Theatre
Sebastian Scotney
MILES., a two-hander with Benjamin (Benji) Akintuyosi as Miles Davis and trumpeter Jay Phelps in a host of roles, including himself – is a show which works remarkably well.Remarkably, yes. Akintuyosi only made his professional acting debut in this role in a run of the show in Edinburgh last summer. Jay Phelps is above all known as a fine trumpet player and a music producer rather than as an actor. And the subject, Miles Davis – this show is carefully placed just ahead of the centenary of his birth in late May – was a complex and in many ways a disputed figure.One reason why the show is so Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Jonathan Lynn has resurrected the two characters he and the late Antony Jay created in the 1970s, billing his new play the “final chapter of Yes, Minister”. It’s an amiable workout for the former political allies, both a boost to their old conniving skills and a crash course in modern life. And some of its teeth still bite.We meet Jim Hacker, now over 80 but once the PM, in the handsome but untidy Georgian master’s lodge of the Oxford college named after him, built on the funding he secured from a Russian oligarch. Griff Rhys Jones plays him with a little too much gurning and an over-emphatic Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Some 16 or so years ago, I recall hearing what sounded like fireworks from my hotel room in Chișinău, the capital of Moldova. I was aware of the Russian-occupied, unrecognised state of Transnistria, but thought that it was very distant, It wasn’t – and I still think they were fireworks, but I can't be sure.In Tbilisi, I heard stories of Russian tanks lined up just 40 kms or so from the Georgian capital; in Yerevan, Armenia and Baku, Azerbaijan, I was told quiet understated cases for both countries’ longstanding claims to Nagorno-Karabakh. That crash course in the poitical turmoil of the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
An infamous international financier, with a contacts book that includes presidents and dictators, a dark dossier on everyone he’ll ever need to bribe or blackmail, and a cold, ruthless heart, spends a long night in downtown New York trying to save his business. And he’ll go to any lengths to do it, including pimping his own son. Terence Rattigan wrote Man and Boy in the Sixties and set it in the Thirties, his evil protagonist partly based on a crooked Swedish businessman finally undone by the Great Depression. But it screams of the here and now, of Robert Maxwell, Bernie Madoff and Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Before the lacerating spats of Albee’s Martha and George, and the circular kvetching of Beckett’s characters, there were August Strindberg’s pioneering excursions into dark psychological truths. Only a handful of his 60 plays are staged here regularly, but thankfully Dance of Death (1900) is one of them.This rendition of a moribund marriage can be a gift to its male lead, as Laurence Olivier and Ian McKellen have shown. Edgar, a pugnacious army captain, is a prototype of the bullied child who matures into a bully, as he himself recognises. He can also be scathingly funny, a trait that Will Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A right wing populist, a master manipulator of the media, he appears to be immune to the long accepted norms of professional behaviour. Foul-mouthed and a bully, but backed by an oligarch, he rides roughshod over those who play by the old rules, truth, like everything else, merely transactional. “What’s in it for me?” is the only question worth the breath.Stop me if you’ve heard this before…Not the Oval Office now, but The Sun’s editor’s office in Wapping nearly 40 years ago, where Kelvin McKenzie, high on his own supply of circulation figures and the reluctant professional admiration of even Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"How can we sleep for grief?", asks the brilliant and agitated Thomasina Coverly (the dazzling Isis Hainsworth) during the first act of Arcadia, a question that will come to haunt this magisterial play as it moves towards its simultaneously ravishing, and emotionally ravaging, end. Many of us asked ourselves that very question last November when the author died in the run-up to the Hampstead Theatre opening of Indian Ink, the play of his whose 1995 premiere followed Arcadia by two years. A sensible reply to the query is given by Thomasina's doting tutor, Septimus Hodge (the expert Seamus Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
From his sickbed, after a nervous breakdown during basic training for the army, the 18-year-old Noel Coward started churning out plays, many of which were never staged. The Rat Trap, finished in 1918, had a 12-night run in 1926 at the Everyman in Hampstead, but Coward was in the US at the time and never saw the production. You wonder what his older self would have made of it.This is Coward gnawing with his baby teeth on a topic that clearly preoccupied him from the outset and would become a prime target of his sharper-toothed dramas: how to sustain a serious relationship, especially a Read more ...
Bill Rosenfield
There are many things that drew me to re-imagining Noel Coward's The Rat Trap, an early play from the author of such enduring classics as Private Lives and Hay Fever.First, since the age of 16 I have been a die-hard fan of his. To have this opportunity (with his estate's blessing) to explore in depth an unknown work of his with the hope of making it more immediate for a modern audience and to actually collaborate with Noel Coward is an honour.Ninety-nine percent of Coward's career happened after he wrote The Rat Trap at the age of 18. So for me, it was a rare gift to have the knowledge of how Read more ...
aleks.sierz
New writing takes many forms: this is one of the glories of contemporary British performance. One of these is the shared narrative, a style pioneered decades ago by Irish playwrights such as Brian Friel and Conor McPherson, which involves several straight-to-the-audience narrators telling a story directly. Unlike the naturalism of mainstream theatre, this method allows for a rapid delivery of events and feelings. In Maggots, an exceptionally humane 65-minute piece by Farah Najib, who won the Tony Craze Award for her Dirty Dogs, the shared narrative also achieves a profound emotional 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 ...