Theatre review: The Tempest(Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

Shakespeare's Globe's winter season is one they can't really make a profit out of due to the Swanamaker's size, so traditionally it's been the one where less obviously commercial choices are made. In the past this has tended to mean expanding the repertoire to less famous Jacobean playwrights and beyond, but for the 2025/26 season it involves two of the more popular Shakespeare plays getting eccentric reinventions. And unlike Holly Race Roughan's Midsummer Night's Dream, which simply took the common trope of finding the play's dark side to its natural extreme, Tim Crouch's look at The Tempest is grounded in ideas I've seen applied to the play a lot less frequently. It is very recognisably Crouch's work, even without the fact that he also appears in it, because in a theme that runs through a number of his plays it takes place in a theatre - specifically this one.

Theatre review: Henry V (Headlong)

This year's second London Henry V is a radically different beast than the Donmar's bombastic war epic, and different in fact from any I've seen before in 30 or so years of Shakespeare productions. The clichéd view of the play is of a jingoistic celebration of Englishness, but in the last two decades it's been rare to see it through anything other than a cynical eye as a story of British imperialism, and increasingly through the prism of an arrogant attitude towards Europe. Holly Race Roughan's production for Headlong, which opens at the Swanamaker before transferring to Leeds and Northampton next year, takes it right out of the canon of Shakespeare's Histories, reimagining it entirely as a brooding and claustrophobic Tragedy. And if I was less excited than some about Kit "Christopher" Harington's casting earlier this year, Big Favourite Round These Parts Oliver Johnstone getting his chance at one of the big Shakespearean leads is more the kind of thing to grab my attention.