Eastward Ho!

Synopsis

The wittiest of Shakespeare's contemporaries pooled their immense individual talents to produce this riotous, hilarious and outrageously bawdy comedy of love, marriage and social climbing. Nearly 400 years on and the characters so hilariously lampooned by this of wits are still with us.

Our Review:

24 December 2002

Although set in Jacobean London, Eastward Ho! (written as a rejoinder to Dekker and Webster's Westward Ho!) has a strong resonance with a contemporary audience. This cast of hucksters, get-rich-quick merchants and social climbers congregating around the City of London are as instantly recognisable to us as their predecessors would have been to a Jacobean audience.

Even more recognisable are the upstart knights buying their titles. These days it's called services to politics or industry in the Honours list, but then it was seen as bribery and James I's creation of a new generation of Scottish aristocracy caused deep resentment among many of the English (which is why the authors included some derogatory passages about the Scots in the text - passages which got them imprisoned).

Given our easy familiarity with these characters and situations, it's strange that the director Lucy Pitman-Wallace feels the need to batter us around the head with th...

Read more of the review

Latest User Review

USER: Whatsonstage.com (80.40.12.123) - 4 February 2003:

I don't agree with either of you. Do you think Ben Jonson and Co. wrote this sort of thing 'to be taken seriously'? Don't you think their cast added their own farcical business, mugged furiously at the audience and shoved in anything topical that would get a laugh? This isn't Oscar Wilde, this is more like the Jacobean version of 'Have I got news for you'. My companion at the show is an Alderman's Deputy himself, and he commented at the end - 'Well, the City hasn't changed a bit!' Cheers to the RSC for a terrific evening. ...

Read more and add your own review