Friday, December 5

Tag: Hilda Cronje

The Winter’s Tale – Royal Shakespeare Company
London

The Winter’s Tale – Royal Shakespeare Company

Yes yes yes yes yes yes! This is the type of production that makes you doubt the play has ever been better performed in the 400 years since it was written. A text often relegated to reluctant decennial repetition by repertory Shakespeare theatres, this “problem play”—only partially redeemed and abashedly esteemed for its “strong female characters”—is here staged so boldly that it not only asks but demands audiences to answer: what actually is so problematic about female strength? Why are men made so uncomfortable by powerful women? And what on earth are women supposed to do with that dangerous discomfort? Directed by Yaël Farber and dripping with the seductive intrepidity that coats her directorial tongue, this production is unmissable and unmistakable. It is contemporary not in the sen...
Meek – Dazed New World Festival
REVIEWS

Meek – Dazed New World Festival

“I’m just a woman who works in a factory, I don’t want any of this!”. These are the words of the heroine of this play, Irene, (played by Maria McColgan) and seemed to me to sum up what the play was all about. A part-time songwriter who is unwittingly drawn into a confrontation with the regime running the country when a love song she has written and performed takes social media by storm (somewhat of an obsession of the character) but is misinterpreted by the country’s religious leaders as a blasphemous attack on their devout beliefs, resulting in Irene being thrown into a prison cell, where the vast majority of the action takes place. Set sometime in the not too distant future in a country not too far from our own, the play centres around the conversations between Irene and her long-time...