Theatre review: Love's Labour's Lost(Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

It's great to see Jade Williams back at the Globe, even if it is indoors in the Swanamaker so there's no groundlings for her to vomit on. She and Dharmesh Patel pair up to play Rosaline and Berowne, the proto-Beatrice and Benedick who appear as one of the central three romantic couples in Love's Labour's Lost. That's right, three; Nick Bagnall's production, although not, to my knowledge, touring, has the kind of cast-size you'd expect of a "tiny" touring production, with eight actors covering all the roles. A cerain amount of editing is needed to make that work, and in this case Longueville and Maria have been edited right out of the play altogether. What's left is the story of the King of Navarre (Paul Stocker,) who talks his friends Berowne and Dumaine (Tom Kanji) into joining him in a puritanically strict three-year course of study that includes swearing off the company of women.

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.