Theatre
Rachel Halliburton
This blisteringly intense evening at Trafalgar Studios begins with two strangers in an Amsterdam hotel bedroom and – through a series of personal revelations – ends up spanning continents. With just 80 minutes and two actors, Ken Urban’s simultaneously warmly funny and deeply moving play manages to achieve an impact that some dramas fail to in three hours with ten times the cast.Designer Jason Denvir has recreated one of those low-budget hotel rooms that seems decorated to emphasise alienation and depression – as Clifford Samuel’s Teddy jokingly remarks, it’s the "same shade of ugly". Though Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The most thrilling revivals interrogate a classic work, while revealing its fundamental soul anew. Marianne Elliott’s female-led, 21st-century take on George Furth and Stephen Sondheim’s 1970 musical comedy Company makes a bold, inventive statement, but somehow also suggests this is how the piece was always meant to be. Ah, a weighted paradox – Company is full of them. Successful New Yorker Bobbie (Rosalie Craig, pictured below with Alex Gaumond and Jonathan Bailey) is celebrating/avoiding her 35th birthday, amidst the overbearing friends she both loves and longs to escape Read more ...
aleks.sierz
In 2017, playwright Nina Raine's Consent, an excellent National Theatre play about lawyers and rape victims, was hugely successful, winning a West End transfer, as well as generating a lot of discussion about gender politics. Her follow up, Stories, may be less controversial, but it boldly tackles a similarly sensitive issue: fertility. More specifically, as the publicity states, the drama asks the question: how do you have a baby when you're 39 and single? Starring Claudie Blakley, the play explores this idea with enormous intelligence and warmhearted sympathy.Anna (Blakley) is a white Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Shakespeare exists to be refracted and filtered through the age in which he is presented. So there's every good reason for the Donmar's artistic director Josie Rourke to approach the eternally problematic Measure for Measure as a twice-told tale that effects a startling shift in time period and gender politics at the interval. A characteristically ambitious venture, Rourke's penultimate Donmar production delivers best when most in period, and it's in fact the modern-day revisions and reversals that make one wish she had carried her vision through still further. The first half of the Read more ...
David Nice
Its roots are in an emotional truth: Matthew Lopez saw the film, then read the book, of Howards End when he was 15 and 11 years later came across Maurice. He joined the dots between an apparent period-piece offering timeless wisdom about the human condition and the gayness he found he had in common with EM Forster. Lopez's epic two-parter The Inheritance is best when it brings the connection directly to light, dramatiSing the playwright's dialogue with his beloved author, but given the predictability of parallel lives in the characters of Forster's Margaret Schlegel and Lopez's Eric Glass, Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The playwright Bathsheba Doran has blazed a stellar trail ever since graduating from Cambridge at the same time as David Mitchell and Robert Webb. After writing for them on the sketch show Bruiser, she earned her spurs as a comedy writer on Smack the Pony, won a Fulbright Scholarship, and eventually became a playwriting fellow at the Juilliard School.The fact that she has subsequently been festooned with prizes for playwriting as well as being award-nominated for her work on the Martin Scorsese-produced HBO series Boardwalk Empire means hopes are high as you descend into the charmingly Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If you're going to write a play that traffics in bafflement, it's not a bad idea to have on hand one of the most beady-eyed actresses around. That would be Dame Eileen Atkins, whose keen-eyed intelligence cuts a swathe through the deliberate obfuscations of The Height of the Storm, the latest from the ever-prolific Frenchman, Florian Zeller. More than any of his previous works, the fractured storytelling at work here adds up to an elaborate puzzle that is sure to leave audiences debating over post-show drinks what the hell actually happened. Such discussions need not be rushed, by the way, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Whatever you might think about Brexit, the dreaded B word, the current climate certainly seems to be reinvigorating both feminist playwrights and political playwrights. So welcome back, David Hare, the go-to dramatist for any artistic director wanting to stage a contemporary state-of-the-nation play. His latest, with the rather downbeat title of I'm Not Running, opened at the National Theatre, but it may be a disappointment to anyone looking for answers to burning current questions because it is more concerned with an imaginary female contender for the Labour leadership than with Brexit, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What better way to celebrate a homecoming than with a party? That is the capacious-hearted thinking behind this new musical version of Twelfth Night, which additionally marks Kwame Kwei-Armah's debut production at the helm of that undeniable dynamo otherwise known as the Young Vic. Resident of late Stateside where he was running Baltimore's Center Stage, Kwei-Armah has posited as his opening production a show that celebrates London in a giddy spirit of inclusion that seems a necessary antidote to our mean-spirited times.And if Kwei-Armah's production, credited to him and the powerhouse Read more ...
aleks.sierz
There are not that many plays about sport, but, whether you gamble on results or not, you can bet that most of them are about boxing. And often set in the past. Joy Wilkinson's superb new drama, The Sweet Science of Bruising, comes to the Southwark Playhouse, a venue which regularly punches above its weight (sorry!), armed with a beautifully evocative title and plenty of theatrical energy. It is also tells a story that is both original and affecting, about the Victorian subculture of female boxing. So hold tight, leave your squeamish side at home, and roll up to the ring to watch the Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It sounds like a marriage made in heaven. Charles Dickens and James Graham – both great chroniclers of the ambitions, hypocrisies, and eccentricities of their respective ages – have been brought together to tell London’s story through irreverent portraits of its high life and low life. This modern Sketches by Boz reboots the Victorian original to embrace computer hackers, a Syrian asylum seeker, and mock conceptual artists among others. The result is a lively, structurally ambitious work that somehow fails to add up to the sum of its potentially fascinating parts.Graham – who has Read more ...
aleks.sierz
We do love our spy stories, don't we? The idea of betrayal, both political and personal, seems to be a strong part of our national identity. And so is telling stories based on real events. Playwright Hugh Whitemore, who died in July, based his Pack of Lies on the Portland spy ring, a secret Soviet operation which was active from the late 1950s until 1961. This new production at Menier Chocolate Factory is the first London revival since it premiered at the West End's Lyric Theatre in 1983, starring husband and wife team Judi Dench and Michael Williams, for which Dench got an Olivier Award. Read more ...