Theatre
aleks.sierz
One island off the coast of Spain has more cultural oomph than all the rest put together. I’m talking about Ibiza, the sun-soaked, music-happy and drug-friendly paradise for anyone in their roaring luved-up twenties who wants a break that will fry their minds – and imprinting them with memories of sun, sex and ecstasy for years to come.Fair enough, but what happens when a group of guys decide to recreate this experience in their fifties? Well, that’s the subject of actor Neil D’Souza’s new comedy, Out of Season, which is currently playing in the Hampstead Theatre’s Downstairs studio.Set in Read more ...
aleks.sierz
For the past ten years, Black-British playwrights have been in the vanguard of innovation in the form and content of new writing. I’m thinking not only of writers with longer careers such as Roy Williams and debbie tucker green, but also of Inua Ellams, Arinzé Kene, Nathaniel Martello-White, Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini and Tyrell Williams.And every year they are joined by other talents. One such is Benedict Lombe, who won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2022 for her debut monologue, Lava, and now returns to the Bush Theatre with her latest, a 100-minute two-hander which is exquisitely written Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It’s an unhappy time to be staging Shakespeare’s problematic play, given its antisemitic content, so hats off to adaptor-director Brigid Larmour and actor Tracy-Ann Oberman for persevering with this updated version, now in the West End. Their ambition to make Shylock a female anti-fascist has been hard won, though.The choice of location (not Venice) and date for the update is crucial here – the eruption of violence in the East End occasioned by the rise of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), led by Oswald Mosley. Oberman’s Shylock lives on this frontline, a gutsy widow running a moneylending Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Is there a healthier sound than that of laughter ringing round a theatre? There are plenty of opportunities to test that theory in Tinuke Craig’s riotous revival of The Big Life, two decades on from its first run at this very venue. Much has changed in that time, specifically the coming to light of the appalling mistreatment of the Windrush Generation at the hands of a callous, racist state. What might have felt then like an unnecessarily heavy-handed political undertow now feels, if anything, underplayed. If that’s the grit in the oyster, the substance of this feelgood musical is a Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In 2017, two years after Hir premiered, Taylor Mac was awarded a “Genius Grant” and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for drama. The new production of Hir at the Park demonstrates why. It’s a rich, provocative piece about the ideas that drive us now, thrown into a blender and blitzed.Mac is a Swiss Army knife of a creative force: performer, singer/songwriter, writer, performance artist, director, producer. His preferred pronouns are judy/judy’s – not a reference, he has insisted, to Judy Garland but to the custom of gay men to disguise their boyfriends by calling them Judy or Mary. (That said, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
You do not need to be Einstein to feel it. If the only dimension missing is time, 75% of a place’s identity can invade your very being, hollow you out, replace your soul with a void. It happened to me at Auschwitz and it’s happening to Samuel at Cape Coast Castle, Ghana.Not at first. We meet him as our host, full of bonhomie, not just reading his script, but revelling in communicating his love of history to the tourists who come to the last staging post for slaves before the dreadful Middle Passage to the Americas. Disillusion sets in. Some visitors are ticking off a bucket list, others Read more ...
Mert Dilek
Less than three years after her magnificent Macbeth, Yaël Farber returns to the Almeida with another Shakespeare tragedy. Her take on King Lear (main picture) offers a full-bodied, slow-burn version of this devastating drama, where Danny Sapani’s masterful performance as Lear sears the stage.While bringing a modern-dress aesthetic to Shakespeare’s play, Farber’s production sets great store by a poetic minimalism that foregrounds the expressive powers of her outstanding cast. On a stage surrounded by a string curtain and occasionally featuring only a few chairs, a piano, and a metal globe Read more ...
Mert Dilek
Doom and gloom, we are told, may have abounded in the classical underworld, but Hadestown suggests otherwise. Returning to London five years after its run at the National Theatre, this time with a slew of Tony Awards, this bracing musical proves its mettle as a heart-warming and atmospheric feast of deeply soulful tunes.With music, lyrics, and book by American singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell, Hadestown reimagines familiar tales from mythology through exquisite songs and eloquent stagecraft. The story centres on the tragic romance between the bard Orpheus and Eurydice, as king Hades and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Real life is a helluva lot scarier right now than you might guess from the performative theatrics on display in the new West End version of An Enemy of the People, which updates Ibsen's 1882 play to our vexatious modern day.Matt Smith is in fine, furious form as the crusading Thomas Stockmann, but the combative landscape is here so predictably writ large - its emotions so preordained - that Thomas Ostermeier's production feels as if it's running in place: an opinion piece online would have made the same points far more quickly. Ostermeier, the German director/adaptor working on this Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It’s awards season in the film world, which means that we’re currently swamped by hyperbolic shows of love and respect – actors and their directors gushing about how each could simply never have reached their creative heights without the other. Of course, it’s not always like that; there is plenty of hell unleased on a movie set. John Logan’s new play investigates the messier, uglier side of the director-actor dynamic, by considering two real-life, notorious, if very different confrontations. One is between Alfred Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren, during the shooting of Marnie, in 1964 in Read more ...
David Nice
David Hemmings was, by his own later admission, a knowing and bumptious boy when Britten cast him as the ill-fated Miles in his operatic adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. The upheaval Hemmings wrought in Aldeburgh’s Crag House when Britten and his life-partner Peter Pears were living there has potential for a similar ambiguity to the opera’s carousel of what’s innocent and what’s “depraved,” and Kevin Kelly has realized the essential drama in it.The main problem is that no 12-year-old of unbroken voice was going to act in a more explicit take than the opera’s on who is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Art makes for unexpected bedfellows, and so it proves in Jez Butterworth's moving if meandering The Hills of California. Butterworth's first play in seven years owes a lot more to as unexpected a source as the musical Gypsy than it does to such previous successes from this same author as The Ferryman and his mighty Jerusalem. Telling of the toxic legacy of a Blackpool stage mother, the play follows The Ferryman in granting pride of place to the inestimable Laura Donnelly (Butterworth's partner), and this dramatist's collaboration with his similarly Tony-winning director, Sam Mendes, Read more ...