Theatre
The Great British Bake Off Musical, Noel Coward Theatre review - blue-chip cast lift daft confection
Helen Hawkins
If you are hoping for some harmless fun at The Great British Bake Off Musical, probably with a few dodgy jokes about soggy bottoms mixed in, you won’t be disappointed. But what you might not expect is that the show will liberally ladle on the innuendo and is so filthy at times that it’s like being at an adult panto. The audience on opening night certainly seemed a primed one, aahing when a contestant was sent home, booing when one resorted to sabotage. What else can the writers do, though, other than step up the smut when their subject is a storyless TV show set almost entirely in a Read more ...
Tom Teodorczuk
It never hurts the trajectory of a promising young playwright if they have a good eye for the zeitgeist, and the writer Joseph Charlton can certainly be said to possess that. His last play Anna X, inspired by high society scammer Anna Delvey and starring Emma Corrin, was a briefly-seen West End success post-pandemic and was staged several months before Netflix aired its phenomenally successful Inventing Anna series.Now Southwark Playhouse is reviving Brilliant Jerks, Charlton’s play chronicling the colourful history of a disruptive ride-sharing app (heavily based on Uber) five years to the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Can a play ever be a bit too much like real life? The thought came to me while watching Matilda Feyisayo Ibini’s entertaining new play Sleepova at the Bush. This latest opening is almost a bookend to the excellent Red Pitch, premiered at the same address last year: another intimate piece about teens in transition to adulthood, but this time featuring a sparky female quartet, not a football-mad trio of young men. It has more lightness of spirit, but less grit.Proceedings start before lights down, with the voices of girls chatting behind the scenes and singing along to tracks playing over the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
As course after course of Noma-style creations are served up to Leontes and his guests – curious mouthfuls with their accompanying spoons, edible branches as though straight from the tree, elaborate miniatures ritually revealed from beneath a cloche – it’s clear that, in Sicilia, eating is scarcely the point. When you dine among sleek Swedish interiors, surrounded by a military drill-team of waiters, it’s hardly going to be about anything so vulgar as appetite, is it?Director Sean Holmes has pulled off a coup: the first director to use both of the Globe’s theatres in a single evening. It’s an Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Has theatre’s time passed? In Tim Crouch’s latest 70-minute show, first staged at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh last year and now at Battersea Arts Centre (BAC) in south London, the nature of live performance is interrogated by this innovative and imaginative theatre-maker, with a little help from a virtual reality headset and William Shakespeare.Taking its title from one of the Fool’s comments in King Lear, this intriguing and entertaining event looks at how the metaphorical dog of truth has been whipped, while the hounds of post-truth deception are given too many treats.We are in Read more ...
Gary Naylor
It is, perhaps, important to note that this production was first staged in London at the Young Vic, a venue noted for shows possessed of a rather harder edge than that usually connoted by the description "West End musical".On leaving the theatre after an unnecessarily gruelling evening in just about the most uncomfortable seat in which I’ve ever sat (and competition is very fierce in that category), I heard an old boy who had not clocked that provenance remark, “It was very… modern.” Quite.And why not? The old warhorse has seen 80 years of beautiful mornings, sitting in the canon of Read more ...
David Nice
The farce in question is fast and furious, but not often hilariously funny; that’s because it’s the invention of a scary Irish dad who forces his sons to act it out with him every day in their seedy Walworth Road flat. Go with conventional expectations and you’ll be wrong-footed, or downright disappointed; Enda Walsh pushes boundaries, pulls the dirty rug from under our feet. Vividly acted, directed and designed, this revival of his 2006 two-acter suggests it’s a masterpiece.It helps not to know what lies in store, which heightens the thriller aspect of the play; I was a nervy virgin Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
It’s been five years since 72 people died in the Grenfell Tower fire in West London. Five years and no arrests, as countless placards and posters around the neighbourhood point out.The Grenfell Tower Inquiry into how the tragedy occurred – why it was allowed to occur by hundreds of people – concluded in November 2022, with enough material that Richard Norton-Taylor and Nicolas Kent have been able to construct another devastating verbatim play. Where Grenfell: Value Engineering (2021) left us speechless, System Failure makes us rage.The Playground Theatre is about 10 minutes’ walk from Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
A man in modern garb reads a tabloid newspaper and makes smarmy wisecracks about the malaise of contemporary Britain – strikes, NHS waiting lists and the rest of it. But hang on a minute: isn’t this meant to be a period drama? Lulu Raczka’s new play at the Almeida, directed by Rupert Goold, declares its fundamental, gleeful tricksiness from the start. The aforementioned chap is the devil, no less, breaking the fourth wall with spoilers, and bemoaning the fact that, whereas once upon a time he was the accepted cause of the world’s ills, today “it’s structural, systemic, never evil Read more ...
aleks.sierz
With the fast-approaching anniversary of the latest war in Europe, our culture’s continued fascination with World War Two gets a contemporary boost from Trouble in Butetown at the Donmar Warehouse.Written by Diana Nneka Atuona, this follow-up to Liberian Girl, her 2015 debut, won the 2019 George Devine Award for most promising playwright. Although it revisits familiar territory, and adopts a deliberately traditional theatre form, it includes an interesting slant on race, multiculturalism and the Special Relationship between the UK and the USA.Set in Butetown, or Tiger Bay, a port area in Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Michael John O’Neill’s first full-length play, premiering at the Hampstead's studio space downstairs, is a puzzler. There’s the title, to start with, a Hebrew word that means “binding” and is a reference to the story of Abraham preparing his son Isaac, at God’s command, to be sacrificed.Spotting the reworking of this biblical theme in the text can be a challenge, even though O’Neill usefully has one of the characters treasure her toy lamb, Deadsheep, as a clue. The religion that features here, too, isn’t Judaism but a cultish kind of Pentecostalism, including speaking in tongues, led by a Read more ...
Mert Dilek
What is one to do with Greek tragedy on the contemporary stage? For Simon Stone, whose Phaedra is currently playing at the National Theatre, the answer is a kind of radical adaptation that retains the myth’s backbone but revises all else.For an alternative response, London theatregoers could do worse than head to @sohoplace, where Dominic Cooke’s production of Euripides’s Medea, in a version by the American poet Robinson Jeffers, does something far less unorthodox but is duly searching.A lot hinges here on the heavy-lifting done by Cooke’s lead cast: an unsurprisingly commanding Sophie Read more ...