Theatre
Philip Hoare
A dark star explodes. I cannot remember the future. A figure appears on the beach. We're always reaching out. It's always just over there. We're always dreaming. The grey rocks, the red sand, the blue sea. Everywhere, the sea. Everything you ever wanted to be. Torbay arches around the south Devon coast like a proscenium arch, a natural arena echoing with the past, present and future. From Torquay's white villas to Paignton's promenade and Brixham's fishing village, these holiday destinations, known as the English Riviera, conceal countless stories behind the resort's veneer: the real lives of Read more ...
David Nice
Of Sondheim’s half-dozen masterpieces, Follies is the one which sets the bar impossibly high, both for its four principals and in its typically unorthodox dramatic structure. The one-hit showstoppers from within a glittering ensemble come thick and fast in the first half – stop the show they certainly did last night – and it’s hard not to miss all that when the camera zooms in exclusively on the quarrelling quartet. Dominic Cooke’s less-is-more National Theatre production, full of subtle touches, finds a better solution than any to the nominally climactic “Loveland” sequence and wisely Read more ...
Maggie Bain
When director Bruce Guthrie first gave me the script for Man to Man by Manfred Karge, I was immediately mesmerised by the language, each of the 27 scenes leapt off the page. Some are a few short sentences, other pages long; every one a perfectly formed fragment from a unique and potentially broken mind, flipping from prose to poetry. There are no stage directions, no character description.The script Bruce handed me was a photocopy of a typewriter copy he had been emailed by the National Theatre Literary Department; faded, smudged and with some of the bottom lines cut off, I had to Read more ...
Howard Brenton
I wrote The Blinding Light to try to understand the mental and spiritual crisis that August Strindberg suffered in February 1896. Deeply disturbed, plagued by hallucinations, he holed up in various hotel rooms in Paris, most famously in the Hotel Orfila in the Rue d’Assas.He’d had great success in Paris. A revival of Miss Julie in 1893 created a sensation and, in 1895, The Father had been rapturously received. But now he abandoned playwrighting. He announced he was not a writer but a true “natural scientist”, an alchemist. His hands burnt by chemicals, he attempted to make gold.It would be an Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Temple Church gained worldwide fame when Dan Brown included a major plot point there in his mega-selling novel The Da Vinci Code in 2003, but it has been standing, minding its own business, since the late 12th century. Now it’s home for a short run of Antic Disposition’s Richard III, following a tour of several UK cathedrals – including, controversially, Leicester, where the king's skeleton was reinterred in 2015 after being discovered in a nearby car park.The controversy, such that it was, concerned Shakespeare’s treatment of the king – who was either an evil child murderer or clever Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill wrote Late Company when he was only 23. It would be an impressive achievement at any age, but it seems all the more remarkable that so stark a dissection of the consequences of a tragedy should have come from so young a writer. Written in 2013, it was his fifth play.Tannahill has said that its inspiration came from a real-life incident in his hometown, Ottawa, and that he had originally meant to write it more for himself, and perhaps a group of friends – as a kind of internal reckoning. But he has gone far beyond that: the skill and tightness of the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Fifty years ago this month, playwright Joe Orton was murdered by his lover Kenneth Halliwell. His debut play, Entertaining Mr Sloane, had both outraged and delighted West End audiences in 1964, and his follow-up a year later was Loot, which was a flop at first and then a hit when restaged in 1966. This is the show currently being revived at the Park Theatre in a production which restores some of the lines cut by the Lord Chamberlain.Only a handful of lines, mainly about a brothel, are involved, but it’s nice to think that director Michael Fentiman discovered the original script in Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Hark, is that the call of the earth I hear? In a frenetic urban world, the myth of rural simplicity exerts a strong pull. Surely a simpler life is possible; a more natural rhythm and a slower pace? Oh yes, I can smell burnt peat, and almost scent the deep ploughed soil and farmyard animals, as I walk into the Donmar Warehouse for this dark revival of David Harrower’s 1995 masterpiece, Knives in Hens, directed this time by Yaël Farber. But this story from a mythical old agrarian world is not a nostalgic evocation of the past. It is much more gnarled than that.Set in a stretch of unspecified Read more ...
theartsdesk
Wondering what on earth to choose between as you tramp the streets of the festival? These are our highlights so far.STANDUPAthenu Kugblenu, Underbelly Med Quad ★★★ Strong debut hour of political and identity comedyCally Beaton, The Caves ★★★★ Single motherhood, autism, sex with women, the corporate world: original and cleverDad’s Army Radio Hour, Pleasance Dome ★★★ Scripts of born-again sitcom classic delivered with real light and shadeDarren Harriott, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★ Extrovert with strong material on politics and personal historyElliot Steel, Gilded Ballroom ★★ Slacker lad's tales Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Luke is a Silicon Valley billionaire, a high-tech wizard. And he’s just had a message from God. And what does God say? Well, He says, “Go where there’s violence.” So what does Luke do? He does what he’s been told, and devotes his considerable intellect and his even more considerable resources to solving the problem of violence in our society. Okay, it sounds wildly implausible, and if Luke wasn’t being played by Ben Whishaw in this new play by the ace American penman Christopher Shinn, at the Almeida Theatre, I might not have believed it either. But he is, and so I do.Against takes this Read more ...
David Kettle
Meet Me at Dawn ★★★★★ Edinburgh-based playwright Zinnie Harris is the subject of a particular focus at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, with three productions in collaborations with leading Scottish theatre companies. Her blazing adaptation of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros has been pulling crowds at the Lyceum Theatre, and her searing Aeschylus reboot This Restless House, created with Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre and the National Theatre of Scotland, opens next week.It’s another Greek myth – that of Orpheus and Eurydice – that simmers in the background of Meet Me at Dawn at the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Every play is a Brexit play. This much we have learnt in the year since the referendum. But in Nancy Meckler’s hands the Globe’s new King Lear becomes the Brexit play – an unpicking of intergenerational responsibility and difference, of philosophies of power and governance, tackling above all that sticky question of what the old really owe the young.But the dramatic dice are loaded. The audience enters to a Globe covered in tarpaulins and chipboard, “KEEP OUT” scrawled across the boarded-up gallery. A cast of squatters surges onto the stage, all anoraks, unwashed hair and beanies, tearing Read more ...