Ron's rages are sincere and — according to his wife — healthily cathartic. But can these splenetic outbursts loosen the grip of capitalism at its most monstrous?
The Alchemist
The Swan Theatre
Stratford-upon-Avon
4/5
RECENT RSC productions of Shakespeare and his contemporaries have gone overboard to draw parallels with our own time but director Polly Findlay doesn’t have to strain with Ben Jonson’s attack on the gullibility of humanity at the mercy of society’s ever-present con artists.
Daily, the media easily appears to confirm Jonson’s view that mankind consists of fools and knaves where greed rules and, indeed, he seems to take pleasure in his own analysis.
GEORGE FOGARTY is dazzled by a breathtakingly skillful puppet version of Shakespeare’s greatest love poem
GORDON PARSONS salutes the apt return of Brecht’s vaudevillian cartoon drama that retains the vitality of the boxing or the circus ring
GORDON PARSONS is blown away by a superb production of Rostand’s comedy of verbal panache and swordmanship
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today


