![]() ![]() It’s not entirely her fault since Hall’s script has already hit emotional resolution prior to this sequence, thus making the death scene feel tacked-on as one of the play’s (too) many endings.īut for the rest of the evening Donnellan’s direction papers over any cracks. And her dying Juliet, performing Shakespeare’s real lines, is effortful and unconvincing. Although Briggs-Owen has the youthful energy to keep the disguise-plot working, she is not a natural comedienne - you can see the hand of the director in her wide-eyed double-takes. This, unfortunately, exposes the production’s weakness. Since the plot hinges on Viola being able to play a love story truthfully to an audience, where better to be than in the audience watching her do just that? Less essential is Hall’s self-conscious addition of numerous gags based on Shakespeare’s later titles and famous lines - such as “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” - which amuses or irritates according to taste.Īs in the film, Shakespeare is bowled over by the acting ability of Viola who, because women are not allowed on stage in Elizabethan England, arrives at the theater dressed as a boy, a device that mirrors “Twelfth Night,” Shakespeare’s later comedy of love and pain. Thus there’s a much higher concentration on exposing the insider mechanics of putting on a play, from auditions to rehearsals to the funding, presenting and producing of theater, all of which feels germane when performed live. The fact that the play’s running time is half an hour longer than the film is largely down to Hall and Donnellan’s understanding that theater, not film, is the best medium in which to tell a story about theater. SEE ALSO: First Look: ‘Shakespeare in Love’ on the West End Hall makes the Marlowe-Shakespeare rivalry a bromance that first comically then tragically ups the stakes in the central love story in which Shakespeare wants to marry wannabe actress Viola De Lesseps (the Gwyneth Paltrow role, played here by Lucy Briggs-Owen), who is already betrothed to Alastair Petrie’s dastardly Earl of Wessex. Hall’s major change is the move to just off-center of a previously minor character, rival playwright Christopher Marlowe, played with wickedly low-voiced, lethal calm by David Oakes in his striking West End debut. 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.
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