Theatre review: Richard III (Shakespeare's Globe)

I'm starting 2024's summer Globe season with the venue's now-traditional, annual raging controversy: For a change this involves protests about the casting not being inclusive enough, rather than the usual protests about it being too inclusive. Artistic Director Michelle Terry's contract requires her to take a role in at least one show per season, and this year that was the title role in Richard III, a role written as disabled, traditionally played by able-bodied actors (often as grotesques) and in recent years reclaimed as a plum role for actors with disabilities. It's a tricky one, and with many disabled actors speaking out against Terry you've got to take that into consideration, but at the same time it seems like making an example of an easy target, and someone who's spent years putting disabled actors, among other minority groups, into other iconic roles that aren't explicitly written for them.

Theatre review: The Solid Life of Sugar Water

Jack Thorne wrote The Solid Life of Sugar Water for Graeae, the company giving opportunities to D/deaf and disabled artists, and has stipulated that this should be respected in any revivals - the character of Alice is explicitly stated to be Deaf, and is required to be played by an actor with a hearing impairment, like Katie Erich in the Orange Tree's production. It's not specified what disability her husband Phil has, if any at all, but Adam Fenton has Tourette's. I'm not sure if the production integrating creative captioning to make it as inclusive for the audience as it is for the company is also a contractual requirement for staging it, but both productions I've seen have done so. So it's a play that foregrounds inclusivity, but the truth is it uses this as something of a red herring: Alice's deafness is occasionally referenced to dramatic effect, but the central tragedy the couple face is a - hopefully rare - potentially universal one.

Stage-to-screen review: Oliver Twist

The National Theatre's NTatHome platform won't be troubling Netflix in terms of volume of content any time soon, but its library has grown significantly since it launched a couple of years ago. As well as the NT's own archive and the productions screened to cinemas with NTLive, it also makes sense as a longer-term home for filmed performances that were screened online during lockdown by a variety of UK theatres, on a variety of platforms. So one such show is Leeds Playhouse's 2020 adaptation of probably the best-known full-length novel by Charles Dickens (Chickens to his friends,) Oliver Twist. Intended to tour, which obviously in 2020 wasn't going to happen, Amy Leach's production was instead made available to stream, in a filmed version that occasionally uses subtitles to supplement the access features that are incorporated into the staging itself.