Michael Dobson

I saw​ a great performance of Hamlet this spring, at Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine, in a Soviet-era theatre built on a similar brutalist scale to the National in London but with less of its self-effacing eagerness to fit in. Or rather I saw Hamlet not in the Ivan Franko Music and Drama Theatre but under it. The theatre’s ambitious artistic director, Rostislav Derzhypilsky,...

Perhaps it was inevitable that Shakespeare’s talent should have been understood in mythological terms from the outset. Even before he published Venus and Adonis (1593) his early plays had revealed an imagination profoundly shaped by Ovid’s tales of the interaction between gods and mortals, and, despite the growing prevalence among his audiences of a neoclassical taste for...

What is the difference between great art and tat? In the theatre, Dr Johnson’s rule of thumb seems adequate: if people are still prepared to revive a play a century after its premiere, it probably matters, whether or not they call it ‘dramatic art’. But it’s trickier with paintings, which have a relationship to the word ‘art’ that baffled me for years. When...

In which country has Hamlet mattered most, politically, over the last couple of centuries? Despite a succession of celebrity stage productions, the answer probably isn’t Shakespeare’s sometime homeland. Modern British nationalism has certainly found the cult of Shakespeare as the indigenous voice of Warwickshire quite useful from time to time, whether the task at hand has been...

We never went on holiday to foreign countries when I was a child. Not to properly foreign ones, anyway. Although we lived on the South Coast, the family Hillman Minx would head not towards a nearby Channel port but westwards, or north-westwards, or just plain north. In perverse flight from the sunlit sandy beaches of Bournemouth – which attracted mere holidaymakers, the kind who were...