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.

Women Beware Women, National Theatre, 17th May

At the centre of Gary Taylor's lecture on this play, previously reviewed here, was the hope that Middleton's work was finally getting the recognition it deserves. Certainly, on the great stage of the National's Olivier theatre, under a glittering chandelier, it looks like a hope that it justified. The best thing about the National is the pool of talent that it can draw on, and the cast for Women Beware Women is as sumptuous as the set.
Harriet Walter as Livia is marvellous - stylish, scheming, and relentlessly practical about the ways women can wield power. She is very funny when yearning for her young lover (a rather tentative performance from Samuel Barnett), and charmingly cynical in the chess scene that T.S. Eliot was such a fan of. Raymond Coulthard, as Hippolito, is a surprise - I'd only encountered him previously in the execrable Hotel Babylon, and he turns in a strong, sympathetic performance in which his love for niece Isabella is very believable. Vanessa Kirby (said niece) will need more experience before she can truly shine; she struggles to project to the vast space, and her voice often sounds strangled.
The design is a little tired - more Fellini - but during the murderous final masque hints of Early Modern style manifest in masks and some smartly tailored jackets, which is a nice touch to a scene that makes brilliant use of the Olivier's revolve. The montage effect is filmic and very slick, a nice handling of a scene that racks up corpses fast enough to be funny if done wrong. Where this performance really wins is in walking an impeccable line through Middleton's extremes - the tragedy is at times painful to watch, but the (often filthy) one-liners get more laughs than I've heard Shakespeare's comedies get at the National. At times it's a little stylised, where plainness would suit best, but there's really barely a foot put wrong.
As the man says, it's 'as if the plague of sin had been agreed to meet here together'. Sin looks pretty sexy from where I'm sitting.

The Duchess of Padua, Pentameters Theatre, 12th May

Oscar Wilde and revenge tragedy. Well, I could hardly turn it down.
Pentameters is a small studio theatre over the Horseshoe pub in leafy Hampstead - I'm fond of these arrangements, because pub theatres usually more than repay the effort of getting out of the West End (I'm looking at you, Rosemary Branch), but I arrived with a certain amount of trepidation, and a nervous respect for any company prepared to attempt this play, which seems to have made a positive effort to kill off its casts in the past.
The Duchess of Padua was written by Wilde in 1883, and has never been performed in England. Wilde imagined a lush set for his Renaissance stylings (he seems very keen on huge marble columns - make of that what you will), but things are rather more austere here, with the music providing what the set can't. There's not much to be done about the script, though. He gave it his all, I'm sure, but it is at best a pastiche. Aiming at the Italianate tragedies of Webster and Middleton, the lines lack the power of the first and the punch of the latter, and the most memorable lines are only so for their mawkishness. I could list them, but I don't want to.
The actors do a very fair job, however. Victoria Porter's Duchess has a tightly-wound desperation about her, and her Duke is marvellously nasty (however stuffed his mouth is with Oscar's pretty paradoxes). There are shades of Browning's My Last Duchess here - she is by no means his first wife, and he plays the unpleasant insinuations about what may have become of the previous with a marvellously light touch. Rupert Savage, as leading man Guido, though, is so extraordinarily wooden that I very much doubt he will ever be a real boy.
I don't believe that this play will ever be more than a Wildean curiosity. It's a failure as a revenge tragedy, occasionally and awkwardly farcical, its denouement is founded on faulty premises (having a ruler in the Borgia mould up in court facing a death sentence just seems silly) and it lacks a much needed epilogue to round it off. Overall, nice try, shame about the play.

The Tudor Tarantino, BBC iPlayer

Dominic Awkwright charts the rise and fall of Thomas Middleton, with help from Gary Taylor and opinions from Professor Jonathan Bate, Professor Sir Brian Vickers, and actress Harriet Walter. Available here on BBC iPlayer until 12.02 pm on Tuesday the 18th of May. Well worth a listen.

Middleton: Renaissance Man, Gary Taylor, National Theatre, Monday 10th May

Gary Taylor is a bit of a rock star to me. He's largely responsible for the revival of Middleton's reputation, and shared responsibility with John Lavagnino for producing The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, as fine a piece of scholarship as you are ever likely to stub your toe on. But, see, Middleton's cool. He's the Rolling Stones to Shakespeare's Beatles. So when Gary Taylor rocks up on stage, with his long hair and his black painted fingernails (on later inspection, actually a rather fetching metallic blue), it's looking like a good evening to me. Under the glittering chandeliers of the Felliniesque set for Women Beware Women, his lecture-lite (geared towards the London theatre crowd, and pretty accessible) concentrated on how Middleton writes women. Taylor points out that while some of Middleton's work is undoubtedly misogynist, in Women Beware Women the ladies always have more lines than their lovers, something otherwise unknown in Early Modern drama. They're not always nice to other women. They can like sex with men a lot or reject it utterly, buy sex for money or refuse to sell it. They're rarely idealised - I'm not sure Middleton ever idealised a single character. What's interesting is that the first revival of Women Beware Women was at the Arts Theatre, a private members club that could get round the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain's office. Thirty-nine year old widows who enjoy themselves with younger men of relatively lowly status apparently used to need a lot of censoring. Taylor is, as one would expect, a practiced and compelling speaker, particularly when in defence of Middleton's talents. And he's right. Middleton excelled in as many forms as Shakespeare - comedy and tragedy alike. The most popular play that ever played at what is now called 'Shakespeare's Globe' was actually one of Middleton's. I think they should rename it, personally...

The Duchess of Malfi, New Players Theatre, Tuesday 4th May

The Duchess of Malfi's getting a good airing at the moment, in Greenwich, here under the arches of Charing Cross, and later in the year with a collaborative operatic treatment from English National Opera and scary interactive theatrical groundbreakers Punchdrunk. Greenwich stuck to a predictable, if effective, fascist-lite setting, and I have absolutely no idea what dark madness to expect from Punchdrunk. Vaulting Ambition, at the New Players, went with...the circus. It could have worked - perhaps some kind of totalitarian ringmaster regime? But it doesn't stick, and a Cardinal is still a Cardinal, even if he's Cardinaling in spangly pants. Only a few of the performers are circus trained; they are mesmerising enough to completely detract at times from the action of the play, and talented enough to make the main actors' attempts at circus stylings seem woefully inadequate. The only real gift of the design is to James Sobol Kelly as Bosola, whose pancake make-up creeps across his face, becoming more and more skull-like as he piles up the body-count. He's a grisly Buster Keaton, a haunted outsider in this production, and it's a testament to the greatness of the writing that this interpretation works as well as any of the other, more macho portrayals I've seen. Just when I thought I couldn't find clowns any more frightening...
The design's a pity - there are some excellent performances, and the production could have stood up perfectly well without the big-top malarkey. The whole Malfi family seem creepily intimate, making Ferdinand's advances to the Duchess easier to reconcile, and our Cardinal, Andrew Piper is quite clearly after Alan Rickman's job. Alinka Wright's a very foxy Julia, who provides an excellent counterpoint to Tilly Middleton's Duchess, whose wooing of Antonio is charmingly tentative, for all her insistence. There are some nice touches in terms of costume design - Alex Humes' werewolf turn is greatly helped by leather and fur, and the lighting is innovative.
With circus arts enjoying a renaissance of their own at the moment, it does them a disservice to crowbar them into renaissance drama. If you want circus, get yourself over to the Roundhouse. Better yet, get thyself to Circus Space and learn how to do it yourself.