Theatre
Tom Birchenough
“Everything in extremity”. That announcement that the Capulet party is about to begin could just as well serve to describe Daniel Kramer’s Romeo and Juliet as a whole. Opening the Globe's new season, it will provoke reactions as conflicting as the play’s warring families. Purists will pan it, that’s for sure, while fans may welcome a fiery energy that melds in considerable comedy. There’s precious little room for any in-between.The party scene says it all. It’s played out to Village People’s “YMCA”. Capulet is clad in a dinosaur suit (he’s accompanied through most of the action by a human dog Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Duncan Macmillan has had a good couple of years. In 2015, his play People, Places and Things was a big hit at the National Theatre, winning awards and transferring to the West End. His other plays, often produced by new-writing company Paines Plough, have been regular fixtures at the Edinburgh Festival, while his co-adaptation (with director Robert Icke) of George Orwell’s classic Nineteen Eighty-Four has been constantly revived in the West End. Now he tackles novelist Paul Auster’s masterpiece in a show that is visually intensive, as well as intellectually satisfying. City of Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
There is a distinctive look, feel, even sound to a stage production directed by Ivo van Hove, which is becoming rather familiar to London theatregoers after two cult hits, A View From the Bridge and Hedda Gabler. You know you’re in van Hovenland as soon as you see the modishly empty stage which before long one of the characters will trash, leaving everyone to wade through detritus for the rest of the play. Long stretches of dialogue will be underscored by music, looped so that the same cadence comes round and round again like toothache. You will also hear unnerving rhythmic sounds that can’t Read more ...
Julian Curry
Much of the brilliance of Shakespeare lies in the openness, or ambiguity, of his texts. Whereas a novelist will often describe a character, an action or a scene in the most minute detail, Shakespeare knew that his scenarios would only be fully fleshed out when actors perform them. He was the first writer to create character out of language. Falstaff has an idiosyncratic way of speaking that is quite distinct from Juliet, as she does from Shylock, and he from Lady Macbeth. An actor receives subliminal clues about their character, merely by the way they express themselves.George Bernard Shaw Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Text can sometimes be a prison. At its best, post-war British theatre is a writer’s theatre, with the great pensmiths – from Samuel Beckett, John Osborne and Harold Pinter to Caryl Churchill, Martin Crimp and Sarah Kane – carving out visions of everyday humanity in all our agonies and glee. But the mountain of written words that they have built is only a part of the live theatre experience, and it is increasingly being questioned by playwrights themselves. Now at the Royal Court, Simon Stephens, author of the West End hit adaptation The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, offers Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Christopher Hampton's witty comedy, first performed in 1970, ingeniously inverts Molière's The Misanthrope, centring as it does on a man whose compulsive amiability manages to upset just about everyone.At the heart of the play is Philip, the polar opposite of Molière's Alceste, the man who turns scathing hatred into an artform. Here Philip is a anxiety-ridden bachelor don who seemingly likes everyone and who teaches philology because, he gaily offers, he lacks the critical faculty needed to teach literature. He's incapable of other things, too: he may be a man in love with words, but despite Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It used to be said that the devil had all the best music. But the devil seems to have lost his touch in this ghost-story rock musical from Duncan Sheik, composer of the stage version of American Psycho and the award-laden Spring Awakening. If the plot seems familiar, it’s because it is – in essence, anyway. An isolated location. Childhood innocence in peril. Malevolent ghosts with a score to settle. Another American abroad tied up that narrative package more than a century ago in The Turn of the Screw.But the main problem with Whisper House, which premiered in San Diego in 2010 and here Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The Bush is back! After a whole year of darkness, the West London new writing venue has reopened its doors following a £4.3million remodelling and refurb, a project close to the heart of its artistic director Madani Younis. Designed by architect Steve Tompkins, and including beautiful ceiling paintings by local artist Antoni Malinowski, the venue looks brilliant, with its new terrace, fully accessible entrance and extra rooms. These include a lovely new rehearsal space, expanded offices and a sedum roof (complete with two black cats). Plus, most significantly, a brand new studio theatre that Read more ...
David Benedict
“Then I’ll kiss her so she’ll know.” At the sound of his ringing voice, the girls part to reveal him standing there, a hapless monument of rumpled charm. The audience relaxes in pleasure as an easeful actor joyfully shows what you can do with a command of textual detail, physicality and, above all, character. The trouble is, the excellent Gavin Spokes is playing not one of the leads but the supporting role of Mr Snow. The downside of a performance this assured is that it shows you exactly what has been missing until now.To a degree, this is a gamble that has paid off – the emphasis is on the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This is a well-travelled Winter’s Tale. Declan Donnellan has long been a director who's as much at home abroad as he is in the UK, and with co-production support here coming pronouncedly from Europe (there's American backing, too), Cheek by Jowl have made it abundantly clear where they stand on the issue of the day. Their version of Shakespeare's greatest romance reaches the Barbican’s Silk Street Theatre after a frenetic touring schedule that began in Paris more than a year ago, with further voyages beckoning. When it comes to travelling light, Nick Ormerod’s spare design must have been of Read more ...
Alistair Beaton
If you’d asked me five years ago whether I might one day write a comedy about fracking, I’d have wondered whether you were entirely in possession of your faculties. Not because fracking sounds dull and boring (although let’s be honest, it does), but because the business of fracking had never really caught my attention.That changed when I stumbled on some photographs of the effect of fracking on the landscapes of Pennsylvania, Texas, and North Dakota. From the air, some areas of those States resembled the surface of the moon. Astonishing then that dozens more states were giving the go-ahead to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It is the fate of a certain type of well-spoken classically trained actor to wear the livery of the English Establishment. Tim Pigott-Smith, double-barrelled and tall with a high forehead, was one such. But the full arc of his career encompassed vast breadth: he was a gifted tragedian, and a nifty comedian. “In television I was first cast as a cavalry officer because of my name,” he told me when I interviewed him in 2015. He brought an air of entitlement to the PM in Johnny English, the Foreign Minister in Quantum of Solace, various higher-ups in various uniforms in The Chief, The Vice, Read more ...