Theatre
Matt Wolf
Harry Potter lives to see another day. The Hogwarts wizard has made his stage debut in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a two-part play that pushes JK Rowling’s world-beating franchise beyond the realm of fiction and film to embrace live action: the bespectacled boy has become an angsty grown-up, and London theatre is much the richer for it.But are these characters really three-dimensional? The answer is a resounding yes, if a moist-eyed audience following Sunday’s final curtain is any gauge. Indeed, the resounding irony across the marathon of more than five hours is that a production so Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
London’s West End may be the envy of the world, but when it comes to musicals the big-hitting theatres might have to up their game a bit if they’re to keep up with the city’s rival offerings. Compare the summer’s biggest opening, Aladdin (currently failing to pull a genie out of its bottle at the Prince Edward Theatre) with just a few of the current upstart alternatives: the cheeky and charming Bugsy Malone at the Lyric Hammersmith and the thoughtful Into The Woods at the Menier Chocolate Factory. Now, from Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, comes yet another challenger – a gritty new Jesus Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Neil LaBute’s exercise in self-flagellation, first seen in 2005 and adapted for film in 2013, offers his familiar misanthropic take on the battle of the sexes. This one concerns Guy (Charles Dorfman), engaged to be married and embarking on a tour of ex-girlfriends across America – ostensibly to right wrongs, but murkier motives soon emerge.It’s inescapably formulaic and repetitive, with Guy visiting a series of women in a series of hotels, each exchange following a similar pattern: defensiveness, rekindled intimacy, revelation and recrimination. Gary Condes’s production differentiates the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Children will listen," or so goes a lyric to one of the most heart-rending numbers in Into the Woods, the Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine musical that seems rarely to be long-absent from the British stage. And the great virtue of the Fiasco Theatre's approach to this of all Sondheim shows is that the company's childlike sense of play releases the abiding seriousness, even sorrow, of the piece afresh. You may chafe near the outset at some of the more cutesy theatrics, including two men en travesti (better done by the British in any case) and folded bits of paper to indicate flocks of birds Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
There are obvious reasons why films about the theatre outnumber plays about the movie industry, but here’s a play that bucks that trend. Anthony Neilson’s latest drama is located on a film set somewhere distant, hot and challenging but doesn’t allow us so much as a peep at the local colour. Throughout the evening any potential view of the wider world is blocked on stage by those wheelie screens cinematographers use for bouncing light around. Their presence signals the theme of the play. Unreachable has no interest in glamourising the film industry. Instead, it sets out to satirise the Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Womanising detectives, shapely dames, gangsters and convoluted criminal conspiracies: Richard O’Brien and Richard Hartley’s 1982 musical take on Carter Brown’s California-set whodunit fiction is pulp noir to the max. However, unlike the pair’s previous collaboration, the indelible Rocky Horror Show, this is more homage than send-up – arch but fairly straightforward storytelling in place of riotous, risqué pastiche.That’s problematic when Sixties sensibilities are presented to a modern audience with only the flimsiest attempts at subversion. The male gaze dominates, unashamedly, in Read more ...
Marianka Swain
For those in sore need of a theatrical pick-me-up, jazz square your way over to Bugsy Malone. Last year’s smash-hit opener of the redeveloped Lyric has been given a well-deserved encore, with Sean Holmes’s production once again nailing the beguiling blend of Alan Parker’s 1976 film: children performing musical mobster pastiche, smartly knowing in their deconstruction of adult absurdities, but sidestepping cloying precocity.There’s a ramshackle feel to this Bugsy – some garbled dialogue, accents meandering between broad New Yoik and distinct south London – that actually adds to its charm. No Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Oh dear. I could have sworn I had a book about Irish playwright Brian Friel somewhere. But I can’t find it. Or maybe I never bought it. Maybe I just thought I might have bought it. Maybe it’s a false memory. Better ask my wife. Now at least I’m in the zone, that place called ambiguity that is, aptly enough, one of the characteristics of Friel’s 1979 play, Faith Healer, which is being revived with a starry cast at this boutique venue. With its themes of miracle cures, bitter exile and fallible memory, this tale is as resonant as ever. Suddenly it feels like the ideal post-Brexit play.Frank Read more ...
Ismene Brown
How often are you charmed by one of Shakespeare’s sylvan romances while literally under a greenwood tree? Even if this summer is proving rather generous with the rough weather, it is an unusual pleasure to wander around a fine woodland garden while Rosalind and Orlando pursue their light-hearted crossdressing courtship in the forest of Arden, and white sheets inked with bad love poems flutter from the trunks of many oak trees.The Crown Estate's Savill Garden in Windsor Great Park is worth a trip for itself, but for the past two midsummers it’s had the additional treat of evening performances Read more ...
Marianka Swain
In seeking to understand the historic, divisive and to some bewildering Brexit vote, I will turn to theatre. Through my regular exposure to it, I can number among my ever-widening acquaintance a young king, a whistleblower, a minimum-wage movie usher, a recovering alcoholic, a passionate teacher, a grieving parent, a struggling miner, an evangelical preacher, an underpaid social worker, a dementia sufferer, and a pair of star-crossed lovers.Theatre is empathy incarnate. It is one of the greatest tools we have for reaching another person, understanding their point of view, coming to realise Read more ...
Melissa Bubnic
In the opening scene of Boys Will Be Boys, the lead character, Astrid, talks about how there’s a boys’ world and a girls’ world. Boys’ world is where you want to be. That’s where power is, that’s where fun is. Boys get to be boys and that means holding all the cards, and doing whatever the fuck you want. How do women get into boys’ world when they’ve got a vagina?This play is about how women navigate life in a man’s world. The play is set in the macho world of fictional trading and broking firm, the very respectable Peterson Jones & Walker. Our characters embrace the work-hard-play-hard Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It begins promisingly, a dark Gothic fairy tale – both Grimm and grim. The writhing witches (four, oddly) are summoned from a pile of dead bodies, Stefan Fichert’s eerie puppetry all chopped-up limbs and interchanging demonic heads, hands scuttling across the floor like a spider, and disembodied voices chanting and haunting. Then the spell is broken and “what seem’d corporal melted”.Unfortunately, that’s also when the air goes out of Iqbal Khan’s lacklustre production, which plods along from one incident to the next without any clear intent. Ray Fearon’s Macbeth is a mellifluous speaker Read more ...