RSC

Potent mix of people and puppets in a kid-friendly Shakespearean show

Susan Hiller is our pick of the week, with not one but two exhibitions opening in London. There’s also an international flavour to this week’s Arts Ahead: Russian ballet, American dance, images from Communist East Germany and your last chance to see Japanese fashion at the Barbican.

David Farr’s production of King Lear, the last in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s current London season, is a mix of successes and failures. Despite excellent acting, there’s little light to be found in this perennially gloomy play…

As You Like It is one of the Bard’s comedies that ticks several Elizabethan mirth-making boxes; love at first sight, cross dressing, plain speaking fools and flirty freedoms when courtly townspeople head out to the countryside. Director Michael Boyd has added a dash of darkness to the proceedings too…

Friends, Londonists, commuters,
Lend me your eyes.
I come to praise Caesar, not to bury it.
The good that men do lives on after them,
Their works oft inspire and amaze.
So let it be with Shakespeare…

A handful of the not-quite-the-headlines stories from around London in the last 24 hours.

Remember Ben Wilson, the chap who paints minute artwork on discarded blobs of gum? The Royal Society of Chemistry, of all people, are trying to track him down with a commission. The RSC want Ben to depict the 117 chemical elements on his miniature medium. …

The Gods Weep. Photograph by Keith Pattison “I feel like my soul has been bathed in acid” says Colm (Jeremy Irons) near the beginning of Act Two. So will you after watching this new play by Dennis Kelly. Starting off with the clean crimes committed …

“I’ll tell you something, I know what you’re thinking.” Just like his most famous character, David Tennant has made an unlikely and heroic return from physical setbacks to claim centre stage with wit and verve as he finally reveals to the West End his interpretation …

Photo by Simon Annand Drawing on the antagonism between authorship, reputation and plagiarism, Marina Carr’s reworking of King Lear, The Cordelia Dream, is a clever, self-referential analysis of our human desire to create immortality through art – at whatever personal cost. The Royal Shakespeare Company …