Theatre
Helen Hawkins
How do you refresh a masterpiece? Bringing back his first and still greatest hit, Swan Lake, Matthew Bourne seems to have changed only minor details since its 1995 premiere at Sadler’s Wells. Its core brilliance is untouched.As usual with Bourne, the production will have been adjusted slightly with each iteration, but it’s possible to compare the 30th anniversary version with the 1995 one, of which handily there is a DVD. The accumulated tweaks are minor. The giant crown hanging in the Prince’s rooms is now a vibrant scarlet, as is the Queen’s ballgown, popping out of her otherwise black Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The Young Vic has opened under a new artistic director with a puzzle play. The puzzle is, why stage this piece today?The key themes of Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play look promising on paper: a strong-willed woman battling her brothers for an inheritance, Succession replayed in the deep South. Regina Hubbard Giddens was a plum role for Tallulah Bankhead on stage and Bette Davis in the 1941 film version. And the cinema is where the piece is most at home, a Hollywood melodrama for an actress who can give Regina (the clue is in the name) a regal grandeur, as well as a skilled line in manipulation. Read more ...
aleks.sierz
I live in Brixton, south London. To get to the tube, I have to cross Windrush Square. Since 2021, I go past the Cherry Groce memorial, which honours the woman who was wrongfully shot by the Met in 1985, an event which sparked the riots I remember so well from 40 years ago. Amazingly enough, I have now seen her sister, Sutara Gayle AKA Lorna Gee, performing a gig theatre piece on the main stage at the Royal Court.The Legends of Them is an autobiographical memory play during the course of which young Lorna grows into Sutara Gayle, told in fragmentary flashbacks which are vivid enough to be Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There is something deliciously perfect about the timing of The Producers’ arrival at the Menier Chocolate Factory. In these twitchy times, Mel Brooks’s scurrilous Hitler musical lands like a stinkbomb in a parfumerie.Swastikas are everywhere, even on the backs of pigeons; there’s a man dressed as Jesus serving a tray of champagne, a bearded Hasidic dancer brandishing a prayer roll who wafts in and out of the routines, geriatric humping and prolific swearing; even Michelangelo’s David turns up, created by a dancer in a white bodysuit and wig, his “marble” tackle prominently to the fore. If you Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Hermia is a headbutting punk with a tartan fetish, Oberon looks like Adam Ant and Lysander appears to have stumbled out of a Madness video. Yet Eleanor Rhode’s exuberant A Midsummer Night’s Dream – which has transferred from a triumphant run at Stratford-Upon-Avon – is no straightforward Eighties tribute, but a psychedelic mashup that’s as ravishing as it’s gritty.Lucy Osborne’s versatile design whisks us from the sinister grandeur of the opening – in which a sun resembling a military flag hangs over the stage to remind us that Theseus has wooed Hippolyta by force – to the hallucinogenic Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's second time only quasi-lucky for The Devil Wears Prada, the stage musical adaptation of the much-loved Meryl Streep film from 2006 that nosedived in Chicago a few summers ago and has resurfaced on the West End to see another day.Refitted with a largely fresh creative team, the show ticks all the boxes that devotees of the movie will want and expect, while never really establishing a reason for being of its own, as Kinky Boots, from the same director (Jerry Mitchell), managed so triumphantly some while back.Mitchell's latest has a vaguely Primark feel where it ought to feel haute couture Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Growing up within a few hundred yards of a major dock, I hardly knew darkness or quiet – the first time I properly felt their terrible beauty was on the Isle of Man ferry in the middle of the Irish Sea, its voids still vivid half a century on. Only a couple of years or so later, I was alone (friends must have left early) and had miscalculated the time required to walk back from the sandhills of Freshfield Beach to the railway station, 20 minutes or so away. Within the briefest of windows, the familiar woods – friendly with the smell of pine and the cuddly toy-like red squirrels Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
If Harold Pinter’s work represents, as he slyly joked, the weasel under the cocktail cabinet, then Oscar Wilde’s represents the stiletto in the Victorian sponge – at a time when the stiletto was a slim dagger used for assassination. Beneath the fopperies and fripperies of his fin-de-siècle classic, every line draws blood as he skewers the false gods and hypocrisies of his age.On paper there’s plenty to tempt audiences to the National Theatre’s latest production of Wilde's searing attack on social convention. Maybe you’re seduced by the thought of a cast that includes current Dr Who, Read more ...
Heather Neill
It's all too easy to underplay the melancholy of Shakespeare's comedy of divided twins, misplaced – sometimes narcissistic – love, drunken frolics and a Puritan given his comeuppance. Tom Littler's decision to present the action in a very English Illyria during the years following World War II immediately sets the melancholy tone, but with pleasure bursting to make an entrance.The names of lost soldiers (loved ones nominated by real people) are inscribed in a memorial around the stage, a bell tolls until it rings for victory, and it is clear that Olivia is mourning a brother who has died in Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Percy Jackson is neither the missing one from Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Michael, nor an Australian Test cricketer of the 1920s, but a New York teenager with dyslexia and ADHD who keeps getting expelled from school. He’s a bit of a loner, too intense to huddle with the geeks, too stubborn to avoid the fights with the jocks, and his mother won’t tell him anything about his absent father. Who turns out to be a Greek god. Could happen to any kid. It’s that blend of familiar anxieties and fantastical backstory that propelled Rick Riordan’s bedtime stories into novels, films, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
British theatre excels in presenting social issues: at its best, it shines a bright light on the controversial subjects that people are thinking, and talking, about. Emteaz Hussain’s excellent new play, which opens at the Royal Court, is based on the appalling crimes, which took place from the 1990s to the 2010s, which involved hundreds of young girls being sexually exploited in northern towns by gangs of predatory men.Broadly based on the Rotherham child sexual abuse scandal, which affected some 1,400 girls who were groomed by gangs of mainly Asian men, Expendable has little to say about the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Watching Dan McCabe’s 2019 play, older folk might be reminded of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’s indelible lyrics, “Can blue men sing the whites, or are they hypocrites…?” The Purists moves the question into the 21st century in a teasing but very enjoyable way.Clearly McCabe has dodged the attention of the cultural appropriation monitors here, a young white man daring to write about hiphop, seemingly a passion of his. His play tags a weightier form of cultural appropriation: the incursion of capitalism into the world of emcees and rap battles, where the enemy is seen as the mighty record Read more ...