-
Let the Right One In
Eli, the adolescent vampire of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN at St. Ann’s Warehouse, is scary strong, and Rebecca Benson, the adult who plays her, is scary good. There is a scene in the second act that is, within the universe of the play, an agon between life and death, living human and undead adversary.…
-
Tristan and Yseult
The story of Tristan and Isolde shares with Romeo and Juliet a special status among the archetypes of love, which for the Romantics was a thing so strong that it doomed its feelers, its sublimity fulfilled only through the greater sublimity of death. But I am convinced, having seen TRISTAN AND YSEULT, which revives the…
-
Julius Caesar
For the London-based Donmar company’s JULIUS CAESAR at St. Ann’s Warehouse, we are herded into, and, two-and-a-half hours later, released from a place of mock confinement. Initially, we are retained in a holding room, between a door that has rolled down behind us and one ahead of us that has yet to open. One looks…
-
Mies Julie
Yael Faber’s MIES JULIE, which adapts the Strindberg play to what is bitterly described as “the new South Africa”, is a raw, explicit, and sanguinary baring of a national soul. The white Julie, whose class has ostensibly been defeated, still has her sexual encounter with John (the “Jean” of the original), whose class – and…
-
Penelope
On one level, Enda Walsh’s PENELOPE is just a modernization of an episode from The Odyssey. Four suitors – living at the bottom of a drained out swimming pool on Odysseus’s Adriatic estate – vie for the affections of Penelope in advance of her husband’s homecoming – finally! – from the Trojan War. They continue…