Theatre
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 ...
David Benedict
Fingers on buzzers… Question: What’s the connection between Days of Wine and Roses, Small Change, Making Noise Quietly and Versailles? Answer: They’re all past Donmar productions directed by Peter Gill.But it’s not just his directing skill – no one in British theatre has a finer ear for the rhythm, pitch and placement of dialogue – that makes Gill a primary figure in the Donmar’s past and present. Not only did he direct the sons-and-mothers struggle Small Change and the post-Edwardian drama of family secrets and lies Versailles, he also wrote them. Robert Hastie’s revival of his 2001 play The Read more ...
Dylan Moore
There is a simple explanation to why Cardiff-born Peter Gill has never directed in his home city, despite the fact that many of his own plays are set in the Catholic, working-class Cardiff of his youth. “I’d never been asked,” states Gill matter-of-factly; “it’s just a trade; it’s not a magical world. You have to ask me to do things.”There is something bracing about the lack of sentimentality with which Gill addresses the question of homecoming. It fits with the setting of our conversation too: a big, airy rehearsal room at the newly-rebuilt Sherman Theatre in the heart of Cardiff’s student- Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It’s three typical cat-lives since Andrew Lloyd Webber and Trevor Nunn staged TS Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats as a musical. The piece can’t quite shake the feel of being a cleverly fashioned showcase for individual performers whose component parts are not totally stitched together. But 45 years on, it can still surprise.Drew McOnie, in charge at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, is a director who can be relied upon to freshen up familiar material, as he did in his small-forces update of Nutcracker at the SBC. This isn’t a radically rethought CATS, as that production was, but its Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There’s an incendiary one-woman monologue to be had from Christine Lahti’s 2018 book about the misogyny of her upbringing, but The Smile of Her feels rather like an early draft of it. Lahti performs it with great candour and pops of dry humour, but you feel it could be even more arresting.Her book of essays, True Stories from an Unreliable Eyewitness: A Feminist Coming of Age, looks at different aspects of her life from early days to middle age (she is now, unbelievably, a sprightly 76). Somehow she has condensed this swathe of experiences into a 90-minute monologue, but inevitably this means Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Sarah Kane’s Cleansed is a love story whose heart has been torn open 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 Read more ...
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 ...
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 ...