Bridge Theatre
Matt Wolf
There are any number of ways to perform A Number, Caryl Churchill’s bleak and beautiful play about a father and three of who knows how many of his genetically cloned sons. Since it first opened at the Royal Court in 2002, this hourlong two-hander has been staged in London with some regularity, as often as not with actual fathers and sons (Tim and Sam West, John and Lex Shrapnel). But director Polly Findlay’s entirely fresh take for the Bridge Theatre is the most literal I have yet seen, and also the most lacerating: this Number may not have family on its side, but it certainly boasts two Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Are first ladies second-class citizens? Do they always have to stand behind their husbands? What are they really like as people? Questions such as these have inspired Irish playwright Nancy Harris to explore the relationship between two fictional first ladies, each of which bears an uncanny resemblance to a real-life figure. One is clearly based on Melania Trump, the other on Brigitte Trogneux, better known as Mrs Macron. As usual at the Bridge Theatre, the show is impeccably cast, with national treasure Zoë Wanamaker making her Bridge debut, and Zrinka Cvitešić, who returns to the London Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Nicholas Hytner’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Bridge Theatre is a feat of exuberant brilliance, a gender-juggling romp that takes Shakespeare’s subversive text and polishes it so that it glints and shines like a glitterball at a disco. No holds are barred in this ecstatic 21st-century take, in which sexualities – as well as lovers – are swapped, the rude mechanicals get distracted by taking selfies, and Oberon, rather than Titania, loses his head for an ass.Game of Thrones’ Gwendoline Christie has star billing here in the traditionally twinned roles of Titania and Hippolyta. Yet it’s not Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Maggie Smith is not only a national treasure, but every casting director's go-to old bat. Now 84 years young, she is our favourite grande dame, or fantasy grandma. With an acting career of nearly 70 years, an instantly recognisable face and voice, and several shelves groaning with awards, she returns to the London stage for the first time in 12 years, tempted by Nicholas Hytner to perform a one-woman show at his high-profile Bridge Theatre. This time, the much-honoured Dame will be playing neither a dowager nor a professor, nor a Shakespearean heroine, but instead a real-life German secretary Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Okay, so this is the play that will be remembered for the character names that have unusual spellings. As in Alys not Alice, Kyte not Kite, etc. Anyway, Lucinda Coxon's adaptation of journalist Harriet Lane's 2012 bestseller for the Bridge Theatre starts off with Frances (Downton Abbey's Joanne Froggatt) coming across a fatal car crash in which Alys, a woman she doesn't know, is killed. As all those who have read the book will recall, Frances finds that her life changes when she is contacted by Alys's family, especially her husband Laurence Kyte (Hustle's Robert Glenister), who turns to her Read more ...
aleks.sierz
It's all in the title, isn't it? Martin McDonagh's surreal new play comes with a warning that not only screams its intentions, but echoes them through repetition. Okay, okay, I get it. This is going to be a dark story, a very very very dark story. And, talking of repetition, the show's cast — in its premiere at the Bridge Theatre — is led by Jim Broadbent, who has form with this playwright. He was also in McDonagh's The Pillowman at the National in 2003 — and that was also a dark tale that was bleaker than bleak. Hot on the heels of the hilarious massacres of the recent revival of his The Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The NHS is us. For decades our national identity has been bandaged together with the idea, and reality, of a health service that is free at the point of delivery. Such an object of myth and pride cries out for comic treatment, and now the spritely octogenarian Alan Bennett – a self-confessed "thwarted preacher" and master of elegiac English humour – has produced a comedy set in a geriatric ward of an NHS hospital, and auspiciously it is directed by Nicholas Hytner, artistic director of the Bridge, who in his previous role as supremo of the National Theatre directed some of the Yorkshire Read more ...
David Benedict
In Harold Pinter’s memory play Old Times, one of the women declares, “There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.” Elizabeth Strout’s heroine in My Name Is Lucy Barton is in the reverse position. When it comes to the difficult childhood she has long since escaped, she’s uncertain of what she can – or wants to – remember, yet she is anything but the standard issue unreliable narrator. In Richard Eyre’s flawless production at the Bridge Theatre, Strout’s writing, as adapted by Rona Munro and performed by a luminous Laura Linney, pulls off the considerable trick Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Barney Norris is as prolific as he is talented. Barely out of his twenties, he has written a series of excellent plays – the award-winning Visitors, follow-ups Eventide and While We’re Here – as well as a couple of novels and lots of poetry. After collaborating in setting up a theatre company, Up in Arms, he now works as a prestigious resident playwright at Keble College, Oxford, and has still found time to write a study of the dramas of veteran playwright Peter Gill. Named as one of the 1000 most influential Londoners by the Evening Standard, his latest play, Nightfall, has just Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
All hail! Shakespeare’s Roman drama may be enjoying something of a resurgence at present, but it rarely proves as vital and arresting in performance as this. Last summer in the US, a staging at the Public Theater caused a furore and frightened away sponsors by killing off a Caesar who was unequivocally the pussy-grabbing Dayglo President himself. There were also productions in Sheffield and at the RSC. This one, though, directed by Nicholas Hytner, is a splendidly many-headed hydra.It’s a slick, pacey, interval-free two hours that sees the Bridge Theatre transformed into something between a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Given the rather uneven record of the National Theatre at the moment, there’s already a certain nostalgia for the days, which came to an end two years ago, when it was run by the two Nicks: Nick Hytner and Nick Starr. Together, they transformed this flagship theatre, offering the world some gloriously entertaining and mega-successful plays, from War Horse to One Man, Two Guvnors. Now at the helm of a brand-new theatre, the Bridge (located next to City Hall on the south side of Tower Bridge), the two Nicks are opening their 900-seat venture with a new comedy about a young German migrant, Read more ...