look at what they are carrying.“They’ve got the Shakespeare books in their hands,” Mr. Herr said of those who are here for the love of theater. “They’re just serious people.”Beliebers, on the other hand, always have their smartphones at the ready to excitedly document the otherwise humdrum landmarks connected to the pop star: the site of his first date, the local radio station that first played his music, the diner where he was rumored to eat.Unlike Shakespeare — who never set foot in this city, named after his birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon, England — Mr. Bieber has genuine and deep connections: He grew up here and is familiar to many.“I know Justin,” Mr. Herr said. “He was always skateboarding on the cenotaph, and I was always kicking him off the cenotaph,” he added, referring to a World War I memorial in the gardens next to Lake Victoria.A cutout of Justin Bieber in the Stratford Perth Museum. The setting is meant to replicate the steps of the city’s Avon Theater. Brett Gundlock for The New York TimesDiane Dale, Mr. Bieber’s maternal grandmother, and her husband, Bruce, lived a 10-minute drive away from downtown Stratford, where the fledgling singer, now 28, could often be found busking on the steps of Avon Theater under their supervision, collecting as much as $200 per day, she said in a recent interview.Those steps became something of a pilgrimage site for Mr. Bieber’s fans, especially those vying to become “One Less Lonely Girl” during his teen-pop dreamboat era.Another popular stop on the pilgrim’s tour was Ms. Dale’s doorstep. After fans rang her doorbell, she would assure them that her grandson was not home, though that didn’t stop them from taking selfies outside the red brick bungalow.“Justin said, if you don’t move, we’re not coming to visit you anymore,” Ms. Dale, a retired sewer at a now shuttered automotive factory in town, recalled. She has since relocated.Businesses in Stratford that benefited from this second set of tourists began speaking of “the Bieber Effect,” a play on the “Bilbao Effect” in reference to the Spanish city revitalized by a museum.Justin Bieber’s grandparents’ former home in Stratford.Brett Gundlock for The New York TimesBut one of the problems with pop fame is that it can be fickle. As fans have aged out of their teen infatuation with the musician, “Bieber fever” has cooled and the number of pilgrims has dropped.The issues that have long afflicted other Canadian cities, like increased housing prices and drug addiction, are more often peeking through the quaint veneer of Stratford, a city of about 33,000 people bordered by sprawling fields of corn in the farmland region of southwestern Ontario.But more than 400 years after his death, Shakespeare’s magnetic force remains fully intact.The theater festival, which draws over 500,000 guests in a typical year and employs about 1,000 people, features Shakespeare classics, Broadway-style musicals and modern plays in its repertoire.Early in the coronavirus pandemic, the festival returned to its roots, staging a limited run of shows outside under canopies, as it did during its first four seasons, starting in 1953. In 1957, the Festival Theater building opened with a summer performance of “Hamlet,” with the Canadian actor Christopher Plummer in the titular role.The Tom Patterson Theater, a new addition to the Stratford Festival.Brett Gundlock for The New York TimesThis year’s production stars a woman, Amaka Umeh, the first Black actor to play Hamlet at the festival.While it’s unknown how popular Mr. Bieber will be four centuries from now, the appeal of someone who has sold over 100 million digital singles in the United States alone doesn’t dissipate overnight.And Stratford has taken steps to permanently memorialize his youth here.Mr. Bieber’s grandparents had hung on to boxes of his belongings, including talent show score sheets and a drum set paid for the by the community in a crowdfunding effort — until a local museum presented them with an opportunity to display the items.“It’s changed the museum forever, in a myriad of ways,” said John Kastner, the general manager of the Stratford Perth Museum.After informing the local newspaper that the museum was opening an exhibition, “Justin Bieber: Steps to Stardom,” in February 2018, Mr. Kastner said, he was flooded with calls from international media.“We were going to do one room, like one 10-by-10 room,” Mr. Kastner said. He called his curator. “I said, ‘We have a problem.’”Angelyka Byrne walking through the Bieber exhibit at the Stratford Perth Museum.Brett Gundlock for The New York TimesThey cut the agricultural exhibition that had been planned for the adjoining space, which proved helpful in accommodating the 18,000 visitors in the first year of the Bieber show, a huge jump in attendance from the 850 who visited the museum in 2013.The Bieber show, on view through at least next year, has brought in thousands of dollars in merchandise purchases, Mr. Kastner said, giving the modest museum some welcome financial cushion.Mr. Bieber has also made a handful of visits, marking his name in chalk on the guest blackboard and donating some more recent memorabilia, including his wedding invitation and reception menu, featuring a dish called “Grandma Diane’s Bolognese.”But even before the Beliebers descended on the town, young people had been coming to Stratford by the busload thanks to organized school visits, with 50,000 to 100,000 students arriving from the United States and around Canada each year.With the exception of the pandemic border closures, James Pakala, and his wife, Denise, both retired seminary librarians in St. Louis, have been coming to Stratford for about a week every year since the early 1990s. Thirty years before that, Ms. Pakala traveled to Stratford with her high school English literature class from Ithaca, N.Y., and the trip has since become a tradition.The Shakespearean Gardens in Stratford.Brett Gundlock for The New York Times“I love Shakespeare and also Molière,” said Mr. Pakala, 78, who was studying his program outside the Festival Theater before a recent production of Molière’s comedy “The Miser.”Other guests enjoy the simplicity of getting around Stratford. The traffic is fairly light, there is ample parking and most major attractions are a short walk from one other, with pleasant views of the rippling river and picturesque gardens.“It’s easy to attend theater here,” said Michael Walker, a retired banker from Newport Beach, Calif., who visits each year with friends. “It’s not like New York, where it’s burdensome, and the quality of the theater here, I think, is better than what’s in Los Angeles or Chicago.”Here for Now Theater, an independent nonprofit that opened during the pandemic and plays to audiences of no more than 50, enjoys a “symbiotic relationship” with the festival, said its artistic director, Fiona Mongillo, who compared the scale of their operations as a Fiat to the festival’s freight train.Performing “Take Care” at the Here for Now Theater in August.Brett Gundlock for The New York Times“It’s an interesting moment for Stratford because I think it’s growing and changing in a really lovely way,” said Ms. Mongillo, citing the increased diversity as Canadians from neighboring cities have relocated to a town that was formerly, she added, “very, very white.”Longtime residents of Stratford, like Madeleine McCormick, a retired correctional officer, said it can sometimes feel like the concerns of residents are sidelined in favor of tourists.Still, Ms. McCormick acknowledged the pluses of the vibrant community of artists and creative people, one that drew her musician husband into its orbit.“It’s a strange place,” she said. “There’s never going to be another place that’s like this, because of the theater.”And Mr. Bieber. 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      At the National Theater, Love Redeems, in Various Ways

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      Two productions at the London playhouse feature heroines who, reluctantly, allow transformative characters into their lives.LONDON — Love is a powerful, redemptive force at the National Theater here, where two very different shows convey the value of letting someone into your life. “All of Us,” the first play from the performer Francesca Martinez, opens our eyes to the hardships of disabled people in Britain. In a separate auditorium, the playhouse has revived Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing.”These plays feature heroines who allow themselves — sometimes reluctantly — to experience love, and are changed by it. The world around them may be unforgiving and harsh, but love is there to offer solace and a way forward.Circumstances are especially challenging for Jess, the therapist at the center of “All of Us.” She is played by the author, already an established comedian. Martinez has cerebral palsy, so understands full well the similarly “wobbly” Jess — “wobbly” being the playwright’s preferred word to describe living with a condition she has had since birth and a term she has used to describe herself in interviews. (Jess jokes early in the play that she’s unlikely to ever be “de-wobblied.”)Jess has a thriving practice, and her routine is facilitated by state-provided home health aides who help her dress and eat; the government also provides a car that allows her to avoid public transportation and enjoy life without being shut up at home.So it’s a shock when Jess gets a visit from an ill-informed government assessor, Yvonne (Goldy Notay), and finds that the level of assistance she has taken for granted from childhood is now at risk. “Never get angry,” says the kindly Polish aide Nadia (Wanda Opalinska), but circumstances are pushing Jess toward the brink.She is demoted to a lower level of care, and as her car is taken away and a first appeal to reverse that decision is turned down, her hard-won composure starts to crack. This woman used to dispensing balm to others could also use shoring up. And Jess is cross with herself for being too candid with the assessor. Sometimes, she muses, honesty doesn’t pay.The prospects are scarcely less rosy for Jess’s feisty, wheelchair-using friend Poppy (a spirited Francesca Mills), a weed-smoking 21-year-old with an active sex life who isn’t thrilled about having to go to bed at 9 p.m. because of cuts to nighttime care services. “I just want to get on with life,” says Poppy, who must rely on friends to dress her in a diaper that she now needs to make it through the night. The play’s director, Ian Rickson, brings his characteristic compassion to a deeply intimate scene in which Poppy is put to bed.Bryan Dick in “All of Us.”Helen MurrayIt’s against these gathering hardships that Jess finds an unexpected soul mate in one of her patients, Aidan (Bryan Dick), a heavy drinker who arrives for his initial sessions in a wary, snarky mood. As a writer, Martinez charts with ease the changing dynamic of their relationship, which goes from professional in the first act to personal in the second: Cocky, defensive Aidan softens in the presence of Jess, who expresses toward Aidan a kindness you feel he’s rarely known.It might seem a contrivance too far when Aidan is revealed to be the son of the Conservative minister responsible for the disability services cuts from which Jess and Poppy are reeling. But that coincidence allows a play rooted in individual circumstances to broaden into a politically charged cry for help.The start of the second act finds the houselights up for a voices-raised town meeting in which the cast members spread themselves around the auditorium to argue their case and hold the minister to account. He replies that the pandemic has put serious pressure on the public purse, and that the cutbacks are meant to encourage independence. It’s left to the live-wire Poppy to make the point that intentions are irrelevant. The reality, she says, is “that Jess used to work and now she can’t.” Without a car to get her to her consultation room, Jess doesn’t have a job.What she does now have is a serious romantic prospect in Aidan, who seeks out Jess no longer as a therapist but as a friend — and more. “Can you undo my buttons?” she asks him in a moment that stills the heart.Aidan certainly finds a flowery rhetoric you wouldn’t expect from the prickly figure we’ve met earlier. (Dick, the actor, navigates the shift in tone beautifully.) “My love for you fills the skies and drowns the moon,” he says in an expansive outburst to Jess that put me in mind of Shakespeare, in whose plays guarded characters often drop their defenses to make room for love. That, in fact, is the situation for Beatrice and Benedick in “Much Ado About Nothing.”From left, Wendy Kweh, Katherine Parkinson and Ioanna Kimbook in “Much Ado About Nothing,” directed by Simon Godwin.Manuel HarlanLong described as a prototype for the rom-com, Shakespeare’s infinitely spry 1599 comedy can also show us a thing or two about pain. At its center are the emotionally cautious Beatrice (Katherine Parkinson, in her Shakespeare debut) and her cousin, Hero (Ioanna Kimbook), who is wrongly accused of adultery on her wedding day.The genius of the play lies in Shakespeare’s ability to balance the mournful undercurrents with the giddiness of Beatrice’s eventual romantic surrender to Benedick (John Heffernan), a soldier she regards warily at first.Simon Godwin’s production relocates the action to the Italian Riviera in the 1930s, which allows for an onstage band to ramp up the party mood as well as some audience-pleasing comic business involving a gelato trolley and a wayward hammock.But its core remains the slow-aborning affection between Beatrice and Benedick, whose shared gifts for wordplay mark them out as the wittiest and liveliest people in the room. And when the mood darkens late on, the once-frolicsome Benedick makes an eloquent bid to Beatrice. “Serve God, love me, and mend,” he implores her, a declaration that itself is deeply touching. Life can deliver blows of varying kinds, but in both these shows, love thankfully remains an option.All of Us. Directed by Ian Rickson. National Theater, through Sept. 24.Much Ado About Nothing. Directed by Simon Godwin. National Theater, through Sept. 10. More