SHAKESPEARE'S SAINTS AND SINNERS. To 16 August.
Oxford.
SHAKESPEARE’S SAINTS AND SINNERS
devised by Heather Davies and Tom Peters from an idea by David Parrish.
St Michael at the North Gate Cornmarket Street/Ship Street To 16 August 2008.
Mon-Sat 7.15pm Mat Sat 2pm no performance 28 July.
Runs 1hr 40min One interval.
TICKETS: 01865 766266
www.creationtheatre.co.uuk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 19 July.
A one-person Shakespeare show that has its point to argue.
Tom Peters’ performance, for Oxford’s Creation Theatre Company, is really about Shakespeare’s intermixing of qualities, his ability to set the word against the word and hammer things out - that’s Richard II talking, in the first play discussed here.
Peters plays an unnamed man going through a difficult patch with his wife. It’s a frame the piece can do without. What matters is that intermixing, as Peters himself mixes recital and background notes to prove that apparent saints sin and vice versa.
He shows Henry V’s troubled and harsh sides, though this seems more criticism of modern folk-memory based on Laurence Olivier’s wartime film than anything new about Shakespeare. Henry’s rejection of Falstaff at the end of Henry IV, Part II is the payoff from Hal’s “I know you all” in Part I, a more “sinful” example, declaring long-term deception rather than responding to the demands of kingship.
And Shakespeare knew what he was doing spending so long with his little touches of “Harry in the night” before Agincourt. Even the command to kill prisoners needs setting in the frame of the French attack on civilians in the English camp.
His attempt to find good in Richard III doesn’t convince. Brave and near repentance? This is a monarch who puts himself before country and rides into battle with the desperation of someone who knows himself damned; his cry for a horse matches Macbeth’s “Lay on Macduff” in its hopelessness.
Yet it’s fine the piece provokes argument. Spreading beyond the best-known plays, it’s particularly strong on the late romances, Pericles, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale, considering the nature of friendship and the importance in Shakespeare of family and relationships (things Macbeth knows he must not look to have). That intractable sinner Iago here takes on a voice linking with another praiser of family values, Charles Dickens, sounding like Sam Weller inhabited by the mind of Uriah Heep.
Peters has the vocal and physical resources for all this, though his women are restricted in tone. The structure could do with more work, but this is an enjoyable show for Bard-oriented audiences.
Performer: Tom Peters.
Director: Heather Davies.
Voice/Verse coach: Richard Ryder.
Assistant director: Ant Stone.
2008-07-21 09:04:10