Royal Court
Matt Wolf
That ages-old dictum "write what you know" has given rise to the intriguingly titled My Mum's a Twat, in which the Royal Court's delightful head of press, Anoushka Warden, here turns first-time playwright, much as the Hampstead Theatre's then-press rep, Charlotte Eilenberg, did back in 2002. While some may cry nepotistic foul at a theatre insider grabbing such a coveted perch, Warden has as much a right as anyone to tell a story that in this instance finds an ideally sparky interpreter in the protean Patsy Ferran. Astonishingly, Ferran is delivering the 80-minute monologue twice nightly Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Year-end wrap-ups function as both remembrances of things past and time capsules, attempts to preserve an experience to which audiences, for the most part, have said farewell. (It's different, of course, for films, which remain available to us forever.) How fitting, then, that pride of place for the year just gone should be saved for the National Theatre's shimmering revival of Follies, the 1971 Stephen Sondheim/James Goldman musical about the very act of letting go, served up in a production from the astonishing Dominic Cooke, whose 2016 NT revival of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom led my line-up Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The civil war in Syria spawns image after image of hell on earth. Staging the stories of that conflict presents a challenge to playwrights: how do you write about horror in a way that is both accurate and entertaining? Goats, by Syrian playwright and documentary film-maker Liwaa Yazji, translated by Katharine Halls, is part of the Royal Court’s international project with writers from Syria and Lebanon, and takes up this challenge. Her angle is to look at propaganda, and to show how truth is the first casualty of war. She also examines what happens when propaganda is questioned.Set in a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
War is morally acidic: it dissolves social rules, loosens inhibitions and gives permission to men to behave like animals. And the people who have to put up with this deluge of amorality and abuse are, of course, women. It is one of the strengths of Ukrainian playwright Natal’ya Vorozhbit’s savage war play, Bad Roads, translated by Sasha Dugdale and part of the Royal Court’s autumn international season, that she shows not only what war is like for women, but also its corrosive effects on masculinity. Especially how conflict collapses the boundary between humanity and animality.Set in the Read more ...
Elyse Dodgson
The autumn season of plays at the Royal Court leads with international work. B by Guillermo Calderón (from Chile), Bad Roads by Natal'ya Vorozhbit (from Ukraine) and Goats by Liwaa Yazji (from Syria) have a long history with our international department. We probably have to go back over a decade to look at the seeds of this work and the connections they have to one another and to each of us.THE ROAD TO BAD ROADIt is June 2008 and I am sitting around a table in Natal'ya Vorozhbit's new flat in Kiev with her mother Masha, her baby daughter Pasha and our co-collaborator and translator, Sasha Read more ...
aleks.sierz
What does it mean to feel contemporary? Feel. Contemporary. According to theatre-maker Chris Thorpe, whose new play Victory Condition has just opened at the Royal Court in tandem with Guillermo Calderón’s B, being contemporary is a really disturbing mixture of feeling all-powerful and completely powerless. In a short two-hander, Thorpe emphasises that something is very wrong at the heart of daily life. We all know this; we all feel this. But what is it? Well, it’s the sense that everything is on the verge of breakdown.Set in a modern new-built flat, Victory Condition is basically two Read more ...
aleks.sierz
In the 1960s, we had the theatre of commitment; today we have an attitude of non-committal. Once, political playwrights could be guaranteed to tell you what to think, to describe what was wrong with society – and what to do about it. Now, as Chilean playwright Guillermo Calderón’s new play, B – which was developed by the Royal Court’s international programme – makes clear, the keynote is ambiguity and an ironic detachment. It sets the tone for this venue’s autumn season, in which “emerging writers from across the world make radical new work for Britain”.B starts innocently enough with Marcela Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Who'd have guessed that the London theatre scene at present would be so devoted to the numinous? Hard on the heels of Girl from the North Country, which locates moments of transcendence in hard-scrabble Depression-era lives, along comes John Tiffany's deeply tender revival of Jim Cartwright's vaunted 1986 play Road, which tempers its landscape of pain with an abundance of poetry.As it happens, one has to wait till after the interval to feel the gathering force of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child director Tiffany's approach here. But come the climactic scene in which a mismatched Lancashire Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Surrogacy is an emotionally fraught subject. The arrangement by which one woman gives birth to another’s baby challenges traditional notions of motherhood, and pitches the anguish of the woman who can’t have children herself against the agony of another woman who gives up her child. Vivienne Franzmann’s aptly titled Bodies at the Royal Court explores what happens when Clem, a British television producer, and her husband Josh use a Russian woman’s egg (fertilised by his sperm) and implant it in the womb of an Indian woman. No prizes for guessing that this is a tale of torment.Although Clem and Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Dorothy Parker’s take on suicide is called “Resumé”: it goes, “Razors pain you; Rivers are damp; Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live.” Although this seems to cover the terrain, Alice Birch’s powerful new play adds a couple more methods of doing away with yourself, as well as an argument for avoiding the necessity of suicide. And although this drama takes up some 237 pages of published text, director Katie Mitchell proves you can stage it in 120 minutes without a break.And what an excruciating, yet devastatingly Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The monologue is a terrific theatre form. Using this narrative device, you can cover huge amounts of storytelling territory, fill in lots of background detail – and get right inside a character’s head. But the best monologues are those that interlock with other solo voices, giving different points of view on the same situation. That’s what Welsh playwright Gary Owen (Violence and Son, Iphigenia in Splott) does with his latest, Killology, which opened in Cardiff in March and now arrives at the Royal Court in London. He also gives this theatre form a provocative twist. Or two.Bad fathering Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This monologue first saw the light of day at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2015. It's a frank – very frank – piece about female sexuality by an anonymous heterosexual female author, performed by a different male comic each night, who reads it sight unseen.The piece begins with the author explaining the kind of man whom she finds attractive; “chiselled jaw line, nicely formed butt, facial hair”. It's a terrifically sly piece of male objectification, of course, and a reminder, should we need it, that women have had to put up with this nonsense for a very long time. And then she goes on to describe Read more ...