Theatre review: The Winter's Tale (RSC/RST)

Having clawed her way off my list of creatives I avoid like the plague with a decent Macbeth and a very good King Lear, Yaël Farber now makes her RSC debut by continuing her successful recent strategy of tackling Shakespeare plays where not having a sense of humour is not really an obstacle. Yes, I know The Winter's Tale is officially classed as a comedy, but you know as well as I do that having one scene where a con-man (Trevor Fox) pickpockets a hot young shepherd (Ryan Duval) doesn't make it a laugh riot, any more than having a scene where a porter does a dozen puns about equivocation doesn't make Macbeth a knockabout farce. The story of two kings who violently turn on members of their own family, Sicilia's Leontes (Transphobia Inc Employee Bertie Carvel) has been best friends with his Bohemian counterpart Polixenes (John Light) since childhood.

Theatre review: King Lear (Almeida)

Given that it doesn't look like Yaël Farber’s going anywhere anytime soon, I feel like Rupert Goold's Almeida has really found the right match for the highly ritualistic South African director, by sticking to those Shakespeare plays where an apparent complete absence of a sense of humour isn't a major obstacle. So after her Macbeth we now get a nearly four-hour long King Lear that despite being a particularly nihilistic take on the play is easily the best work I've ever seen Farber do. Regular readers of this blog may both decide for themselves how much of a compliment that actually is - but I'd say it's also one of the better Lears I've seen in general. We begin at a live TV broadcast by the Royal Family where the succession is to be formally announced. Lear (Danny Sapani) asks his three daughters how much they love him, and the eldest two go along with the ritual, singing his praises.

Theatre review: The Tragedy of Macbeth (Almeida)

Yaël Farber has in the past few years added herself to a fairly exclusive club, considering how undiscerning my theatre bookings can seem: Creatives who are widely lauded but I've never seen the appeal of, to the point that I eventually decided just to skip their future work altogether. This is inevitably a rule I keep finding exceptions for, and in a year that's been short of major event theatre for obvious reasons, her new take on The Tragedy of Macbeth has, thanks to the London stage debut of Saoirse Ronan (I don't watch many films but I'm assured she's a Famous,) become such a hot ticket that the Almeida introduced a Byzantine new booking process especially for it. It also doesn't seem quite as risky a booking as some - one of my problems with Farber is the lack of any discernible sense of humour, and that's not often much of an issue where this play's concerned. James McArdle plays Macbeth, the Scottish warrior lord whose prowess in battle sees him promoted by King Duncan (William Gaunt).

Theatre review: Knives in Hens

Wheel! Of! Misfortune!

After joyless South African director Yaël Farber royally shat the bed at the National a few months ago, she was lucky to have her next London gig already lined up, or I don’t think we’d have seen her here again for some time. In any case I saw her production of Knives in Hens at the Donmar as giving her a last chance before deciding if I just don’t see what others apparently see in her, and putting her on the same shelf as Samuel Beckett. David Harrower’s play is set in a non-specifically pre-industrial North of England, a place dominated by work and a combination of austere religion and superstition. Judith Roddy plays an unnamed Young Woman (significantly, only one person in the play gets to know her name,) married to ploughman Pony William (Christian Cooke,) so called because he may or may not fuck his plough-horses.

Theatre review: Salomé (National Theatre)

It's looking as if the successful Les Blancs was a fluke, and Yaël Farber really does believe that people walking around a stage incredibly slowly is the very essence of Dame Theatre. Her Salomé, which she writes as well as directing, has the tagline "the tale retold," but it's arguable whether it does even that - if you were raised in a non-Christian society and had never heard of Salomé, would you be any the wiser after this? I wouldn't put money on it. She's the niece and adopted daughter of King Herod, who lusts after her and demands an erotic dance from her in return for anything she desires; she asks for the head of the prophet Iokanaan, also known as John the Baptist. On stage the story is best known in the sole tragedy written by Oscar Wilde - which the RSC are, coincidentally, about to stage - in which her motives are those of a vengeful woman spurned, but Farber has a different interpretation of why she was so bloodthirsty.

Theatre review: Les Blancs

It was left unfinished on playwright Lorraine Hansberry's death, but the National saw enough merit in Les Blancs to get adaptor Robert Nemiroff and director Yaël Farber to create a stageable version of this African epic: In an unspecified post-war, colonial African country, a European mission operates a very basic hospital. The influential pastor is unseen, off on some apparently regular trek into the jungle, but his blind wife Madame Neilsen (Siân Phillips) is there to meet American journalist Charlie Morris (Elliot Cowan,) there in search of the real story of a country whose decades of foreign rule have finally led to increasing black-on-white violence. Not satisfied with only getting the white side of the story, he focuses on a trio of brothers, all of whom are outsiders in some way, who've returned to the area for their father's funeral; particularly middle brother Tshembe (Danny Sapani,) who's spent years travelling the world and has a white wife in London.

Theatre review: The Crucible

Will the critics still shit stars all over the Old Vic once Kevin Spacey leaves? I can't help but wonder after the newspapers heaped praise over Yaël Farber's production of The Crucible. Arthur Miller wrote his play about the Salem witch trials in the wake of McCarthyism, in which he was caught up; but it functions just as well as a metaphor for any mass hysteria in which accusation is treated as the same as guilt in the court of public opinion. In Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, fear of witchcraft is rife. A group of teenage girls are glimpsed dancing naked in the woods, and divert attention from themselves by pinning the blame elsewhere, accusing various local women of being in league with the devil. This escalates quickly into a trial where half the town seems to stand accused, and the only way to avoid hanging is to confess - and give the court another name to go after.

Theatre review: Mies Julie

Strindberg's Miss Julie seems to be striking a chord with theatre-makers at the moment, we're onto the third adaptation of the play I've seen in the last year. At least, unlike the last attempt I saw, Yael Farber's Mies Julie relocates the action to a new setting that still makes sense of the old story: Post-Apartheid South Africa, on the surface a country that's made huge leaps in racial relations in the last two decades, but in reality still simmering with tensions that come down to the ancestral ownership of the land the action takes place on. We're in the farmhouse kitchen of Veenen Plaas ("Weeping Farm,") an estate in the unforgiving Karoo region. The landowner is away on the night of a big celebration by the staff, and his daughter Julie (Hilda Cronje) braves first the party, then the kitchen where ageing maid Christine (Thoko Ntshinga) and her son John (Bongile Mantsai) are working into the night.