Theatre
Veronica Lee
In a rather clever wheeze, Dominic Dromgoole, former artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe – who therefore knows a thing or two about historically accurate stagings – has established Classic Spring, a new company dedicated to celebrating work by “proscenium playwrights” and staging their plays in the theatres they were written for. Its first year-long season is devoted to Oscar Wilde and opens with a star-stuffed A Woman of No Importance, directed by Dromgoole.Wilde's play, written in 1893 and staged in a CJ Phipps beauty that opened in 1870, deals with the hypocrisy (sadly not confined to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“He has something of Dillane about him.” Thus Patrick Marber on David Oakes. “I rate him very highly indeed. One of the very best of his generation.” Audiences at the Theatre Royal Haymarket will be able to judge for themselves this autumn. Oakes, 34, stars opposite Natalie Dormer in Marber’s production of Venus in Fur, a sizzling two-hander by David Ives.Oakes’s main field of operation in recent years has been historical fantasy in the likes of The Pillars of the Earth, The Borgias, The White Queen and, currently, Victoria, in which he plays Prince Albert’s doomed romantic brother Ernest. Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Loneliness: in the age of the digital hook-up and the flaunting narcissism of social media, it’s become a strange sort of taboo – a secret shame, the unsexy side of singledom. So it’s good to see playwright David Eldridge putting it centre-stage in this tender, pleasingly unsentimental two-hander. Written with wry humour, warmth and compassion, and delicately threaded through with painful laughter and uncertainty, Beginning is like an emotional striptease, peeling away the defences of its pair of needy characters. In Polly Findlay’s assured, delicate production at the National Theatre, it’s Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The awful mother, the celebrity-obsessed teenager, the mediocre old writer who wants some young sex in his life – there are motifs in Chekhov’s The Seagull that fly merrily from one century to another, and Simon Stephens and Sean Holmes’ new modern-dress update for the Lyric, starring Lesley Sharp, is fresh and accomplished, even if the classic bird's flight is rather lopsided. The comic wing turns out to flap more strongly than its tragic one, but it's good the Lyric’s notably young audience can think of a 120-year-old play as a play for today.The vision borrows something from reality Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
God makes few appearances at the modern playhouse – so few that the Finborough Theatre saw fit to print a glossary in the programme for its latest production. What begins with Agnostic, Annunciation and Aramaic runs all the way to Spirit Guide, Utopia and Vespers, which gives some idea of the breadth of reference to be found in this tightly constructed three-hander by New York writer Keith Bunin.Hannah (Kazia Pelka) is an Episcopalian minister (the US equivalent of Anglican), wont to accessorise her clerical collar with combat pants and sneakers. She may be a fervent Bible scholar, but she is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What a difference an ocean and a change of scale can make. When I saw the Mel Brooks musical Young Frankenstein on Broadway a decade ago, the show seemed to take its cue from the lumbering monster contained within it, who stutters and sputters before eventually being kickstarted into something resembling life. All involved have since been back to the laboratory, and the happy news is that its West End iteration is a thing of joy. For once, I really did laugh until I cried, not least in amazement that so unapologetically bawdy, lowdown a romp has somewhere along the way acquired a heart. Read more ...
Heather Neill
Bold and fearless are adjectives that might describe playwright Rory Mullarkey as accurately as any chivalrous knight. He made his name in 2013 when, at the age of 25, his play Cannibals, part of which was in Russian, took to the main stage at the Manchester Royal Exchange and went on to win the James Tait Black Prize. He has written opera libretti, a play about revolution for the Royal Court, The Wolf from the Door, and a version of The Oresteia for the Globe. And now here he is filling the Olivier’s wide spaces with an epic modern folk tale.Saint George and the Dragon comes, in proper Read more ...
Elyse Dodgson
The autumn season of plays at the Royal Court leads with international work. B by Guillermo Calderón (from Chile), Bad Roads by Natal'ya Vorozhbit (from Ukraine) and Goats by Liwaa Yazji (from Syria) have a long history with our international department. We probably have to go back over a decade to look at the seeds of this work and the connections they have to one another and to each of us.THE ROAD TO BAD ROADIt is June 2008 and I am sitting around a table in Natal'ya Vorozhbit's new flat in Kiev with her mother Masha, her baby daughter Pasha and our co-collaborator and translator, Sasha Read more ...
Heather Neill
Nikki Amuka-Bird spent the summer in Antigua, swimming and scuba diving and could have claimed to be working. She is playing Ellida in Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea at the Donmar, in a version directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah transposed to the Caribbean. Amuka-Bird spent part of her childhood in Antigua and, home for a holiday, was thinking about Ibsen’s restless heroine, for whom the sea represents freedom.Born in 1976 in Nigeria, where her father is a newspaper editor, she grew up with her mother, a journalist and later a Body Shop franchisee, in the Caribbean and the UK, where she attended Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Simon Stephens and director Marianne Elliott are hyped as a winning partnership. Their previous collaborations include The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a massive Olivier award-winning hit, and her sensitive revival of his early play, Port, at the National Theatre. Now they are in the West End again, this time with a two-hander starring Anne-Marie Duff and Kenneth Cranham. Despite the title, this is not a play about science, but about love, but it does concern chance. And uncertainty.Inspired by a vague notion of the Uncertainty Principle, which suggests that Read more ...
aleks.sierz
What does it mean to feel contemporary? Feel. Contemporary. According to theatre-maker Chris Thorpe, whose new play Victory Condition has just opened at the Royal Court in tandem with Guillermo Calderón’s B, being contemporary is a really disturbing mixture of feeling all-powerful and completely powerless. In a short two-hander, Thorpe emphasises that something is very wrong at the heart of daily life. We all know this; we all feel this. But what is it? Well, it’s the sense that everything is on the verge of breakdown.Set in a modern new-built flat, Victory Condition is basically two Read more ...
Marianka Swain
A year after premiering acclaimed French playwright Florian Zeller’s The Truth, the Menier Chocolate Factory now hosts The Lie – which, as the name suggests, acts as a companion piece of sorts. Once again, we’re in a slippery Pinteresque realm, the seemingly conventional domestic set-up teasingly deconstructed as Zeller challenges our conception of honesty and morality.This latest Lindsay Posner-directed import is similarly light-hearted – compared with the weightier Zeller double of The Mother and The Father – and once again features two affluent couples, with the same names, plus Read more ...