Theatre review: Romeo & Juliet(Empire Street Productions / Harold Pinter Theatre)

What if, instead of giving a written instruction to a servant who can't read, you gave it to one who can? If Capulet (Clark Gregg) had handed the invitations to his ball to the Nurse (Clare Perkins,) she could have found the guests herself. Instead the illiterate Peter (Jamie Ankrah) needs help from a stranger in the street, who invites himself along to the party to stalk a girl he fancies. Once there Romeo (Noah Jupe) falls for Capulet's daughter Juliet (Sadie Sink,) who enthusiastically returns his interest. This teenage infatuation is given an entirely unnecessary sense of peril and urgency by the fact that the pair's families have an unexplained, deadly rivalry, leading them into an elopement within hours of their first meeting. A number of other avoidable accidents and violent acts interfere over the next couple of days, and trying to navigate them while keeping their big secret sees the affair end in tragedy.

Stage-to-screen review: Good Night, and Good Luck

Former Golden Girls guest star George Clooney made his Broadway debut last year in Good Night, and Good Luck, an adaptation of one of his own films from twenty years earlier. One performance was broadcast live on CNN of all places, and that recording has now been added with very little fanfare to Netflix in the UK - possibly to make sure everyone forgets about Jay Kelly a little bit quicker. For David Cromer's production Clooney and Grant Heslov adapt their own script, with Clooney moving up to the lead role of Edward R. Murrow, the 1950s CBS news reporter whose team took on the, at the time seemingly all-powerful, Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy's HUAC witchhunts, most famous on stage as the inspiration for The Crucible, used a panic they themselves had largely created about Communist spies hiding in America, to build a culture of fear where McCarthy was the ultimate arbiter of what was true and who was loyal.

Stage-to-screen review: Much Ado About Nothing (Bellwether Pictures)

I rarely venture away from live performance in my reviews on this blog, but if the worlds of Shakespeare and Buffy the Vampire Slayer collide you know I'm going to be interested¹. Since Joss Whedon started running TV shows in 1996 he's been fond of using certain actors again and again across Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse and Dr Horrible, while constantly adding new faces to the ensemble. It's also been common knowledge that his casts would spend their days off at Whedon's home where he'd direct them in Shakespeare readings. So when a black and white film version of Much Ado About Nothing suddenly materialised, filmed secretly at Whedon's Hollywood mansion in the break between shooting and post-production of Avengers Assemble, it was both a surprise and somehow completely inevitable. In retrospect, all these years he's been building a repertory company, but for TV and film rather than theatre.