Theatre
Helen Hawkins
There is so much that is right about Jonathan Kent’s new production of House of Games – the casting, the staging, the direction. But the flaw it can’t overcome is that the 1987 David Mamet screenplay on which Richard Bean based this stage version in 2010 has been transformed from a vicious psychologically tough caper-movie into an almost jaunty puzzle-play, its sharp teeth removed.The setting is still Mamet’s regular beat, Chicago, slightly modernised: there are mobile phones here, though they don’t play a strategic part in moving the plot along. There are fleeting references to the senator Read more ...
Matt Wolf
You don't have to be greeting the modern day with a smile unsupported by events in the wider world to have a field day at Here We Are. The last musical from the venerated Stephen Sondheim has only grown in import and meaning since I caught its New York premiere some 18 months ago.Blessed with two alums from that production, the indispensible duo of Denis O'Hare and Tracie Bennett, this musical adaptation of two surrealists works from Luis Buñuel manages, miraculously, to remain light on its feet even as the landscape lowers around it. Musical theatre newbies may want more distinct numbers, Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
When Mark Rosenblatt was preparing his debut play, the miseries of the assault on Gaza were still over the horizon. Now they are here, another terrible moment in human history that resonates all through Giant. Since the play opened at the Royal Court last year, that ugly hum has grown even louder. Now transferred to the West End, it could have been written to give dramatic form to this most incendiary of talking points.“Incendiary” is a word that we see author Roald Dahl gleefully welcoming as a compliment when applied to his writing. Indeed, what he seems to achieve in the course of the Read more ...
David Nice
Watching the stricken faces on the split screen, I felt at times like callow Farfrae in Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge: when faced with Henchard’s account of his blackest misery, the young man replies “Ah, now, I never feel like it”. Well, hardly ever. It’s impossible not to be held captive by the eyes and words of the six actors sharing the roles of estranged father, mother and son in Nobel Prize winning Norwegian writer Jon Fosse’s Einkvan (Everyman).Fosse is a bit like Beckett without the laughs, which is still something; all credit to the Norwegian Embassy and the AKO Foundation Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There was a time when the only daytime TV (ex-weekends and ex-Wimbledon fortnight) comprised the annual party conferences and the Trade Union Congress. A seemingly endless parade of indistinguishable middle-aged balding white men, with Barbara Castle’s fiery redhead and Margaret Thatcher’s immovable blonde hairdo the only relief, would grab 15 minutes of fame speechifying on the minutiae of policy, some puffing on pipes, some on full-strength Capstans. It was parochial, boring and almost always of no consequence a week or so later, but I rather miss those days… If you do (and even if you don’ Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In Dublin, a city that has changed more than most in the last 30 years, a young woman, with an English accent that is expensive to acquire, is cycling through sexual partners. We eavesdrop on their conversations, witness the physical intimacy fade as the psychological intimacy hesitantly grows, in that strange vacuum in which you realise that you know everything and nothing about the person in front of you. There’s an awkwardness, both thinking “Sure that was fun, though I’m not sure this is and… what’s next?” Mark O’Halloran’s two-hander won Best New Play at the Irish Times Awards in 2022 Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Holsters, Stetsons and bluegrass music bring a distinctive flavour to this Wild West riff on Romeo and Juliet that flings us into a vortex of frontier-town politics where men are men and bad girls wear gingham. Sean Holmes’ vigorous production stirs up the original to prove that cowboys can be zombies and that you should always bring a gun to a knife-fight.There are many bold innovations in this interpretation of the play, but one of the best is the clear indication that Lola Shalam’s bolshy Juliet is far more the daughter of Jamie-Rose Monk’s nurse than of her rigidly elegant mother. Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In the Stygian darkness of a bare room, a table on a low platform with a light hanging overhead starts to emerge. Then a door briefly opens at the back of the space and the figure that has entered and sat down at the table also begins to emerge. When the stage lighting goes on, this tableau out of a Bacon painting sharpens and we can properly scrutinise the man. He is played by Stephen Rea, who has arrived from Dublin in a Landmark production of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, written in 1958 and directed by Vicky Featherstone. Rea is now almost a decade older than the protagonist, a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's both brave and bracing to welcome new voices to the West End, but sometimes one wonders if such exposure necessarily works to the benefit of those involved. And so it is with My Master Builder, American writer Lila Raicek's Ibsen-adjacent play that nods throughout at the Norwegian scribe's scorching 1892 The Master Builder only to suggest that director Michael Grandage might have been better off staging that classic title instead: his Wild Duck, dating back to his Donmar tenancy, remains the stuff of legend. The onetime Tony winner for Red has certainly given the show a Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Patrick Marber’s powerful debut about gambling men is 30 years old, born as the Eighties entrepreneurial boom was starting to sour but before poker become a game for mathematical whizz kids. What it reveals as it maps the male psyche seems as pertinent as ever. Into the gladiatorial arena of a weekly poker game among restaurant colleagues comes a (disguised) pro player, and the results are explosive. There are no women here, which is the point. Their disapproving tongues aren’t needed as the combatants are perfectly adept at skewering themselves. These are men who have mistaken risk- Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Fragile egos abound. An older person (usually a man) has to bring the best out of the stars, but mustn’t neglect the team ethic. Picking the right players is critical. There’s never enough money, because everything that comes in this season is spent on the next. The media, with a sneer never too far from the old guard and its new version alternately snapping and fawning with little in between, has to be placated.You have to keep going out there, no matter how much it hurts the body or mind, as an audience always awaits. And yet you know, with total certainty, that these are the best days of Read more ...
David Nice
Back in 2009, there were Ben and Wystan on stage (Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art). Last year came Ben and Master David Hemmings (Kevin Kelly's Turning the Screw), followed by Ben and Imogen Holst according to Mark Ravenhill. That RSC Swan production is now playing in the Richmond round. It grips, thanks to extraordinary performances by Samuel Barnett and Victoria Yeates, and taut dramatic structure, but how deeply is it rooted in truth, and does that matter?Up to a point, yes. Britten told “Imo” in July 1952 that “it has been wonderful to know there was someone one could trust, not only to Read more ...