Shakespeare

You may need to do a spot of homework before attending Tilly No-Body at the Arcola. Acted and written by Bella Merlin, the play examines the sufferings and blunders of Tilly Newes, an actress born in 1886, who married the experimental German dramatist Frank Wedekind. At first sight the show looks like a lesson for newcomers but the content is bound to confuse anyone who lacks a working knowledge of German theatre in the early 20th century. The ideal viewer is a literary expert familiar with the whole of Wedekind’s dramatic output. Numerous lines from his plays are quoted, not always with intelligible citations. ‘Women are natural actors’, runs a typical aphorism, and ‘no woman can keep a man happy by behaving sincerely.

Hamnet is an imagined account of William Shakespeare’s marriage to Agnes (Anne) Hathaway, their unspeakable grief at the death of their son (the titular Hamnet) and how this may have inspired Shakespeare to write Hamlet. It stars Paul Mescal and an extraordinary Jessie Buckley, who will likely win every award going, yet be warned: it does do everything it can to make you cry. You can hold out and hold out and refuse to be emotionally manipulated, as you’re better than that, but when Max Richter’s ‘On The Nature of Daylight’ kicks in at the end you will give up the fight. Take a hanky if you do not wish to deploy your sleeve.

Othello directed by Tom Morris opens with a stately display of scarlet costumes and gilded doorways arranged against a backdrop of black nothingness. This is Venice at night with no hint of sea or sunshine. Crimson-robed senators gather to discuss Othello’s alleged abduction of Brabantio’s daughter. And here he comes, David Harewood as the Moor, wearing a gauche two-tone suit like a tasteless guest at a wedding. The scene is stiff, arid and over-ornate but the show opens up when the location shifts to Cyprus. Warmth and light fill the stage and the costumes improve. Othello and his men wear creamy white battle fatigues that look stylishly and subtly masculine.

Born With Teeth is a camp two-hander starring a pair of TV luminaries, Ncuti Gatwa and Edward Bluemel, as Marlowe and Shakespeare. The year is 1591 and the great dramatists are holed up in a tavern working on an early draft of Henry VI (Part 3). Not much writing gets done. It’s all rhetoric and bombast. Marlowe is a bullying egomaniac who boasts of his ‘throbbing quill’ and parades a peacock’s feather which he strokes lasciviously. Both playwrights are gay, of course, and they live in a world that views heterosexual couplings as a mystifying aberration. Marlowe prances about on the table and re-enacts his conquests of grateful gay aristocrats. He peels off his undershirt and flings himself at Shakespeare who responds with fake reluctance.

‘There is good music, bad music, and music by Ambroise Thomas,’ said Emmanuel Chabrier, but then, Chabrier said a lot of things. I adore Chabrier – who couldn’t love the man who wrote España and turned Tristan und Isolde into a jaunty quadrille? – but it doesn’t do to take him too literally. Thomas ended his career as a notoriously crusty director of the Paris Conservatoire, and when the French musical establishment puts you on a pedestal younger composers invariably start hurling the merde. Scraps of Thomas’s music survive in all sorts of odd corners (a snippet from his opera Mignon crops up in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp). I’ve always found it rather appealing.

Cul-de-Sac feels like an ersatz sitcom of a kind that’s increasingly common on the fringe. Audiences are eager to see an unpretentious domestic comedy set in a kitchen or a sitting-room where the characters gossip, argue, fall in love, break up and so on. TV broadcasters can’t produce this sort of vernacular entertainment and they treat audiences as atomised members of racial ghettos or social tribes. And they assume that every viewer is an irascible brat who can’t bear to hear uncensored language without having a tantrum. The result is that TV comedy often feels like appeasement rather than entertainment. Theatre producers are keen to fill the gap, and the latest effort by writer-director David Shopland declares its ambitions in its title.

Poor John Dennis. In 1709, the playwright devised a novel technology to simulate thunder to accompany his drama Appius and Virginia. The play flopped and was promptly booted out of the theatre. To add salt to the wound, Dennis’s thunder-generating technique was stolen and inserted into a staging of Macbeth. He accused the producers of ‘stealing his thunder’, birthing the phrase that has long outlived his work. Stage technology has come a long way since. Directors have a toy box of high-tech smoke and mirrors at their disposal. Perhaps it’s more of a Pandora’s box. Live on-stage cameras are particularly in vogue. Watch them crawling all over Jamie Lloyd’s monotone Romeo and Juliet and Ivo van Hove’s ill-fated Opening Night. They’re even parodied in Inside No.

Britten’s Peter Grimes turns 80 this June, and it’s still hard to credit it. The whole phenomenon, that is – the sudden emergence of the brilliant, all-too-facile 31-year-old Britten as a fully formed musical dramatist of unignorable force. W.H. Auden had urged him to risk everything – to step outside his admirers’ ‘warm nest of love’ – and in the first moments of Peter Grimes, Britten does precisely that. The folk-opera bustle of the opening tribunal scene dissolves into the desolate bird cry of the first Sea Interlude and straight away, you’re in the presence of something unimaginably vaster and more true. It pins you to your seat. That was certainly the impression I had from Tomas Hanus, conducting the orchestra and chorus of Welsh National Opera.