Theatre review: Love's Labour's Lost(Shakespeare's Globe)

I've got a couple of shows planned for later this week notorious for their nudity, and it feels like the theme has started early with Love's Labour's Lost: While everyone more or less keeps their kit on at the Globe, Ned Costello spends much of it in matador pants so tight he might as well be naked. It's all done for highly plot-significant reasons, honest, because Indiana Lown-Collins' production turns the delegation of noble ladies from France into one from Spain, and makes flamenco the show's visual and musical language. The King of Navarre (Costello) has vowed to spend three years in study, his many ascetic rules including no contact with women, and roped his best friends Berowne (Transphobia Ltd Employee Philip Arditti,) Dumaine (Jax Guerrero) and Longaville (Philip Labey) into the agreement.

Theatre review: A Fight Against...(Una Lucha Contra...)

Chilean playwright Pablo Manzi's A Fight Against... (Una Lucha Contra...) was developed at the Royal Court at a time when his country was experiencing a lot of violent unrest against the state and inequality, culminating in recent elections that saw voters lean much more to the Left than had been expected. Some of the play's scenes inevitably reflect this energy, but as the ellipsis in the title suggests, not all of the characters know - or necessarily care - who or what they're fighting. In five separate, but possibly connected scenes spanning the last 140 years, we see characters trying to make sense of their own, or other people's anger: Beginning with Chilean university professor Carla (Jimena Larraguivel,) who returns from a day's teaching to announce that one of her students attacked and threatened to kill her. Her husband (Joseph Balderrama) understandably wants to know more, but something her student said might have alarmed Carla even more than the violence, and she's reluctant to say much.