Theatre
Tom Birchenough
‘Night, Mother remains a play of piercing pessimism, something that’s not necessarily the same as tragedy, though the two often run congruently. The inexorability of the development of Marsha Norman’s 1983 Pulitzer Prize winner certainly recalls the tragic arc of drama, but its sense of catharsis remains somehow limited.The cathartic impact for the audience is incremental, and it is absolutely felt in the closing minutes of Roxana Silbert’s production for the Hampstead Theatre – ‘Night, Mother received its British premiere there back in 1985, and it’s revived now as part of the theatre’s 60th Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Trigger warnings have become commonplace in theatres these days, but few chill the blood like the description "a new musical" on a playbill. There are so many things to go wrong, so few ways to get things right and, never far away, the dissenters who caught ten minutes of the Sound of Music during its annual Christmas TV airing and won’t stop telling you exactly how they feel about musicals.So, while the National Theatre gears up for its new musical, Hex, the RSC is commendably returning to its lockdown-postponed The Magician’s Elephant, both productions given the stages and Read more ...
Mert Dilek
"You need to get better at communicating", says one character to another in Isley Lynn’s albatross. Indeed, the same advice would fare well with many of those in the Anglo-American Lynn’s new play, where miscommunication plagues a range of relationships and chance encountersStructured as a loosely connected sequence of mostly two-handers, albatross. offers a panoramic look at the power dynamics coursing through everyday conversations among strangers and intimates alike.This production is brought to the Playground Theatre by represent., a repertory company dedicated to working with Read more ...
aleks.sierz
I’ve lived in Brixton, south London, for about 40 years now, so any play that looks at the gentrification of the area is, for me, definitely a must. Like many other places in the metropolis, the nature of the urban landscape has changed both due to gradual factors — such as migration — and spectacular events — like the Brixton riots of 1981 and 1985. Archie Maddocks’s new play, A Place for We, which is produced by Talawa Theatre Company and the Park Theatre, comes to the stage after being shortlisted for, although not winning, the Bruntwood Prize and the Alfred Fagon Award. Its cast is led by Read more ...
David Nice
“I want to tell her that people will be good,” Tewodros Aregawe of Phosphoros Theatre confided to us as Little Amal closed her eyes on the giant bed made up for her in the Paul Hamlyn Hall, “that all the people with kind eyes who have walked alongside her and listened to her story will be louder than those who wish she wasn’t there”.It’s a Utopian vision that has largely gone hand in hand with the three-and-a-half metre tall creation of the wonderful Handspring Puppet Company on her 8000 kilometre journey from the Turkish-Syrian border, though even this ultimate exercise in magical moving Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Two tribes, both alike in dignity in fair Vanara, trade goods and insults in a post-apocalyptic world in which fire is known to The Kogallisk but not to The Pana. When The Oroznah, a shaman respected by both feuding factions, foretells a long winter to come, The Pana must do all they can to steal the fire from The Kogallisk in order to survive the long nights.But the two bright young heirs have other ideas – Mohr, the sensitive Pana warrior, catching the eye of Ayla, the idealistic Kogallisk princess, and another way to salvation emerges.With a tour planned for 2022 and a buzz generated Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Jaws was the Moby Dick of late 20th century capitalism, a fantasy about fear and the unknown for a society that had rarely felt more secure and powerful. Despite the tremors caused by the Watergate scandal and the loss of the Vietnam war, the US would be the wealthiest country in the world for the next three decades and in Jaws Steven Spielberg announced himself as its chief mythmaker.This shark-tooth-sharp comedy, which has swum relatively seamlessly down to the West End from the 2019 Edinburgh Festival, is an enjoyable three-hander about the near-disasters behind the scenes in the film’s Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Grenfell: Value Engineering isn’t actually a play. It’s an edited version of the testimony heard by the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, particularly Phase 2, from January 2020 to July 2021. Along with director/producer Nicolas Kent, Richard Norton-Taylor has distilled the Inquiry’s proceedings into two-and-three-quarter hours of devastation. They show that tens, maybe even hundreds of people are responsible for the fire that killed 72 and injured almost as many. It’s verbatim theatre, but it leaves you speechless.The set-up is simple. Designers Miki Jabikowska and Matt Eagland have recreated the room Read more ...
Love and Other Acts of Violence, Donmar Warehouse review - snappy and tightly intelligent but flawed
Rachel Halliburton
This is simultaneously a love story and an archaeology of hate, a sparky, spiky encounter between two individuals whose chemistry proves as destructive as it is explosive.Love and Other Acts of Violence opens with a comedic encounter on a dance floor – the man is a torrent of flustered polemic while she leans backwards like a faintly amused angle-poise lamp. He’s a poet and a political activist, she’s a physicist and keeps her emotions in test tubes. Yet there’s something that neither of them can explain that keeps them coming back to each other.Cordelia Lynn’s snappy, tightly Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“Careful, there’s a hole in the floor.” The warning’s an unusual one, passed along conscientiously by the stewards at the door of the tiny Orange Tree Theatre.The hole in question is long and angular and will soon be filled with water, stretching around one side of the pristine white set of Rice, a new play by Australian-Hmong writer Michele Lee. It’s an intimate two-hander about immigration and belonging, directed ably by Matthew Xia – but, like its characters, it’s suffering an identity crisis.Our heroines are two women of colour: Nisha (Zainab Hasan, pictured below), a young executive at Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
“You can’t kick a cow in Leenane without some bastard holding a grudge for 20 years,” sighs Pato Dooley (Adam Best) prophetically; he has already started making his escape from that particular Galway village, doing lonely stints on London building sites. For 40-year-old unmarried Maureen Folan (Orla Fitzgerald), the woman Pato had dubbed "the beauty queen of Leenane" in her youth, departure is a national pastime: Ireland, in this 25th anniversary revival of Martin McDonagh's breakout play, means “always someone leaving”, she suggests. For her conniving mother Mag (Ingrid Craigie), Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The cherry orchard in Anton Chekhov’s eponymous play is a classic MacGuffin, its existence a reason to stir the sorts of resentments, fancies and identity causes that start wars and revolutions. The orchard’s beautiful, and that’s all – a cultivated but natural ornament upon the great land of Russia, where need and want hold sway over millions of wretched and enslaved people.Have those breathtaking horizons of white blossoms any use other than that? Is there a greater importance to existence than being beautiful? Nearly 120 years on, the conundrum is just as vital, and the play is Read more ...