Theatre
Gary Naylor
Growing up in Liverpool, it’s usually not long before you visit the vast golden sands of Prestatyn, still the best beach I’ve ever seen, and the dubious arcades of Rhyl to roll a penny between the lines. Your accent and age announces you as someone to be watched - not without cause, most of the time - and you wonder how the locals can tell, as they seem to have the same one anyway.Not long after, as a Scouser, you’ll hear of a lost underwater city, well, village, the local Atlantis. Nearly 150 years ago, the then thriving city of Liverpool decided that it liked the super soft Welsh Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
What can you do with lots of big sheets of white paper, three rolls of Sellotape and a couple of torches? These are items from the “props incident room”, as he would call it, of Phelim McDermott’s workshop. With them, and the other workshop that is his fertile imagination, he has conjured up a very special show.It was originally to have been a collaboration with the leading minimalist composer Philip Glass at the piano, but his health problems wouldn’t allow him to appear. So McDermott, the man who staged Glass’s Satyagraha and Akhnaten for English National Opera, had to rethink the piece. Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Attending the tale of Sweeney Todd was my introduction to musical theatre. I was in my early 20s and a friend of mine had invited me to the summer show at Guildford School of Acting and Dance. Reluctantly, I went along, fearing jazz hands, happy talk and an overdose of The Kids From Fame. I was much too cool for that – or so I pretended.I could hardly believe what I saw. So much of The Macabre that I had grown up with was there being sung by characters unrepentant in their violence and mendacity. My mother was a very enthusiastic reader of fairytales as bedtime stories and, not much later, Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Sarah Kane’s Cleansed is a love story whose heart has been torn on barbed wire. Yes, that’s what it feels like. Sounds intense? Okay, welcome, you’re already in the zone. It’s also a pioneering account of queer and trans sensibility, a difficult play that I’ve seen several times since its premiere in 1998. Most productions appear on the spectrum between cool abstraction (James Macdonald) and hot literalism (Katie Mitchell). This revival by the Almeida Theatre’s ace director, Rebecca Frecknall, is firmly in the literalism camp, only occasionally dipping its injured toes into the cooling waters Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If a week is a long time in politics, 30 years is an aeon in popular culture. It was in 1996 that Danny Boyle’s film of Irvine Welsh’s novel, Trainspotting, exploded over Britpop Britain, with its frequently horrifying but perversely life-affirming saga of a bunch of Edinburgh junkies. Its opening sequence of Renton and Spud being chased through the Edinburgh streets by a pair of store detectives, with Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” pounding like a steamhammer over Ewan McGregor’s “choose life” monologue, has crystallised in time as one of the all-time classic moments of British cinema.Welsh’s Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If the secret of comedy is timing and location, location, location determines a property’s success, then the producers of Here Comes J. Edgar! are batting on a sticky wicket. How can it hit it out of the ball park in a country with no ball parks?Okay, if London’s musical theatre fans can line up for singing cats in Regent’s Park – as they will from next week – will they do the same for a show about the tyrant who ran the FBI as a personal fiefdom from 1935 to 1972, told in the style of Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective? A hard sell indeed.But they have showbiz royalty onside. Harry Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Queerness is subversive – it dissolves gender binaries. You know the kind of thing: male/female, straight/gay, married/single, fixed/fluid. Likewise, queer theatre typically calls into question all the genre norms: comedy/tragedy, naturalism/symbolism, everyday story/tale of horror. In Eleanor Tindall’s haunting play, Tender – which returns to the main stage of the Bush Theatre a couple of years after premiering there in the studio – the usual conventions of both gender and theatre are challenged in a passionate love story. Is it a queer romance? Body horror? Haunted house? Who cares? Not me Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Social engineering gets a bad press. The whiff of creating a eugenics-inspired master race by other means clings to it, so too agitprop induced brainwashing, the Republic of Gilead also hoving into view. That’s at the level of a society, but at the personal level, it’s scarcely better received, the thought of tiny protégés being force-fed learning, violin or tennis racquet in hand, both bigger than they are.But I’m here (literally, right here, right now) because of such practices, the son of a panel beater and school dinner lady, who first went to a Russell Group university and later received Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Dismemberment is a key motif in the writer-director Simon Stone’s The Oresteia. It reflects the treatment of two of the piece’s several dead bodies, as is hinted at when their killer is asked where he buried them. “Many places,” he replies coolly. And it’s what Stone himself has done with his ancient source material,As the play’s publicity materials announce, it is “after Aeschylus and others”. But the trilogy Aeschylus left us (actually, a tetralogy, according to a programme essay by an eminent classicist: a lost satyr play was the fourth part) is like a rock formation that’s only visible Read more ...
Gary Naylor
“Trump Arrangement Syndrome”, my propensity to see the world refracted through the lens of the omnipresent ogre’s cult, raised its head again. In watching a mad monarch, dementia tearing at their mind, insults raining down on those who fail to praise them, he loomed large in the consciousness yet again. How long will it be before we can look upon Lear and not see the orange man-child? Soon, I hope - but I doubt it.Finn den Hertog, listed as director and adapter, has a wonderful stage on which to work, a fine cast and, for only the eighth time in the 75-year history of Pitlochry Festival Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
A febrile energy powers Timothy Sheader’s production of Jesus Christ Superstar, which arrives in the West End with an edgy vibe that powerfully conveys the idea of Jesus as a dangerous revolutionary. At the age of 56, the musical isn’t showing its age remotely, with its vigorous, unashamedly complex rhythms and persuasive interrogation of the Bible marking it as a resounding classic even for Lloyd Webber agnostics like this critic.You could argue that Eurovision star Sam Ryder was made for the role, a former carpenter with an impressive beard and a lion’s mane of hair, who after years of 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 ...