You don’t notice him at first. The stage is open, set in a ramshackle garden behind York Library, surrounded by Roman ruins and picnic blankets. It’s light, early evening in the summer, that moment before the curtain comes up mixed with the moment before the sun goes down. Unobtrusively, a man sits down on one …
An empty stage that isn’t a stage, but a broken extension of the theatre around it. The stage boards warp upwards, a tree breaks through in one spot and a ditch runs left to right in front of what appears to be the back interior wall of the theatre. If it is, it’s clearly seen …
Over the last year I’ve been to the theatre three times, all different and all fantastic shows. The Mckellen/Stewart Waiting for Godot, a production of Pirates of Penzance that was gloriously, riotously silly and the David Tennant-fronted Hamlet. I reviewed it here, and I wasn’t alone in hailing Tennant as one of the greatest Hamlets …
I watched an actor draw his own map on Saturday. The RSC’s production of Hamlet, held at the Courtyard Theatre whilst their complex is, in essence, rebuilt, has attracted a lot of press due to the casting of both Patrick Stewart as Claudius and David Tennant as Hamlet. Whilst not all of that press …