Narrator Simon Russell Beale
GREG Doran, former Royal Shakespeare Company artistic director, York Millennium Mystery Plays director, renowned Shakespearean and knight of the realm for services to theatre, is back in York for two days presenting his revival of Shakespeare’s narrative poem Venus And Adonis.
He will take part in a post-show discussion after today’s 2pm performance, but whether you attend the matinee or tonight’s concluding show, you really should see the best 60-minute combination of Shakespeare and (adult) puppetry that makes theatre stand out from other artforms.
Those performances fall either side of England’s last 32 low-block encounter with D R Congo, so that feeble football excuse won’t wash.
What’s more, esteemed Shakespearean actor Simon Russell Beale is the narrator, live and in person, seated, in black, voice mellifluous, arm movements a show in themselves.
Here’s the history bit. When theatres were closed by a severe outbreak of the plague in 1592, William Shakespeare spent lockdown not baking banana bread but switching from penning plays to poetry. Cue Venus And Adonis, little known to modern audiences but a publishing sensation in his lifetime, running to ten editions, no less.
First staged by Doran in 2004 for the RSC in tandem with Little Angle Theatre , it has become one of his favourite pieces – and Sir Greg, you should note, has directed all 37 plays in Shakespeare’s First Folio – over subsequent productions.
When the RSC contacted him to ask what should be done with the now redundant box of puppets, jettisoned in the need to create space, Doran decided to reactivate puppets and poem alike in a 2026 tour that already has played the Shakespeare festival in Craiova, Romania, and the Barbican, London, with support from the Backstage Trust and executive producer Mark Pigott.
Inside York Theatre Royal’s plush proscenium arch stage now stands Rob Jones’s design of another vintage theatre frontage, with a golden orb to the top, ornate curtains and a backdrop on which shadow-play puppetry and scenes in miniature are played out.
In front is a table; to one side is guitarist Nick Lee, performing beautiful, romantic and mournful music of the period arranged by John Woolf & Stevon Russell; to the other is Russell Beale, no less melodic in tone.
Venus And Adonis director Greg Doran
Constantly on the move, and yet somehow invisible, such is their skill, like the impact of Milk Tray Man, are puppeteers Bartolomeo Bartolini, Edie Edmundson, Rachel Leonard, Lee Maeda and Sarah Wright, who provide sound effects too, from kises to sighs.
Inspired by Japanese Bunraku Puppets and Jacobean Court Masque, they enact Russell Beale’s poetic flow with Lyndie Wright’s puppets to tell the story of Venus, the Goddess of love, and her fixation with the bodacious, handsome but headstrong hunter, Adonis.
Performed on the table top and tableau behind, with rods and marionettes too, the puppetry is exquisite, supple and, at first, comedic. Without being irreverent, imagine Miss Piggy’s seduction technique, hitting on Kermit or celebrity guests on The Muppets, and you will see Venus at work on “waylaying” young, resistant Adonis, even pulling him off his horse in her desires.
Every move, every movement, is choreographed by puppetry director Steve Tiplady with delightful detail and comic timing, the puppetry and Russell Beale in blissful union.
The story switches from V & A horsing around to horses doing the same in a parallel storyline as a frisky mare mirrors Venus in enticing Adonis’s stallion. Again, the comedy here is both earthy and eloquent.
The mood changes suddenly once Adonis insists on hunting for a wild boar, ignoring Venus’s pleas of foreboding not to do so. Jones’s mini-theatre suddenly sprouts huge arms, on whose fingers Venus is gripped with fear, or swings or dances, depending on her transmutable mood.
When Vince Herbert & Lauren Watson’s lighting picks out the now prone Adonis, blood pouring from his side in the form of a red scarf, the tragedy rips at your heart, such is Venus’s woe as every tender touch fails to awake him.
Once described by former RSC artistic director Adrian Noble as “Shakspeare in miniature”, Venus And Adonis is emotional poetry in motion and commotion, combining the two faces of theatre, comedy and tragedy, in 60 sensuous, sensual minutes of lust, love and untimely loss.
Venus And Adonis, York Theatre Royal, 2pm and 7.30pm today. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.