Shakespeare in Love: The Play (London)
Opening Night: July 23, 2014
Closing: October 25, 2014
Theater: The Noël Coward Theatre
Promising young playwright Will Shakespeare is tormented by writer’s block until he finds his muse in the form of passionate noblewoman, Viola De Lesseps. Their forbidden love draws many others, including Queen Elizabeth, into the drama and inspires Will to write the greatest love story of all time, Romeo and Juliet. Based on the Oscar-winning screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, Shakespeare in Love has been adapted for the stage by Lee Hall (Billy Elliot). The production is directed by Declan Donnellan and designed by Nick Ormerod, the driving force behind the world-renowned theatre company, Cheek by Jowl. Featuring a company of 28 actors and musicians, this sweeping romantic comedy will transport you back to Shakespeare’s London, teeming with vibrant colours, characters, music and life. Oh, and there’s a bit with a dog!
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July 23, 2014
“Comedy, love – and a bit with a dog. That’s what they want,” declares Thomas Henslowe, the debt-ridden theatre manager in Shakespeare in Love. We’ll come to the love in a moment. But first things first. Not since the chihuahua in the musical of Legally Blonde has there been a more captivating canine cameo in the West End than that now being turned in by the Labradoodle “Spot” (“Out, damned spot! out, I say!”) in this joyous stage adaptation of the Oscar-laden 1997 movie. Spot is used sparingly and starts off, truth to tell, as a bit of a dope. But Lee Hall’s very canny overhaul of the celebrated Tom Stoppard/Marc Norman script gives Spot the chance to turn up trumps at a crucial juncture (Lassie, eat your heart out) and it’s deliciously funny and absurd and affecting and entirely of a piece with the irresistible spirit of this show. Screen to stage transfers are so frequent and mostly catchpenny and cynical that the prospect of yet another tends to fill a critic’s heart with dread. But here there’s the elating sense that the material – with its rivalry between two public playhouses echoing the feud between the Montagues and Capulets – is revelling in it natural element in the theatre.
READ THE REVIEWJuly 24, 2014
I’ve often attacked our modern mania for turning movies into plays. But, in the case of Shakespeare in Love, the transformation is fully justified. Even more than the original screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, Lee Hall’s new version is a love letter to theatre itself, and one that celebrates the way magic and mystery are born out of chaos and confusion. The story is, at heart, a romantic comedy in which the young Shakespeare finds himself falling for the courtly Viola de Lesseps, who has disguised herself as a boy-player in Henslowe’s company. But this is buttressed by the idea that nothing much changes in theatre and that London’s Bankside in 1593 was much like modern Broadway. Money men assert their power, scripts get rewritten, egos have to be massaged and last-minute crises intervene. Somehow Shakespeare even manages to turn the distinctly unpromising Romeo and Ethel, Daughter of the Pirate King into the tragic love story we know today. But the skill of Hall’s script lies in having it both ways. On the one hand, it suggests commercial theatre is a timelessly precarious business: on the other, it flatters us with its references to the specific conditions of Elizabethan theatre.
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July 23, 2014
Can an adaptation be too faithful? Directed with verve by Declan Donnellan across, up and down Nick Ormerod’s versatile Elizabethan theater set, the 28-strong cast of this grand screen-to-stage adaptation of Shakespeare in Love (backed by Disney Theatrical and Sonia Friedman Prods.) fills the stage with high-spirited comedy. Authenticity begins to pall at the drawn-out climax of the too-lengthy second half, and doubts creep in that anything substantial has been added to the movie. But as Tom Bateman’s unquenchably dynamic Shakespeare reasserts himself, you realize that while the show is hardly newfangled, it’s a big-hearted hit. The script by Lee Hall (Billy Elliot) doesn’t so much reimagine Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard’s screenplay (which won one of the movie’s seven Oscars) as compress and fillet it for the stage. But since many of the major characters have been retained, there are heaps of opportunities for cameo roles, all of which are taken with relish. Abigail McKern shines as the nurse and, fresh from his Tony-nommed turn as Maria in the Globe’s Twelfth Night, Paul Chahidi returns to the Elizabethan era to make a delightfully exasperated mountain out of the molehill that is Henslowe, the theater owner who badly needs Shakespeare to stop indulging himself with writer’s block and give him an audience-pleasing, coffer-filling comedy, preferably with a dog since Queen Elizabeth (gruffly imperious Anna Carteret) is partial to them.
READ THE REVIEWJuly 23, 2014
At a time when so many stage shows are based on films, it is odd that it has taken so long for Shakespeare in Love to arrive in the West End. But boy has it been worth the wait. The Oscar-laden movie, with its wonderfully witty script by Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman, was terrific, but in Lee Hall’s delightful stage adaptation the piece seems to have found its true home. It’s funny, often genuinely moving and generates a glow you could warm your hands by. You can feel the audience getting behind the piece from the start, and by the end this inventive and touching comedy seems like a joyous celebration of the possibilities of theatre itself. It’s got the lot – a stirring love story, a prodigious succession of terrific jokes – and it sends up the theatre something rotten while simultaneously delighting in it. Before taking my seat in the stalls, I worried that the director Declan Donnellan and the designer Nick Ormerod might be too serious for the task in hand. Their Cheek by Jowl company, which specialises in serious classics, often in foreign languages, is much admired but not exactly famous for the number of laughs it generates. But they too seem to have fallen under the spell of the piece in which the young Shakespeare, suffering from a bad case of writer’s block, finds the inspiration to write Romeo and Juliet when he falls in love with Viola De Lesseps, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, little realising that she is leading a secret life of her own by disguising herself as a boy actor in his own acting company.
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July 23, 2014
Many people, it must be said, prefer the idea of Shakespeare’s plays to the reality of them. Whether they admit it or not, such souls feel that Shakespeare is great for seasoning but indigestible as a main course. They’re often the ones you hear promiscuously peppering their conversation with the canon’s best-known lines or speaking of failed politicians as “truly Shakespearean.” The play that opened on Wednesday night at the Noël Coward Theater here seems to have been created expressly with this audience in mind. It is called Shakespeare in Love: The Play, and it might best be described as Shakespeare-flavored, in the way that some soft drinks are advertised as fruit-flavored. Like many such beverages, this show is moderately fizzy and leaves a slightly synthetic aftertaste. Staged by the inventive team of Declan Donnellan (director) and Nick Ormerod (designer), Shakespeare in Love has been adapted from the 1998 movie of that title. Featuring a screenplay by Marc Norman and that most fashionable of cerebral dramatists, Tom Stoppard — with a plot that pondered the sexual and writing habits of the most celebrated playwright ever, and a cast that included Dame Judi Dench, if you please, as Elizabeth I — the film brimmed with class and cachet.
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