Menier Chocolate Factory
aleks.sierz
In the past, playwright Terry Johnson has mixed sex and comedy with hilarious results. His Freudian farce, Hysteria, and his tribute to traditional British Benny-Hill-style comedians, Dead Funny, share a bed of giggling gyrations with his love letter to Carry On films, the innuendo heavy Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle and Dick.But now, as his latest show reopens the Menier Chocolate Factory, which has been closed for a while, does he still have the magic touch? With its lurid title, The Sex Party is certainly a come-on, but is it also a turn-off?Johnson’s idea for a sex comedy is very promising: a 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 ...
Matt Wolf
It seemed impossible and yet, the other evening, while idly flicking through emails, I learned the unimaginable: Stephen Sondheim, age 91, had passed away. And very quickly by all accounts, given that he was reported to have enjoyed a Thanksgiving meal with friends just the previous day."They die but they don't," goes a lyric from Into the Woods, as my mind filled with multiple responses to the news, many of them culled from his work (and often cited by others in their own, instantaneous reactions). I, too, was "sorry/grateful" – bereft at the news and yet grateful for the work. But I suppose Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Indecent is a play wrapped inside a news story about stigma. Playwright Paula Vogel was at Cornell University when she stumbled on a “yellowing copy of an out-of-print translation” of Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance. Asch had been born into a Hasidic Jewish family but rebelled after discovering the decadent delights of fin-de-siècle philosophy and literature. In 1907 he wrote a play that simultaneously scandalised his community and garnered international accolades with its depiction of Judaism against the backdrop of a Jewish brothel and a lesbian love affair.For Vogel Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There’s slight (White Christmas, to name but one) and then there’s The Boy Friend, a period musical so unabashedly vaporous that if you sneeze, it might blow away. All credit then to the Menier Chocolate Factory for anchoring Sandy Wilson’s onetime theatrical mainstay in a sustainedly nostalgic billow of song and dance to draw attention away from the fact that comparatively little of consequence happens across three acts. Matthew White's production would seem to be predicated on the assumption that nature abhors a vacuum, in which case, when in doubt, dance – and why not? Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What a joy Laura Wade's latest play is. Transferring from its successful run at the Minerva Theatre at Chichester last year, The Watsons is developed from Jane Austen's unfinished novel (started in 1804 and abandoned the following year). But rather than give us a period homage or a modern pastiche, Wade serves up a delightful concoction that has elements of both, but also much, much more.She sets the scene by dramatising the surviving pages of Austen's story. Emma Watson (Grace Molony) returns home to Surrey after being raised by a moneyed aunt in Shropshire for 14 years. Her father is dying Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Robert James Waller’s bestselling, though critically panned, 1992 romance novel was reincarnated in the Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep-starring film, and then again in Jason Robert Brown and Marsha Norman’s Tony-winning 2013 musical – both adaptations wisely sloughing off some of the original’s schmaltz and sappiness. Now Trevor Nunn, whose Menier-originated Fiddler on the Roof is currently playing in the West End, helms the moderately successful UK premiere.Italian war bride Francesca (Jenna Russell) has been transplanted to Middle America, where she’s raised two children with farmer Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Where would Tennessee Williams's onetime flop be without the British theatre to rehabilitate it on an ongoing basis? Arriving at the Menier Chocolate Factory in a co-production with Theatre Clwyd, where Tamara Harvey's production has already been seen, this marks the third London outing for this lesser-known title in as many decades: Orpheus, too, has played elsewhere around the country (Manchester in 2012 for one) even while languishing largely unperformed Stateside. What, then, does Harvey add to our understanding of a work that Peter Hall rescued from obscurity in 1988 in the Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
In an age where political, social, and gender norms seem to be in perpetual meltdown, it should be pretty much impossible for a musical that begins with a song celebrating ‘Tradition’ to strike a chord. Yet from the moment that the cast of Trevor Nunn’s foot-stompingly fist-wavingly triumphant Fiddler on the Roof launches into the opening number, it’s clear that they have the energy and chutzpah to whip up an emotional storm.The musical – the latest West End transfer from production powerhouse, the Menier Chocolate Factory - is famously based on Sholem Aleichem’s stories about a Jewish Read more ...
Matt Wolf
David Hare knows a thing or two about sustaining an onstage face-off. Skylight and The Breath of Life consist tantalisingly of little else and so, for the most part, does his 1986 curiosity The Bay at Nice, which I caught back in the day during a premiere engagement at the Cottesloe that was given immediate lustre by the ravishing Irene Worth. Its first major London revival, elegantly presented by Richard Eyre at the Menier Chocolate Factory, casts the comparatively cool Penelope Wilton as a Russian one-time student of Matisse who confronts her unhappy daughter (Ophelia Lovibond) in 1956 Read more ...
Marianka Swain
There’s a welcome alternative to panto hijinks in this gem of a Trevor Nunn musical revival – more attuned to the biting hardships of winter, and to the elegiac aspect of change, than to festive jollies. Which is not to say that there isn’t rousing fun to be had in many a slick set-piece, but this intimate, sensitive staging brings out the work’s soul, particularly its timeless call for empathy and compassion.Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick drew on Sholem Aleichem’s stories for their 1964 musical, and it initially feels like a folk tale: that of Tevye the dairyman (Andy Nyman) Read more ...
aleks.sierz
We do love our spy stories, don't we? The idea of betrayal, both political and personal, seems to be a strong part of our national identity. And so is telling stories based on real events. Playwright Hugh Whitemore, who died in July, based his Pack of Lies on the Portland spy ring, a secret Soviet operation which was active from the late 1950s until 1961. This new production at Menier Chocolate Factory is the first London revival since it premiered at the West End's Lyric Theatre in 1983, starring husband and wife team Judi Dench and Michael Williams, for which Dench got an Olivier Award. Read more ...