Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

 A warm and dry evening lends itself perfectly to an evening at the Globe and this one didn’t disappoint.  This is a traditional version of the play that surely would have satisfied the purists but without being stuffy at all.  For the first half, the theatre was full of the lovely lightness and comedy of this classic enemies to lovers romcom.   Ekow Quartey was an engaging and sweet Benedict and Amanda Vitalie turned in a great comic performance as a fiery fury of a Beatrice.  The two secondary lovers were fairly insipid but that’s no fault of the actors;  I’ve rarely seen performances that manage to lift those characters into something more interesting.   The second half  has a fairly clunky change of pace and tone, and always feels like a screeching handbrake turn to near tragedy but, in an echo of Romeo and Juliet, the priest’s suggestion to play dead works out this time and so we get our happy ending. The bit that really grates thou...

 I haven’t had as much fun dancing and singing along to a play for ages.  This was a spur of the moment booking when I had a spare evening so I grabbed a groundling ticket at the Globe to see As You Like It. I hadn’t seen a single review so had no idea what I would be walking into but this romcom of a play is almost always fun anyway so I kept my fingers crossed.  As You Like it takes place in the Forest of Arden where the strict rules of the city no longer apply and where the characters can become different versions of themselves to find their own freedoms.  This production ditched chunks of the language (‘shall we just go to the next scene?’) and all of the songs, replacing them with catchy danceable pop numbers instead, with a definite eye on the audience having fun.  Whilst Shakespeare purists and gender critical types might be a bit grumpy, the only bit from the traditional version I actually missed was Rosalind's closing speech.  But, that's a small g...