Arden of Faversham, Rose Theatre, Thursday 1st July

Tucked away behind the great Globe, down a gloomy street, past the deliciously titled Bear Gardens, under a shiny blue plaque, is the Rose Theatre. It is a profoundly depressing sight. The paint is peeling, the box office is a shack, and the lady selling coffee from behind a wonky trestle table looks kind of grumpy. It is, as the nice young man kindly explains before we're allowed to take our seats, an archaeological site, although at the moment further excavation looks hugely unlikely. We get a quick explanation of the (only partially successful) campaign in 1989 to save the site, and are ushered in. Rope lights show the outer and inner walls of the original building, and the placement of the stage, all under a protective layer of sand, concrete and water, and it's a little bit magical to watch your reflection washing over the floor of the theatre.
The Rose has a reputation for putting on plays that are not performed often - staples of the Bankside theatre that might have packed them in in 1589, but just aren't doing it any more. In the past, I've missed Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday and Kyd's Soliman and Perseda here, so I was glad to make it to Arden of Faversham, as it's unlikely I'll see another performance for years, if at all. It's an anonymous play, but suggestions for authorship have been made in favour of Marlowe (there's the geography), Shakespeare (there's the Arden connection) and Kyd (there's a bloody massacre in it). I'm not really swayed by any of the arguments, but I don't think it matters, because as it turns out, it's a bloody good play.
The tiny stage, in the gallery overlooking the excavations, with a full house of cramped audience huddled around it, does not seem immediately promising. However, Peter Darney, directing, has not for one moment allowed his actors to be limited by the space. There are punch-ups, sword fights and a goodly amount of (graphically) physical comedy. Rachel Dale, as the conniving wife of the unfortunate Mr Arden of Faversham, 'ungentle Alice', is marvellous - seductive, cunning and charming by turns, as untrusting as she is untrustworthy, a good match for Jonathan Woolf's edgy Mosby, clearly out for anything and everything he can get. Mark Carlisle is a very sympathetic Arden, and Francis Adams does solid work as his rather less credulous friend. The cast as a whole do a good job of evoking the freedom of the city as compared to the closeness of the country (and its gossiping), and the London we see briefly is one where everyone is anonymous and the usual rules do not apply - a ruffian can have his head broken by a woman without retribution. The play, for all its tragedy, has a thread of rollicking comedy, and it's the dirty jokes that get the biggest laughs. The two star turns, who earn most applause are Kent ruffians Black Will and Shakebag, a marvellous punk pair, who here swagger around, insulting the audience, pilfering from them, hiding amongst them, starting fights, cracking dirty jokes and generally being revolting.
The script has been trimmed lightly, but nothing is wanting, and at an hour and fifty minutes, no interval, it's a neat little piece, quite fast paced and (thanks largely to Will and Shakebag) marvellous good fun. There is a slight problem in that doubling of parts has given rise to an extraordinary number of regional accents - it's not necessary to define characters thus, and left me with the impression that Early Modern Kent was a remarkably cosmopolitan place. But overall, a very fair showing, and a nice little domestic tragedy. Now go and write the Rose a cheque, eh?

Shakespeare: The Man From Stratford, Wilton's Music Hall, Sunday 6th May

Wilton's Music Hall, a short stroll from Tower Hill, is my favourite venue in London. Sadly decaying, it is the last remaining music hall, a miraculous survivor of the Blitz, and a marvellous place to put on a show. I've seen an all male Pirates of Penzance there, and had a goodly drink in the bar. It's got a damp concrete smell of decadence about it, and I love it.
Simon Callow must love it too, otherwise he wouldn't have chosen it to put on a secret preview of his new show Shakespeare: The Man From Stratford. It'll be on tour round the country during the summer, finishing at the Edinburgh Festival, and hopefully finding a London home after that (fingers crossed).
Things were a little bit rough round the edges, as you'd expect - no set, no props, just the disarmingly lovely Callow giving an intimate explanation of what makes Shakespeare so damn good. Jonathan Bate has done good work with the script - Jacques' seven ages of man speech from As You Like It is used as a route through Shakespeare's life, and Callow plays a multitude of characters along the way, slipping gracefully in and out of a handful of the Bard's (and his contemporaries') plays. It's a charming little biography, casual and engaging, and runs the gamut of human emotion in Callow's performances - he's as fine a Juliet as a Launce. There are moments of surprisingly modern relevance, particularly in a momentary delving into Sir Thomas More, which touches on the problems of immigration.
My only problem is that it's such a tease. If you weren't familiar with Shakespeare's biography (what there is of it), or needed to change the mind of someone unconvinced by all the versifying, it'd be a marvellous start. But a few moments of Callow as Lear, or Leontes, or (for a few, fabulous, spine-tingling moments) Faust, just isn't enough for me. More Simon Callow, please. In Faust flavour, if you have him.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Rose, Kingston, Thursday 11th March 2010

Now, Judi Dench is, of course, a National Treasure (TM). The Rose, Kingston (not to be confused with the barely excavated original on Bankside) was always guaranteed selling every seat in the house on this basis alone, but this staging is much more than a mere vehicle for the lady's talents.
First of all, the Rose is a charming venue. A copy of the fourth of London's public theatres, built by Philip Henslowe on Bankside in 1587, its enclosing circular layout lends a certain intimacy to performances, far more appropriate to the works of the Bard than the standoffish proscenium arch theatres of the West End. The Kingston Rose is very bare bones - towering metal girders instead of the Globe's kitschy authentique wood and marble. It's a very workmanlike theatre, and what romance it offers is entirely up to the production.
This one's got it in spades. An opening masque provides a speaking show whereby a court of players are given permission to perform by the ever regal Dench as Elizabeth I, who then translates herself into Titania. This is very much a play about patronage, and what might have seemed a clumsy paralleling of the Queen of England with the Queen of the Fairies is legitimised by the text. Titania is always surrounded by her fairy players, who sing and dance on her command, while Oberon is quite solitary, but for his henchman Puck. Our rude mechanicals too (with their obligatory regional accents - it's Liverpool this time) shine on the night, clinging to the hope of sixpence a day for life from Theseus.
The frantic lovers are all I'd hoped - they were always going to be somewhat overshadowed by the greatness of the leading lady, but there is talent here. Lysander and Demetrius are rather insignificant, comically interchangable, as Helena and Hermia are not, but this is and always has been a play about women's desires. Annabel Scholey does a fine job in the slight role of Hermia, but Rachael Stirling brings real depth to her portrayal of Helena with a husky-voiced desperation that hints at real self-loathing.
But it was always going to be about Dench. And so it is. There's a ripple of indrawn breath when she first appears as Titania, and it's a lot to live up to. But how could she not? This woman *breathes* Shakespeare. She's occasionally been criticised (I name no names) as a haughty sort of performer, and one suspects a hint of self-parody in her first addresses to Oberon, in front of their audience of fairies. She's a commanding presence, but never an overpowering one, and Charles Edwards' Oberon stands up very well to her, bringing a certain petulance to the part. There's something about his Oberon that suggests a boy grown to manhood too fast, not quite in control of his emotions, but very much in love with his queen.
I have not yet read a review of this staging that didn't make mention of Dench's age. I do not know why. As someone rather more down-to-earth than myself pointed out to me, they're not human. They're fairies. And one of Shakespeare's favourite themes is that we're all (whatever age) fools for love.
Titania certainly is. Beautifully, stupidly, madly in love. Dench's performance demonstrates how love transforms us - she blossoms in the company of Bottom and his asses head (which was lovely - whatever charity deals with donkeys should have passed round a hat - they'd have been coining it) and it only makes the tragedy of her love worse. Everyone who's ever watched in dismay as their best friend giggled in infatuation at the dreadful jokes of the latest dreadful lover knows this feeling. And Judi Dench has a lovely giggle. As plot-devices go, 'and then she falls in love with the donkey' is pretty far-fetched, but that giggle clinches it. She's head-over-heels.
The verse speaking from the whole cast is impeccable. Peter Hall has long been noted for his respect for Shakespeare's lines, for leaving them be. There's no running on of lines over the long speeches, and rhymes are allowed the space they deserve. It pays off in that the whole play breathes - it isn't overworked, and there's no hint of actorliness even in the soliloquies. It lends new comedy to Puck (a delightfully clowning, loose-limbed Reece Ritchie), who got laughs for lines I've never heard an audience enjoy so much before.
I've seen A Midsummer Night's Dream more times than any other play. I've seen some absolute shockers, and I've seen some I thought were perfect. This was better. This one proves it. The play really is the thing.

Fanfare please...

Alarums and Excursions is dead chuffed to announce that it has got its sticky fingers on a pair of tickets for (the completely sold out) A Midsummer Night's Dream, at the Rose Theatre, Kingston, starring the inestimable Judi Dench. Much excitement!

Ill met by moonlight...

Welcome to Alarums and Excursions, your guide to all things Renaissance (both fair and foul) in London. I'll be posting as often as I can manage with reviews of everything there is to do around here that comes in Early Modern flavour. Next week I'll be reviewing Phillip Ball (author of The Devil's Doctor) lecturing on Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Science and Magic, hosted by The Last Tuesday Society and planning a trip to the Seven Stars on Chancery Lane, which has been around since 1602. I'm also tempted by Rory Kinnear in Measure for Measure at the Almeida and (if I'm feeling brave) Richard III at the Riverside Studios, where Sadie Frost is tackling my favourite female role in Shakespeare's canon, Lady Anne. It's looking like a promising few months for Renaissance stagings, as Greenwich Theatre makes a return to producing in-house shows with Volpone and The Duchess of Malfi coming up in March. I await reports from my spies south of the river. As for tonight? I have an exposition of sleep come upon me.