Theatre
Gary Naylor
A couple of years ago, on a drive through the picture book hills and lakes of Connemara, my pal (his car, his driving, his choice) played a compilation of Frank Sinatra’s hits on the music system. He sang along lustily, as I contemplated the contrast with the landscape and wondered about how long it would be before I could suggest a bit of Van Morrison, The Pogues, Val Doonican…Because I’ve never really got "The Chairman of the Board". I see what others see, but it’s all too clean, too consciously produced, too overweening in its sheer Frankness for me to engage. Every song was Sinatra first Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Terrorists are monsters. Or so we are told – pure evil. Well, it makes a good story. Even if it isn’t completely true. Actually, most political assassins are quite ordinary young men, often troubled, often vulnerable, unsure of themselves and so prone to being led by others. American playwright Rajiv Joseph takes this insight and applies it to the Serb terrorists whose actions precipitated the First World War. First staged in New York in November last year, this wild dark comedy is now on the Royal Court’s main stage in a fizzing, occasionally eye-popping, production by director Lyndsey Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
The best thrillers have not one, but two twists. Often, there’s a predictable twist, and an unpredictable one. So it is with The Guilty, Chloë Moss’s adaptation for the stage of the 2021 film of the same name by Antoine Fuqua, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, which is itself an English version of the 2018 Danish original, Den Skyldige, by Gustav Möller and Emil Nygaard Albertsen. Currently playing at the Donmar Warehouse, it’s a 60-minute monologue performed with compelling intensity by Russell Tovey. As with all the finest thrillers, it constantly keeps us guessing, asking what’s next?The set up is Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Hot from its successful run at the Old Vic, Carrie Cracknell’s Olivier-nominated revival of Tom Stoppard’s 1993 masterpiece has made a particularly sweet landing in the West End. For opening night was accompanied by the news that the play’s venue, the Duke of York’s, is to be renamed the Tom Stoppard Theatre. The honour is well-deserved. Stoppard, who died last November, is one of the true greats of British theatre; and it’s well-timed with this play, which has its second revival here, 17 years after the first, and is one of his very best. Arcadia contains everything that made Read more ...
Springwood, Hampstead Theatre review - international politics revealed as a gentle comedy of manners
Rachel Halliburton
In 1939, the newspapers dubbed it the Hot Dog Summit. When King George VI and his wife Queen Elizabeth visited President Franklin Roosevelt, it was the first time a reigning monarch had visited a sitting president in the US. In the last year we’ve watched King Charles travel to the US to try and repair the tatters of Trump’s ties to NATO. By contrast this visit – in which King George sought the US’s support as World War II loomed – would prove to be the first step towards the Special Relationship which would underpin the formation of NATO a decade later.Yet Richard Nelson’s play – which began Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Violence against women – it’s horrible, and horribly familiar. Let’s make a list: everyday sexism, coercive control, physical attacks, mind games, casual cruelty, double standards, victim shaming, gaslighting, constant undermining, sexual manipulation, domestic abuse, gross neglect, femicide, grooming, harassment, unwanted touching, catcalling… It’s a long list, exhausting, but hardly exhaustive. So how can you dramatise this in a 90-minute play?Award-winning playwright Sophie Swithinbank’s gruelling new drama, Sting, which is currently playing in the Young Vic’s studio space, takes its place Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Language is a weapon in the RSC’s vigorous adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac – we feel viscerally that wordplay is just one letter away from swordplay, and verbal discord can result in death. Co-adaptor Debris Stevenson cut her teeth on the Grime poetry scene, and brings a raw, abrasive energy to this love story for word nerds that transforms poets into warriors as Cyrano strives for the survival of the wittiest. Jamie Lloyd’s production of Martin Crimp’s rap battle-style Cyrano de Bergerac seven years ago felt definitive, yet this Cyrano more than holds its own. It’s proof once Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Ben Ockrent’s Relics had me hooked from the moment the safety curtain started rising: a metal number with a banner of packing tape marked FRAGILE on it. As it rose, the teddy bear that had been lying in front of it was silhouetted, hanging from it by one arm.It’s not just a cute opener. Director Michael Longhurst and his designer, Joanna Scotcher, are projecting the core of the piece with minimum means. Things in this house are fragile. And when nerdy Rob (Sam Swainsbury, pictured bottom) appears, this mini-prelude is rounded out as he silently and warily, like a kid doing something naughty, Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Post-Covid British theatre has a crush on adaptations, especially those with a star actor. So it’s easy to see why National Theatre chief Indhu Rubasingham is staging the latest sparkling verse play by Martin Crimp, whose electric version of Cyrano de Bergerac with James McAvoy conquered the West End in 2019. This time Crimp revisits Molière’s 1666 masterpiece, The Misanthrope, with Canadian superstar Sandra Oh taking on the main role, her terrific performance turning the original’s Alceste into a very contemporary Alice – I couldn’t take my eyes off her.Oh’s character, a Booker-Prize-winning Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The erotic life of puppets – we discover in this show – is filled with intriguing possibilities that are denied to mere flesh and blood lovers. They can float up into the air when they kiss, glide backwards if they’re upset, and perform acrobatics that would be ambitious even for devotees of the Kama Sutra. In this revival of Greg Doran’s wonderful production – first devised in collaboration with Islington’s Little Angel Puppet Theatre in 2004 – such attributes do not divide them from the human experience but provide a wittily alternative expression of love’s highs and lows. In effect, Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
French playwright Florian Zeller’s 2011 four-hander about infidelity and the deceptions it entails, translated by Christopher Hampton, returns 10 years after its UK premiere at the Menier Chocolate Factory. A lot has changed in the personal communications world since its debut, but the play soldiers on with just a few appearances by early mobiles and no sign of social media.Does that matter? It makes the play something of a period piece, but its illicit liaisons are not dependent on technology. And at its heart is not so much deception as self-deception and the language we use to blank it out Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
King Charles I famously declared that Much Ado About Nothing should be renamed the "Beatrice and Benedick play". So it’s not difficult to imagine him – or indeed any fan of romantic screwball comedy – relishing Chelsea Walker’s elegant, sorbet-hued production in which Pippa Nixon’s flinty Beatrice and Ken Nwosu’s jocular, easy-going Benedick strike sparks from the off. Sometimes it takes a while for the banter to ignite in a Much Ado production, but Nixon’s wiry physicality and waspish delivery means that every insult lands with perfection. When the Messenger observes that Beatrice is Read more ...