Theatre review: Henry VIII (Shakespeare's Globe)

Despite being named after a monarch more famous than any of Shakespeare's other History Plays, Henry VIII has always languished in obscurity - this is only the second time I've seen the play, and I've yet to see any evidence that it deserves better. It's one of the late collaborations with John Fletcher, with all the unevenness that implies, but it's also a play that reflects the way Shakespeare's work tended to bow to the trends of its time, in this case the popularity of big spectacle and pageantry (so much so that it's best known for including the special effect that burned down the original Globe.) It also came a decade after the death of the last Tudor monarch, meaning it was now safe to portray that particular dynasty on stage, while also tapping into nostalgia for Elizabeth I's reign. All solid commercial reasons for creating a show, and the latter element feels topical, seeing it on the Jubilee weekend, but they don't suggest a great play for the ages.

Radio review: The Two Noble Kinsmen

Even speaking optimistically it'll be a while before any live Shakespeare productions come along in 2021 (although multiple competing Romeo and Juliets are on their way digitally,) but in the meantime the BBC Sounds app offers an alternative: The Shakespeare Sessions podcast features, alongside various Bard-related documentaries and interviews, some of the Radio 3 adaptations from recent years. So with me not fancying another lockdown night in front of Netflix, one of the most obscure plays in the canon and the last one I ticked off my "seen onstage" list, but one which I've become more familiar with in the last few years, was an option. A candidate for the title of his final (collaborative) work, Shakespeare and Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen is an eccentric, tragicomic adaptation of Chaucer's The Knight's Tale.

Theatre review: The Two Noble Kinsmen (Shakespeare's Globe)

A minor way in which Michelle Terry has already differed from her predecessors at the Globe is that this is the first summer season at the venue not to have an official overall theme - just how well past seasons ever really tied in to those themes is a different story. It's been no secret though that there's a very low-key connection between four of this year's shows, and that's "Emilia," a name that crops up in a number of Shakespeare's plays. The theme will culminate in a new play about the woman they may or may not have all been named after, but the first Emilia on stage this summer is the one who inadvertently puts a rift between The Two Noble Kinsmen. Fletcher and Shakespeare's last play together tells a story taken from Chaucer's Knight's Tale, a pretty thin story that's padded out in a way that leaves us with a messy, but in the right hands entertaining, few hours.

Theatre review: The Two Noble Kinsmen (RSC / Swan)

I saw my first Shakespeare production aged 15, an RSC production of Macbeth which, like the company's entire ensemble seasons in those days, came to the Barbican. The Macbeths I've seen since must go into double figures but not every play is as frequently revived, and thanks to my largely eschewing theatre in the late nineties and early noughties, completing the set ended up taking 27 years but I've finally seen every canonical Shakespeare play^ on stage. Nowadays you have to go to Stratford-upon-Avon to catch the less popular titles but it's good that I was back at the RSC to tick off the last show on the list, and also appropriate that it should be what's generally accepted to be Shakespeare's final extant play, and to this day the most obscure, the Fletcher collaboration The Two Noble Kinsmen. Set in the same time and place as A Midsummer Night's Dream, it seems Shakespeare thought all Theseus (Gyuri Sarossy) and Hippolyta (Allison McKenzie) ever did was fight wars and watch shows, because once again they spend the start of the show doing the former, and the rest of it doing the latter.