Theatre
Gary Naylor
When it comes to the proletariat taking matters into their own hands, the British working class does not have many spectacular victories to celebrate. There are glorious defeats of course, eg the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, the Miners' Strike of 1984, the Stop The War protest of 2003. Even the broader coalition who marched to support a second EU referendum in 2018 made little impact, though it was a nice day out, with nice people and nice food, to be fair.Alas for artists with fire in their bellies, the considerable advances won by progressive politics in the UK tend to have been secured by Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Tim Crouch is one of our great theatrical alchemists. Most famously – in his conceptual show An Oak Tree – he creates a portrait of grief in which each night an actor who’s never seen the script before plays a grieving father who believes that his daughter has metamorphosed into an oak tree. What’s so extraordinary about the piece is the way that Crouch breaks down any factor that might seem to contribute to authentic emotion, carefully pointing up the show’s anomalies until the story itself grabs by us the throat. In his directorial debut at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, he does something Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Spanning centuries, cultures and an ocean, Finn Anderson and Tania Azevedo’s new musical, Ballad Lines (say it fast and it sounds like Blood Lines) has the epic scope a big show demands. It also has an intimacy, a specificity, that may prove, for some, an issue and for others, a liberation, a chance to be seen on stage for once. One thing is for sure – it’s not like any other show I’ve reviewed.Sarah and Alix are thirtysomething New Yorkers, career women - now there’s a gendered phrase – setting up home together in their new apartment. There’s a bit of bantz early on joking about the fact Read more ...
aleks.sierz
This year the Royal Court is 70 years old. Yes, it’s that long since this premiere new writing venue staged its opening season, whose third play was John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, a drama which redefined British theatre. The current celebratory year kicks off with Guess How Much I Love You?, by Luke Norris, whose debut Goodbye to All That was successfully staged here in 2012. Since then, the playwright has provoked interest with several theatre and television pieces, including the BBC’s Poldark and So Here We Are at the Manchester Royal Exchange. But because he’s hardly produced more than Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Scottie Fitzgerald, the sole offspring of F Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda, swigs from a hip flask where she shouldn’t (she inherited the transgression gene). She’s in the room that harbours her parents’ cluttered archive, and soon she conjures their ghosts who tell us the story of their lives.Or, more accurately, some of the story of their lives, continuing a trend in biopics (Bradley Cooper’s Maestro is an example) in which we’re either assumed to know the works or to accept that the artistic achievement is less interesting than the marital strife that fuels it. Inter alia, such narratives come Read more ...
Gary Naylor
On a motorcycle, you have to slow down once you get that sinking feeling that there’s an accident on the road up ahead. Even if you’re not rubbernecking yourself, you don’t want to be going at full tilt in close proximity to those who are. I made an effort not to look past the sirens and flashing lights towards the wreckage, but sometimes it was unavoidable.I recalled such incidents in the unlikely environment of the Hotel Malmaison’s first floor corridor and again inside six of its bedrooms, the venues for Dante or Die’s revival of their immersive production I Do. It’s not like Tunde (Dauda Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What a journey Jamie Eastlake’s play has had: his stage adaptation (which he also directs) of Jonathan Tulloch’s book The Season Ticket began life as a three-hander in 2022, when it was performed in a social club on North Tyneside. It has had various iterations since and now – with a greatly enlarged cast and multiple storylines – it has a short West End run.The show centres on “two reprobates from Gateshead", the titular Gerry (Dean Logan) and his best mate Sewell (Jack Robertson), two unemployed young men always on the lookout for a money-making opportunity (and comically, in Sewell’s case Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In the long slide from its imperial economic might, it’s hard to make a case for finding a place for “The UK” and ‘“World-leading” in the same sentence. But we’re pretty good at pop music, particularly once you offset Sir Cliff with Johnny Hallyday. C’mon Europe, whaddya got?It’s taken a while for that to be recognised by The Establishment, eventually getting round to gonging up Sir Macca and Sir Ringo, Sir Elton and Sir Rod, Sir Mick and Sir Tom. But who exactly is Sir Ray? He certainly needs more than one name, so what’s he ever done?That Knight of the Realm is, of course, Sir Ray Davies ( Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Humour is a good way of defusing tense situations. You know, social embarrassments, personal difficulties and existential puzzles. In the wonderfully titled Eat The Rich (but maybe not me mates x), Jade Franks turns her experience of being a Scouser who survived a Cambridge university education (just, and then some) into a short, but entertaining monologue. And, having really wowed Edinburgh last year, she brings this comedy of bad manners to the studio space of the Soho Theatre. But although there’s been a bit of loose talk about this being “the new Fleabag” (could this moniker be cancelled Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Such is the USA administration’s overwhelming saturation of the news cycle that, even with the comforting presence of an ocean between, it’s hard not to find Talking Heads’ unforgettable lyric relentlessly buzzing through your brain on repeat – “And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?”. It is the mission of The American Vicarious theatre company to “... create art that challenges us to confront the gap between America’s ideals and its lived realities”. Guys, there’s never been a better time.Almost three years on from their electrifying Debate: Baldwin vs Buckley recreated Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Lawlessness and lack of accountability seem, tragically, on the verge of becoming a new American norm, so what better time to re-consider High Noon, the classic 1952 Western that forefronts issues of moral rectitude. Will Kane, the marshal who stays on in his tight-knit New Mexico community to square off against an outlaw whom he sentenced to hanging five years before, possesses a moral propriety akin to the likes of Atticus Finch. And look how often To Kill A Mockingbird lands on stage. On the face of it, you can see the sense in adapting Fred Zinnemann's four-time Oscar-winner to the Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Just weeks after the theatrical version of the cult film Paranormal Activity successfully recreated the original’s nail-shredding fear, A Ghost in Your Ear offers its own distinctive route to transcendental terror. Where Paranormal Activity – directed by Punchdrunk’s Felix Barrett – leans heavily on superb stage illusions, A Ghost in Your Ear, as the title suggests, largely channels its chill factor through soundwaves. It was only going to be a matter of time till a theatre maker brought together a ghost story and binaural sound effects. Both have enjoyed increasing popularity in Read more ...