Theatre
Matt Wolf
Why? That's the abiding question that hangs over The Girls, the sluggish and entirely pro forma Tim Firth-Gary Barlow musical that goes where Firth's film and stage play of Calendar Girls have already led. Telling of a charitable impulse that succeeded beyond all expectations, the real-life scenario makes for heartening fare in our seemingly heartless times. But the fact remains that this latest version of the narrative brings very little that is fresh to the table, unless you're so desperate for a new British musical at any cost that its mere existence is justification enough. As Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The 1980s were a great decade for British women playwrights. During those Thatcher-dominated years, Caryl Churchill produced two world-class masterpieces – Top Girls and Serious Money – while a host of other playwrights, such as Timberlake Wertenbaker, April De Angelis, Charlotte Keatley, Sarah Daniels, Winsome Pinnock and Andrea Dunbar lit up our stages. Many of them experimented boldly with the structure of their plays, using time shifts and different storytelling techniques to give a forceful picture of women’s life experiences.The central event of the play happens offstageThe late Clare Read more ...
Will Rathbone
Hot on the heels of Katherine Soper's award-winning Wish List, about the UK benefits system in crisis, and John Godber's This Might Hurt, about an NHS in crisis, comes this play about our education system in crisis. One suspects there will be plenty more plays about comparable flashpoints to come, but the passionate arguments found within Alex MacKeith's somewhat over-zealous debut play definitely hit home. Set in the headteacher's office of a south London primary school on SAT results day, the play vividly outlines the dilemmas at its heart. Schools must adhere to rigid systems based on Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The Other Palace’s housewarming party certainly lives up to its billing as a wild one – wet and wild, in fact, as the first three rows are sporadically doused with bathtub gin. The theatre formerly known as St James, revamped by purchaser Andrew Lloyd Webber as a breeding ground for musicals, opens with the UK premiere of an established show: Michael John LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe’s 2000 version of Joseph Moncure March’s initially banned narrative poem about the excesses of the vaudevillian Roaring Twenties.Curiously, Andrew Lippa provided a competing musical take on March’s tale in the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Sex workers come in all shapes and sizes. Everyone knows that. But why do they do it? Why does anyone take the risk of being intimate with a stranger for money? This new show, which was not only devised with the help of genuine prostitutes, but is also acted by them, introduces us to both the enormous variety of sex workers and to their wide range of motives. The play, which was created by director Mimi Poskitt and playwright Molly Taylor, takes us by the hand and gently ushers us into a darkened room, designed by Katrina Lindsay, to show us a slice of life that is mainly invisible to most of Read more ...
David Kettle
In the end, it’s all about Mamillius. It’s he – the young son of Leontes of Sicily – who launches director Max Webster’s really quite magical new production of Shakespeare’s credibilty-busting tragedy-cum-comedy at Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre, suggesting it’s all a child’s made-up story in the first place. It's he who fast-forwards us 16 years just after the interval.And it’s he – superbly played by young Will Robertson on press night (the role alternates between two youngsters) – who provides the uncanny sense of innocence and wonder in Webster’s production, as though it’s all seen through Read more ...
David Nice
Hated the Schaubühne Hamlet (same lead actor, same director as this latest Shakespeare auf Deutsch); loved Ivo van Hove's Toneelgroep Kings of War, with Hans Kesting's Richard III on the highest level alongside the Henrys V and VI. Thomas Ostermeier's Berlin ensemble is nowhere near as vivid overall as van Hove's Dutch team, but everything that didn't work for me about Lars Eidinger's Prince of Denmark turns to fool's gold in his brilliant take on the bunch-back'd dissembler turned mass-murderer. It's a performance which takes you further than you thought possible.And the stage - in Jan Read more ...
aleks.sierz
There are few modern literary fables that really resonate in the wider culture. And most that do are dystopias. Think of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, or even Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? And, of course, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. This 1962 novel explores the myth of the unique violence of modern alienation in a hectic parable which is told in “nadsat”, a teen language of the future which mixes Russian with English while sporting a distinctly Shakespearean cadence.This is a testosterone-heavy, noisy and boyish Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Tom Stoppard’s humungously funny play Travesties was born out of a piece of James Joyce doggerel about how a British diplomat sued him for the cost of two pairs of trousers. It’s like this. Joyce was organising an expat amateur production of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in Zurich; the British consul Henry Carr agreed to play Algernon on the understanding that he would choose his own trousers and – crucially – have two full costume changes.As is the way in theatre, heads butted when the box office takings came in, and Joyce wrote in an outraged ditty about the incident: "We paid all Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Some know him only as Lord Varys the scheming eunuch, spymaster to the king of the Seven Kingdoms. Game of Thrones fans may be less familiar with Conleth Hill's other career as a nimble. light-footed stage actor of staggering range and skill whose name, mystifyingly, is less celebrated than his talents deserve. That is about to change. Hill is George to Imelda Staunton’s Martha in a new West End production of Edward Albee's Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?Staunton has sufficient clout at the box office that she was allowed to nominate her sparring partner. She chose wisely. Hill was a jobbing Read more ...
David Nice
Prolific, fitfully great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig's two biggest popular biographies, Marie Antoinette: The Story of an Average Woman and Mary Stuart, would be a gift for any screenwriter, given their fully realised dramatic scenes. His best-known and most substantial novel, Beware of Pity (its German title translates as "The Heart's Impatience"), seems less adaptable, given the revealing consciousness of its first-person narrator, an officer describing his disastrous relationship with a crippled girl brought to an end by the First World War. It did in fact become a 1946 movie, and now Read more ...
Jasper Rees
On 23 February 1942 at half past four in the afternoon in a secluded Brazilian hilltown called Petrópolis about an hour from Rio, a maid and her husband pushed at the bedroom door of a modest rented house. Despite the late hour, the tenants had not yet stirred. The door swung open to reveal, lying on the bed, a young woman in a cotton dress rolled over on her side, an older supine man wearing a jaunty moustache and a punctilious tie. The woman’s body was still warm.Word of the suicide of the famous writer Stefan Zweig and his wife Lotte hastened as rapidly around the globe as any news could, Read more ...