Monday, March 9

Tag: Patsy Ferran

Dead Poets Live: Emily Dickinson – Coronet Theatre
London

Dead Poets Live: Emily Dickinson – Coronet Theatre

Dead Poets Live aims to bring poetry to the stage, “creating theatre out of poems and poets”. Over the last ten years, poets from the past from Yeats and Byron to Robert Frost and Stevie Smith have been resurrected in the person of actors such as Rupert Everett, Glenda Jackson, Denise Gough and Monica Dolan. Patsy Ferran is centre stage tonight as one of America’s greatest poets, Emily Dickinson, a 19th century writer who flirted with modernism before it had a name and engaged fully with the world while remaining reclusive and withdrawn physically from it. Her poems are noted for their odd metre and punctuation – chiefly dashes – while offering playful and perceptive views of melancholia, religion and nature. Although other stagings of Dead Poets Live have been presented in full ...
The Merchant of Venice – Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
West Midlands

The Merchant of Venice – Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

It is not often recognised that this is one of Shakespeare’s comedies and watching this RSC production from 2015 under the direction of Polly Findlay as part of the BBC Culture in Quarantine programme, one would be tempted to say it was a tragedy. I often say that less is more but Johannes Schütz’s set design is so bare that even with its pendulum constantly swinging, it is impossible to decipher a proper sense of time or place which is at the heart of this play about money and how it affects all involved. We begin with Antonio (Jamie Ballard), a prince among Venetian merchants who is unaccountably depressed despite his obvious success as a dealer in luxury goods. His friend Bassanio (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) in contrast is broke but remains reasonably cheerful as he has a plan to marry Por...