But this, alas, is not Greek drama brought up to date; it is high-class hokum hoping to gain some tragic glamour by association. Hunter takes the central role of Hester Swane, a contemporary version of Medea, the heroine whose emotional anguish at being spurned drives her to the terrible, self-destructive revenge of infanticide.We discover our heroine putting up doughty resistance to being evicted from her home by Carthage Kilbride (Gordon MacDonald), the man with whom she has been living for the past 14 years. Evidently, the Hollywood star sees something in Marina Carr’s play that eludes this reviewer.
Transplanting Greek tragedy to the dark bogs of the Irish midlands, the piece now receives its British premiere in a powerfully cast and poetically well-gauged production by Dominic Cooke. This is not the first time that Holly Hunter has acted in By The Bog Of Cats – she appeared in an earlier staging in San Jose. Any play – modern, ancient Greek, Pinter – will be at home here.’As You Like It’ plays at Rose of Kingston, Kingston Upon Thames (020-8546 6983; ) to 18 December. This wise man points out that plays don’t only need to succeed with audiences or critics: it is the building that decides their fate.

It simply rejects the plays it doesn’t like – the ones it feels are not suitable for the building.The final excitement of working in this new building is that Rose of Kingston is not simply a space for Shakespeare and Elizabethan drama. It is as if the play has been waiting for a stage that enables it to express itself naturally.The first experience of any theatre excites trepidation in actors. Does it welcome or does it repel? Is it going to be a struggle to communicate? The French dramatist Jean Giraudoux wrote a speech for a perceptive director of a Court theatre in one of his plays. Above all, it is a place for the audience’s imagination.The re-created Rose offers another special advantage – as rehearsing As You Like It has made clear. Passages of text that often seem recalcitrant come alive and work easily on this stage, because the actor has such direct communication with his audience.

It also fulfils the mandatory requirement for Shakespeare: it is large enough for the actor to use his voice fully, yet small enough to allow him to whisper. In the promenade area at Kingston, people will sit on cushions rather than stand – thus everyone, like those first audiences, will have a clear view of the stage at low prices.The new Rose is intimate yet epic; a place for private scenes or surging battles – just like the original theatre, which had to cope with plays such as Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great. The Elizabethans were smaller than we are, and they put up with more cramped conditions. This is not possible in any of the other reconstructions of Elizabethan theatres, either here or in America.The original Rose may have seated 1,100 people in the galleries and squashed a further 500 standees into the yard Rose of Kingston holds 1,000.

In 1989, I stood on the excavated Rose stage and it was clear to me that an actor anywhere on it could communicate with the whole audience.I was confirmed in that conviction on that first day at Kingston. By following the design of the Elizabethan Rose, this new stage allows every actor to command the entire house He knows everyone can see him. The entire audience was in front of the stage, not clustered around the sides. But because of the narrowness of the auditorium there is nothing much he can then do except move back again.The Elizabethan Rose stage was not a thrust, but a lozenge shape that was wide and narrow, tapering towards the front. To make an entrance on the stage of the RSC’s Swan is one of the most dynamic actions an actor can perform. Actors naturally move to the front of the thrust to talk to most of their audience – but in doing so they inevitably leave a significant proportion of the spectators behind them The thrust is also inflexible.