Theatre review: As You Like It (Open Air Theatre)

Second time lucky at the Open Air Theatre's As You Like It - if you thought London hadn't had a drop of rain for weeks you weren't in NW1 last Friday, when it came down so heavily the performance was abandoned before it could even start. Although this afternoon's grey clouds never resolved themselves into another downpour the fates still seemed against me seeing this production: At least two audience members fainted 20 minutes in, leading to a pause in the performance, and the least said about the pigeon that tried to land on my head in the second act the better. But Max Webster's production made it to the end, and the multiple marriages at the end of one of the more music-heavy Shakespeare plays, made even more so here with some original compositions by Charlie Fink.

Theatre review: The Winter's Tale (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

The Swanamaker's first all-Shakespeare season opened, very successfully, with two of his least-performed plays, but its second half brings two late plays that are much more popular - if not always with me. The regularity with which The Winter's Tale is revived is something I find a bit baffling, but every so often a production comes along to justify its popularity and, except for an overly hefty running time, Michael Longhurst's definitely fits into that category. John Light is Leontes, the king of Sicilia who's been best friends with his Bohemian counterpart Polixenes (Simon Armstrong) since childhood; until for no reason at all, he becomes convinced his wife Hermione (Rachael Stirling) is cheating on him with Polixenes, and tries to have both killed. He doesn't come back to his senses until it's too late, and has seemingly lost all his family. But his baby daughter has in fact survived and 16 years later Perdita (Tia Bannon) has the chance to make things right between the royal houses with her romance with Polixenes' son Florizel (Steffan Donnelly.)

Theatre review: Pericles (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

From no Shakespeare at all in its first two winter seasons, Dominic Dromgoole's swansong at the Globe is an all-Shakespeare season in the Swanamaker. I hope this doesn't become the norm, as I liked having the indoor playhouse as a place to showcase other Jacobean playwrights and works that don't often see the light of day. Of course, even a Shakespeare play can be pretty obscure, and as the theme of the season is to play four of the late romances in rep, two of the quartet are rarities. The reason we seldom see the first is that, apart from the entirely lost plays, Pericles is the one of which the least has survived. The version we have is reconstructed from a a dodgy quarto of fragmented scenes, some attributed to Shakespeare, some to George Wilkins. So it's episodic, inconsistent and full of bizarre tangents and plot contrivances. But Dromgoole opts to view the problems as strengths, playing it as a kind of silly alternative to the Odyssey.