The Gods Weep
Hampstead, until 3 April
Mrs Warren’s Profession
Comedy, booking to 19 June
Finding fault with Shakespeare is one of the RSC’s favourite activities. It’s now so fed up with King Lear that it has decided it needs to be scrapped and rewritten. A tall order? Not a bit of it. The company maintains a team of ‘embedded’ writers whose talents rival those of the bard, more or less, and Dennis Kelly has been given the tiresome but necessary job of correcting the faults of this famously ill-written drama. Kelly’s previous works — Debris, Orphans, Osama the Hero, and Our Teacher’s a Troll — give some hint of his artistic range. He likes controversy, violence and macabre humour. (He dedicates the text, in the third person, to ‘Jeanie and Marie for putting up with him even when he’s being a prick’.)
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