Fair Em

Synopsis

Whether it's a Shakespeare collaboration or not this rollicking romantic comedy plucked from the Shakespeare Apocrypha should brighten up anyone's winter blues. With a host of colourful characters, a riot of mistaken identity and all the joys and perils of young love, this delightful romp through high and low society, town and country, England and Denmark, culminates in a finale every bit as pleasing and problematic as anything in the acknowledged Shakespeare canon.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 11 January 2013

No-one believes that Shakespeare wrote anything at all of Fair Em, the Miller’s Daughter of Manchester, although it was once thought he might have played William the Conqueror; so Jack Taylor has grown his hair and beard like the Droeshout portrait and carries on like a minor relative of Sir Toby Belch.

The play is one of the Shakespearean Apocrypha, written around 1590, and attributed to the bard by a librarian of King Charles II. Director Phil Willmott has exposed the plot pretty well, but in so doing he also lays bare the thinness of the writing. And the acting at the Union is on the far side of coarse and lumpy, like cold porridge.

The regal invader has banished a nobleman and his daughter, who fetch up in Lancashire disguised as a jolly miller and fair “impoverished” Em (pretty Caroline Haines; she breaks hearts and fends off suitors by the awkwardly non-PC ruse of affecting physical disability (deafness and blind...

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Latest User Review

John Riley - 30 January 2013:

I really enjoyed this superb, fun-packed, tongue-in-cheek, happy, uplifting, well-acted romp. For me it was an excellent antitode to recessive times! It brought to life what ordinary, not-so-intellectual Elizabethans will have enjoyed and has actually helped enhance my appreciation of Shakespeare. Yes, there is lack of literary quality and intellectual depth which gave it a critical low rating but the effervescent production resonated really well with me (and the audience on the night I went). So I give it five!...

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