Theatre
aleks.sierz
History is a prison. Often, you can’t escape. It imprints its mark on people, environments and language. And nowhere is this more true that in Northern Ireland, where the history of conflict between the Republican Catholic community and the Loyalist Protestant community is both centuries old, and still raw from the legacy of The Troubles. Kate Reid’s new play, which premiered at the VAULT festival in 2020, and now resurfaces in a co-production between Park Theatre and Plain Heroines, gives a meta-theatrical spin – with the cast also including the playwright – on both the legacy of Bloody Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In the 80s, An Audience With... gave a television studio to an actor who then recounted stories culled from a life in entertainment. The best subjects were the natural raconteurs with plenty to say - Billy Connolly, Barry Humphries, the incomparable Kenneth Williams - and it's a testament to the format's longevity that Adele did one as recently as November. With a few crucial differences, David Suchet - Poirot And More, A Retrospective captures the warmth and easy pleasures of that much-loved format.Two chairs, placed the required two metres apart on stage, set the tone for the evening: Read more ...
David Nice
It sounds like the title of a play by Rattigan. No such luck: “Force Majeure” – a legal term with which all too few will be familiar, in which circumstances beyond anyone’s control cancel a contract – is how Ruben Östlund’s 2014 film Turist is known beyond Sweden (an American remake with Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, not good by all accounts, has much the best title, Downhill).This tragicomedy about the consequences of a husband and father running away from his family when an avalanche seems about to overwhelm a ski-resort restaurant has been adapted for the stage by Tim Price and Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Cecil Sharp, heritage hero or imperialist appropriator? If you attended school in the first half of the 20th century, you would have sung from his collections of English folk songs, and probably gritted your teeth and performed the country dances he recorded, too. Not far from the Hampstead Theatre, where Nell Leyshon’s play about him, Folk, has premiered in the Downstairs studio space, there is a world-renowned centre named for him and dedicated to the English folk traditions he helped salvage.Or did he? Sharp’s legacy has divided academic opinion since the 1980s, attracting complaints that Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Assembly Hall Theatre, Tunbridge Wells ★★★★Shirley Ballas (main picture), released from her day job as head judge on Strictly Come Dancing, certainly knows how to make an entrance, and as the Wicked Queen she does here in a range of fantastic costumes. She swashes her buckle – well, swishes her frock – with aplomb.Although Ballas's is the name above the title, the driving force of the show is Leon Craig in the Dame role as Nurse Nellie. He's terrific, much aided by a sparkling, family-friendly script by Paul Hendy (who can't resist a pun), and Damian Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There was no live theatre at the start of 2021, just a return to the world of virtual performance and streaming to which we had become well accustomed, and very quickly, too. So imagine the collective surprise come the start of this month as show after show, venue after venue, ceased performance or curtailed operations, however temporarily. Hex, Force Majeure and Moulin Rouge were three prominent end-of-year openings to push their press nights into 2022, a year shrouded as I write this by Omicron-prompted uncertainty. All one can do, and hardly for the first time these days, is hope that Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Was Peggy Ramsay a “woman out of time”? The celebrated London literary agent, who nurtured the talents of at least one generation of British playwrights, surely counted as a legend in her own lifetime (she died in 1991). Has she lasted beyond it?That the stories relating to her professional life – the personal life was kept much more off limits – around her celebrated office off St Martin’s Lane, up those flights of stairs, have lived on is due not least to Alan Plater’s 1999 drama Peggy For You in which he (one of the hundreds of writers on Ramsay’s roster, of course) imagines a day in the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
When Berliners sat down to watch Franz Wedekind’s debut play Fruhlings Erwachen – Spring Awakening – in 1906, they had little inkling of the kind of drama he had written, or how it would change theatre for the century to come, despite being banned for long periods. Masturbation, homosexuality, underage sex, S&M, abortion, not to mention atheism and political radicalism had arrived onstage all at once. Inevitably, the musical based on the play that became a Broadway hit in 2006 dialled down some of this risqué content, but not by a lot. When I saw it there, my seat neighbours, a Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Charles Dickens and Martyn Jacques is a marriage made in heaven (well, hell I suppose): the Victorian novelist touring the rookeries of Clerkenwell the better to fire his imagination and, 150 years or so later, the post-punk maestro mining London's netherworlds for his tales of misfits and misdeeds.So it's no surprise to see The Tiger Lillies bring their unique sensibility to A Christmas Carol, Jacques' song cycle taking us into the head of the miser, Ebenezer Scrooge, paring the tale back to its psychological trauma and its bitter social critique. The Lillies' leader is front and centre, of Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In his 1973 play Habeas Corpus, now revived at the Menier Chocolate Factory under the direction of Patrick Marber, Alan Bennett had his way with the venerable Whitehall farce. Today’s younger playgoer would probably marvel at the popularity of these plays in the 1950s and 1960s, and at the ease with which they made it onto the nation’s television sets.Powered by wince-worthy double entendres, trouser-dropping and much rushing through multiple doors, they passed for light entertainment: the middle classes laughing at naughty sexual shenanigans, harmless fun, what! Bennett, though, decided to Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jack and the Beanstalk, Hackney Empire ★★★ It's always good news when Clive Rowe decides to don the frocks to play the Dame, and this year he has also taken over directing duties (with Tony Whittle), with a script written by Will Brenton. It's a straightforward retelling of the tale, pun-heavy – although I did miss the sauce that Rowe has brought to proceedings under previous writer Susie McKenna, and couldn't fathom why the Dame's love interest, Councillor Higginbottom (Whittle) was dressed as a Freddie Mercury tribute act.A giant has stolen Hackney-on-the Verge's musical harp and magic ring Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
No playwright has a scalpel as sharp as James Graham’s when it comes to dissecting politics; he has a brilliance and edge that strips away all unnecessary material till the beating heart of the matter is revealed. His latest tour de force takes the pulse of 1968 America where – against a backdrop of anti-Vietnam protests and outrage at the assassination of Martin Luther King – right wing polemicist, William F Buckley, is embarking on a series of TV debates with liberal Gore Vidal.Graham’s fondness for origin stories is well-chronicled. Ink, for instance, his play about the rise of Rupert Read more ...