Theatre
Peter Quantrill
Back in Margaret Thatcher’s middle England, teenagers got by somehow. Without recourse to wands or Ballardian games of extinction, we survived adolescence with the help of a story full of people we knew. People (a bit) like us. Every year I re-read Sue Townsend’s chronicles of Adrian Mole, hopeless lovestruck bard of Leicester. And each year he grew up with me, as experience uncovered the texture of Mole’s life. "Phoned Auntie Susan but she is on duty in Holloway." A line like that was simply information at first. A year or two later, it brought a smile, then a conspiratorial laugh.Laughter Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's enough plot for a dozen plays buzzing its way through Mosquitoes, Lucy Kirkwood's play that uses the backdrop of the Large Hadron Collidor (LHC) to chronicle the multiple collisions within a family. Veering off now and then into discussion of particle physics, Rufus Norris's furiously busy production is anchored by Olivia Colman and Olivia Williams as largely fractious siblings enmeshed in a spiralling landscape of sexting, career sabotage, incipient senility, and a helluva lot more.Any one of these topics might have made a play all its own, and the accomplished creative team here on Read more ...
bella.todd
Plays with songs in, or more precisely plays with famous songs in, can feel like the uncanny valley of theatre. They’re not quite musicals and not quite tribute shows. They deliver on familiar tunes and disconcert with fresh narrative. You’re constantly wrongfooted by the rush of recognition.Lazarus was good-weird – a mash-up of David Bowie and Enda Walsh with a vision so unique and uncompromising it didn’t matter if anyone else could quite see it. Girl from the North Country, the new play by Conor McPherson for the Old Vic with songs from Bob Dylan’s back catalogue, is also very weird. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Maggie the cat is alive: I am alive," or so remarks the feline, eternally frustrated heroine of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. That self-assessment has rarely been truer than as spoken by Sienna Miller in the terrific West End production directed by Benedict Andrews, in which the actress finally lands the stage role in which she can let rip.Casually updated to a contemporary landscape of mobile phones and luxury black satin sheets, Williams's portrait of pain, deception and death in the American south emerges with its potency intact, Miller and co-star Jack O'Connell the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Olivia Williams’s first film was, (in)famously, seen by almost no one. The Postman, Kevin Costner’s expensive futuristic misfire, may have summoned her from the depths of chronic unemployment, but the first time anyone actually clapped eyes on her was in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, in which Bill Murray most understandably falls in love with her peachy reserved English rose. Then came The Sixth Sense, in which with great subtlety she in effect gave two performances as the wife/widow of Bruce Willis, depending on whether you were watching for the first or second time.The summons to Hollywood was Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
When I say that Matthew Dunster’s Much Ado is revolutionary I’m not talking about the many textual updatings and rewritings, not the lashings of PJ Harvey, nor even the gunfire – weaponised punchlines that cut through the colour and noise of the production. No, the revolution in question is in Mexico, 1914, home to Dunster’s exuberant, moustachioed, tequila-fuelled fiesta of a production that swaggers and stamps its way across the Globe’s stage this summer.Don Pedro (Steve John Shepherd) becomes a Pancho Villa-like revolutionary, leading a band of hot-blooded hangers-on from his headquarters Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"What is this, Saving Private Ryan?" a character randomly queries well into the actor Oliver Cotton's new play, Dessert. Well, more like a modern-day An Inspector Calls on steroids, with the volume turned up so high in Trevor Nunn's production that you don't half believe the questioner's wife when she talks about a state of affairs that could be heard all the way to France. After a promising and prickly start, Cotton's hectoring satire of our recklessly self-absorbed, increasingly divisive age devolves into implausibility and hysteria in equal measure. The result is less enlightenment Read more ...
Susan Sheahan
Much loved, yes. But Dickens’s novel is probably little read by modern audiences and so a chance to see a new adaptation of this tale of discontent, riot and general mayhem set in the French revolution and spread across London and Paris in the late 1700s should be a genuine treat for theatregoers. And on paper Matthew Dunster’s version for Regent's Park of this intense exploration of injustice (billed, in fact, as "a new play") has it all: love, death, comedy, revolution and the promise of a provocative exploration of the underlying issues of power, oppression and tragedy connecting how we Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Hospital Club’s annual h.Club100 awards celebrate the most influential and innovative people working in the UK’s creative industries, with nominations from the worlds of film and fashion, art, advertising, theatre, music, television and more. This year they are teaming up with theartsdesk.com – the home of online arts journalism in the UK – to add a brand new award to the line-up.The Young Reviewer Award is aimed at bold, thoughtful young writers aged 18-30 who are serious about a career in arts journalism. It will be presented to the author of the best review of any art-form that we Read more ...
Deborah Bruce
My inspiration for The House They Grew Up In, my new play at Chichester Festival Theatre came about five years ago, in the café of an art gallery near my house. This café had a slightly intimidating air, full of its own importance, as if the art in the adjacent rooms elevated it above the normal status of a café. I’m not sure how I had ended up in there myself really, but I noticed two people at the next table that seemed particularly out of place.I have always people-watched, and on that day I felt so drawn to this man and woman.I listened intently to her sentences broken into small anxious Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Surrogacy is an emotionally fraught subject. The arrangement by which one woman gives birth to another’s baby challenges traditional notions of motherhood, and pitches the anguish of the woman who can’t have children herself against the agony of another woman who gives up her child. Vivienne Franzmann’s aptly titled Bodies at the Royal Court explores what happens when Clem, a British television producer, and her husband Josh use a Russian woman’s egg (fertilised by his sperm) and implant it in the womb of an Indian woman. No prizes for guessing that this is a tale of torment.Although Clem and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
How well do you know your British history? Fancy explaining the causes and origins of the Glorious Revolution or listing the members of the Grand Alliance? What about the terms of the 1701 Act of Settlement or the Occasional Confirmity Bill of 1702? I ask not because Helen Edmundson’s Queen Anne will require you to know any of this, but rather precisely because it won’t.If there was a Top Trumps of British monarchs Queen Anne wouldn’t be anyone’s pick for a winner. Hers is a corner of the 17th and 18th centuries rarely taught in schools, its political back-and-forth and factional tussling Read more ...