Colin Davison

1 day ago | britishtheatreguide.info | Colin Davison

William Shakespeare Royal Shakespeare Company Released 25 April 2025 Share: When Gregory Doran became Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2013, he decided to produce all Shakespeare’s plays without repetition and to broadcast them to cinemas.

3 days ago | britishtheatreguide.info | Colin Davison

There is something faintly ludicrous about a plot that involves our hero confounding master spies, narrowly escaping beheading by biplane and scrambling for his life down the face of Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps that is what attracted Emma Rice, for her adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller is gloriously daft, bursting with visual and physical humour that typified her time as artistic director of Kneehigh Theatre in Cornwall and later at London’s Globe.

3 days ago | britishtheatreguide.info | Colin Davison

Even in 2018, when Bavarian State Opera first proposed staging War and Peace, it faced a formidable challenge, not only in the monumental scale of this usually four-hour epic. Prokofiev omits the happy, bucolic ending of Tolstoy’s pacifist novel as Pierre is united with Natasha. Instead, writing in 1943, with Russia invaded by Nazi Germany, the composer was forced to incorporate bombastic nationalistic choruses and peons to Stalin himself, such as that with which he ended the opera.

1 week ago | britishtheatreguide.info | Colin Davison

Three women, a century apart, condemned for their unconventional or illicit relationships, find refuge in a remote croft, where myth and memory swirl about like Highland mist.

1 week ago | britishtheatreguide.info | Colin Davison

Verdi based Un Ballo in Maschera upon the actual assassination of King Gustav III of Sweden at a masked ball in 1792, but, faced with the impossibility of getting a story of regicide past the censors in Austrian-controlled Italy, he switched the location to Boston c1700, changing the identity of the King to that of the local governor, Riccardo.