Limping in at the tail end of the World Shakespeare Festival is a contribution from Catalan director Calixto Bieito, spending a few days at the Barbican Theatre, and aiming to bring together the worlds and moods of the various
Forests from Shakespeare's plays. Starting in the Forest of Arden and indeed spending most of its first half in the world of
As You Like It, the performance takes a darker turn in the second half with soul-searching or violent moments from the likes of
Macbeth,
King Lear,
Timon of Athens,
Hamlet,
Troilus and Cressida and several other plays plus a few sonnets. There's a few brooks and blasted heaths here too in among the actual forests - I got the impression that as long as a scene could conceivably happen within ten miles of a tree, it was fair game. In theory I suppose this is meant to be somewhere along the lines of
A Tender Thing, reappropriating Shakespeare's lines to give them new meaning, but in practice meaning is rather short on the ground.
