CYMBELINE

"On her left breast
A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops
I' the bottom of a cowslip"

A grave disappointment, as the reputation of Kneehigh, and the clips we had used in our Complete Works promotional video, had whetted my appetite. But there was little of Shakespeare here, the plot had been lost, and the good jokes were drowned in sloppy paraphrasing. You can muck about with WS, as our Othello and Dream proved, but you had better know what you are doing. So if you change the words of "Fear no more the heat o' the sun", and make chimneysweepers into dandelions, it needs to be an improvement. It was not.
The mole cinque-spotted was a buttock tattoo - that was OK. There were a lot of bangs and explosions in the second half; a good cockerel and owl, and some neat work with a toy car. The play was three hours - two would have been better. The audience, I am happy to say, loved it.

Michael Billington wrote in The Guardian [possibly after reading my comments]
"...I felt we were being asked to celebrate Kneehigh's cleverness rather than explore Shakespeare's own mysterious, experimental genius."

Personal Star Rating [out of five] *