It can’t have been an easy pitch. “Popes. Both foreign, yes. German and Argentinian – sorry, can’t change either. Eighty-something and the other’s a decade younger. Mainly just talking about their pasts and their different approaches to Roman Catholic theology. No chorus of angels, no. Can't cross-promote with Sister Act, no. We thought we’d open in Northampton…”Anthony McCarten’s play, The Two Popes, did open in Northampton, at the Royal & Derngate in 2019, and went on to be adapted into a feature film that won nominations for Academy Awards, BAFTAs and Golden Globes. Now it comes to the Read more ...

Derived from Delia Owens’s massively successful novel, Where the Crawdads Sing is the story of Kya Clark, a girl from an abusive, broken home in the North Carolina marshlands who raises herself almost single-handedly. The few people she encounters during her strange, isolated development from battered girlhood into a fragile young adult dismiss her mockingly as “Marsh Girl”. It’s only the kindly black couple who run the general store in Barkley Cove who take any trouble to get to know her or show any concern for her welfare (pictured below, Sterling Macer Jr as Jumpin' and Michael Hyatt as Read more ...

Rebecca Lenkiewicz's adaptation of August Strindberg's 1900 paean to the power of loathing over loving uses the now familiar trick of dressing characters in period detail while giving them the full range of the 21st century's argot of disdain and distress.Indeed, the spectacular sprinkling of the C-word (indeed, pretty much the A-Z words) here jolts us into the thought that though divorce laws may be more liberal these days, marriages can still limp on with each party secretly (or not so secretly) waiting for the release that only death can bring.Roll in medical interventions that prolong Read more ...

We’re in New York City, in an upscale loft apartment, with that absence of stuff that speaks of a power to acquire anything. There are paintings on the walls, but we see only their descriptions: we learn that the owner (curator, in his word) really only sees the descriptions, too, and that the aesthetic and artistic elements barely register. The maid has been given the evening off –  it’s soon obvious why – and an art dealer flits about nervously waiting for his client to arrive with a view toward arranging a significant purchase. The artist is Black; everyone else, indeed, Read more ...

Playwrights return to classical myths for two main reasons – to shine a light on how we live today and because they're bloody good yarns.Marina Carr's re-telling of Clytemnestra's story is boldly innovative in its conception and execution, but it never loses sight of its source material's power – and we wonder how, if "Enough is Enough" didn't work thousands of years ago, how is it going to work now?King Agamemnon needs to do something as his men are mustered for war and the blood is up, but the winds will not come to fill their sails for the passage to Troy. Worse still, a potential Read more ...

When Bliss, a new play adapted from an Andrei Platonov short story by Fraser Grace, made its debut in Russia in early 2020, Cambridge-based company Menagerie were told that their production was “very Russian”.I’m no expert on Russian culture, but I would agree – in a good way. Paul Bourne’s production for the Finborough Theatre takes a while to warm up, but still packs a poignant punch.Nikita Firsov (Jesse Rutherford) has returned home from the Civil War to a post-apocalyptic landscape: rural Russia in 1921. There’s no food and almost no people. The price of stealing grain is execution, and Read more ...

It’s not hard to see, watching Tom Fool at the Orange Tree Theatre, why Franz Xaver Kroetz is one of Germany’s most staged playwrights.Born in Munich in 1946, he’s known for unflinching portrayals of poverty and what it does to people. Directed sensitively by Diyan Zora, this production is a masterclass in what critic Richard Gilman dubbed “the theatre of the inarticulate” – but it does leave us yearning for a little more depth.The inarticulate in this case are the Meier family, of 1970s Bavaria. Martha (Anna Francolini) looks after the home while her husband Otto (Michael Shaeffer, pictured Read more ...

A speeding drunk driver arrows down a silent street into a Roman block of flats. The impact’s reverberations ripple through the next 10 years, in Nanni Moretti’s soulful, Italian all-star adaptation of Eshkol Nevo’s novel, Three Floors Up.The teenage driver, Andrea (Alessandro Sperduti), sent a woman fatally careening on his disastrous course, confirming the low opinion of his judge dad (Moretti), while barely phasing sympathetic mum Dora (Margherita Buy). The smashed flat’s owners, Lucio (Riccardo Scamarcio) and Sara (Elena Lietti), are more concerned by incipiently senile old neighbour Read more ...

Mark was teased about the fallout shelter at the bottom of his garden by his co-workers (that wasn’t the only thing – every friendship group has a target for micro-aggressions) but his foresight pays off when terrorists explode a suitcase bomb on a Friday evening. Louise, hungover after her leaving do, wakes up down there, Mark having rescued her from the rubble and sealed the door against the radiation. She faces 14 days locked down with him waiting for the air to clear.When the director Lyndsey Turner planned her revival of Dennis Kelly’s 2005 two-hander, she could hardly have expected the Read more ...

Few sights speak so eloquently of loss, of an especially cruel and painful loss, as one glass of wine, half-full, alone on a table. A man speaks to a partner who isn’t there, wishes her back, but knows that she has gone. Then another woman materialises to speak of of the futures he could have enjoyed - but now will not - and of the many, many futures that hunger for life, shut out of our world by deliberate action and unintentional chance. They crowd him, but only a child, bouncing with optimism, emerges fully to insist that he, this potential human being, will happen.Into her 80s but as Read more ...

Despite its painfully relevant title, How To Survive An Apocalypse was written in 2016. If only Canadian playwright Jordan Hall knew, eh? The end times aren’t just creeping but hurtling towards us, these days. Luckily for those weary of Covid stories, this play is more about millennials sensing impending doom, and how that experience impacts upon their personal relationships, than the doom itself. Jimmy Walters’ production for the charmingly intimate Finborough Theatre sparks intriguing ideas on which it doesn't quite fully follow through.Jen (Kristin Atherton, who really knows how to wear a Read more ...

On its surface, a biopic of a late-Victorian artist starring big British talents including Benedict Cumberbatch, Andrea Riseborough and Claire Foy, sounds like typical awards fare for this time of year. Will Sharpe, best-known for directing the dark TV comedy Flowers (starring Olivia Coleman who is on narrating duties for this film), and drama series Giri/Haji, offers just that.Charting the tragic life of Louis Wain, an artist-cum-inventor who was plagued with mental health problems, Sharpe’s film has a magical, surrealist, Dickensian quality. Much like Armando Iannucci’s David Copperfield, Read more ...