Girona’s Teatre Municipal, December 6th & 7th: With the European ideal in the doghouse and nationalism on the rise, theatre company Propeller get in there with a brutal, allegedly brilliant staging of Shakespeare’s Henry V, the heroic history play-turned-1989 movie that once made Kenneth Branagh sexy.
Better days
It’s the IV time that the all-male British troupe, artistically directed by Edward Hall, returns to the state of Catalonia. Their physically and psychologically invigorating approach to Shakespeare has impressed even local audiences accustomed to the visual excesses of Calixto Bieito and La Fura dels Baus. In fact, Propeller productions with their dark comedy and ‘audience implication’ are much more unsettling. Last year, the company brought Richard III to Girona, the unfettered malevolence of the Machiavellian mastermind inspiring full-on encouragement from the public.
Know who your friends are
Dugald Bruce-Lockhart plays the iconic English hero who dumps his mates to take up royal duties, meating out (sic) tough justice and heading a mass slaughter of the French, sacrificing more of his ‘friends’ in the process, at the Battle of Agincourt. Alas, the show is only on in Girona, though it tours round the UK with The Winter’s Tale afterwards. Read a gushing review here. Read a balanced review here.
Click LIKE if you’re pissed off that there’s no European money for a Barcelona-based performance but that there seems to be rather a lot of European money for interminable emergency economic meetings.
