Theatre
David Kettle
Of the Edinburgh International Festival’s three productions by 2018’s resident company, Paris’s Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, The Prisoner is the most gnomic, the most baffling, and, frankly, the most disappointing. Which is a great shame, of course, because it is also the one possibly most hotly anticipated, being co-written and co-directed by the Bouffes du Nord’s guiding light across several decades: the legendary elder statesman of the theatre Peter Brook who, astonishingly, is 93.We’re in an unnamed foreign land – judging by the sun-scorched trees, dusty rocks and heat- Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Director Madani Younis, who since 2011 has transformed the Bush Theatre in West London into one of London's most outstanding Off-West End venues, is leaving in December, on his way to becoming the creative director of the Southbank Centre. For his last show at the Bush, he has chosen a project close to his heart, Vinay Patel’s An Adventure, an epic reading of one Asian family’s global migration story. It’s a typically ambitious choice, a beguiling tragi-comedy whose narrative is original and which, more importantly, makes its political points deftly and unobtrusively, using a three-part Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A sizeable Off West End success nearly eight years ago looks more than a little exposed in a new, scaled-up production that is one of several shows on now, or imminently, to feature a Game of Thrones actor in a leading role. The particular TV name in this instance is Iwan Rheon, an Olivier Award-winner back in 2010 for the musical Spring Awakening seen here to be rather dramatically changing gears in Dawn King's lumbering dystopian parable about, well, more or less whatever you want it to be about. There's more than a hint of Brexit and the American law enforcement agency ICE in King's Read more ...
Jeanie O'Hare
I admit it took me a while to give myself permission to do this project. We English are very squeamish about altering Shakespeare. Our cousins in Germany thrive on radical undoings of our scared son, but we cross our arms and say no. I started thinking about making this play when I was at the RSC ten years ago. Queen Margaret, aka Margaret of Anjou and wife to Henry VI, thumped me in the heart as I watched Katy Stephens's peformance in Michael Boyd's History Cycle (the three Henry VI plays and Richard III). She then nagged at me every day as I nodded to the enormous photo of Peggy Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Blackout. Dark, the colour of childhood fear. Black, the colour of despair. Black. No light visible; no colours to see. Just pitch black, maybe even bible black. This is how Robert Alan Evans’s The Woods, which stars the brilliant Lesley Sharp and which opened tonight in the Royal Court’s theatre upstairs, begins – in total darkness. Followed by images of desolation, the sound of torrential rain, the devastation of a falling tree. In the crepuscular gloom, the story begins to unfold. Little light visible; few colours to see. But the weird atmosphere is just about to get weirder. Luckily, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Sir Peter Hall had no ordinary life, as might be expected from the director who more than any other defined the British theatre of the last half of the 20th century. The same can be said of the unforgettable two-part send-off he received exactly a year on from his death in 2017, age 86. Yesterday's events coupled a properly weighty memorial service at Westminster Abbey with a looser, larkier afternoon knees-up at the National Theatre, his onetime home. Both occasions felt absolutely true to Hall’s capacious and protean spirit.The midday gathering at Westminster found a steady stream of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Fenella Fielding - “one of the finest female impersonators in the business,” joked Eric Morecambe – has died at the age of 90. Most actors of such a great vintage tend to be forgotten, but not Fielding. Last year she celebrated her big birthday with a memoir. Its alluring title Do You Mind If I Smoke? was lifted from that succulent scene in Carry On Screaming! Playing a femme fatale draped on a divan, Fielding seemed to exude sultry clouds of steam from her very pores.The memoir brought her a great deal of publicity. She did book events, she read the readers’ news on Radio 4’s PM, she was Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Holy shit! After being closed for two long years, the old and battered Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn has been refurbished and relaunched, with a name change and £5.5 million-worth of improvements. It’s now a much more welcoming place, full of light at the front and with an on-street café, as well as easy access to the new plush seats and excellent sightlines. Although some patrons have grumbled that the name change is a betrayal of past achievements, Indhu Rubasingham, the artistic director, has created a much more hipster-friendly, much more middle-class venue than the previous community hive. Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
There's a clear theme running through this year's autumn programme at the Southwark Playhouse: new musicals with strong feminist roots. Wasted, centred on the Bronte siblings, is landing later this month, but first there's Unexpected Joy, written by Bill Russell and composed by Janet Hood, and directed by Amy Anders Corcoran. First seen Off Broadway, this is a solid, dependable sort of show that doesn't justify the first word of its title.The eponymous Joy (Janet Fullerlove) is a hippy musician straight out of the '60s, wafting about the stage in kaftans and shawls ( Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Underground Railroad Game is scabrous theatre – in every sense. To start with, Jennifer Kidwell and Scott R Sheppard’s two-hander is as down and dirty as anything you’ll find on the London stage at the moment, with one sex scene that’s belly laugh-out-loud funny, another which creates a silence of unease that chills the house.But it’s scabrous in the original sense, too, about a wound that doesn’t heal, the scab that has formed over it only precarious protection against the original hurt. That hurt, of course, is slavery, the legacy of which simply has not gone away for America, even a Read more ...
Heather Neill
The title of Tony Harrison's teacherly entertainment – it can't be called a play – refers to the square bullets invented by James Puckle to kill Muslims in the 18th century. This shocking morsel of information is provided by the brothers Hiram and Hudson Maxim, inventors respectively of the machine gun and smokeless gunpowder, who are two of the characters in Square Rounds.That apparent oxymoron might also imply attempts to square impossible circles, to the irony of scientific curiosity so frequently leading simultaneously to beneficial and destructive ends. Hiram Maxim (played energetically Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Transatlantic theatrical traffic is busier than ever, and now here at the Hampstead is not just Stephen Karam’s Tony-winning play, first seen in 2015, but director Joe Mantello and his full Broadway cast. It seems fitting that they should travel together, since Karam’s work is so dependent upon a company – as they do here – capturing the intricate rhythms of family, until the rich naturalism begins to convey something profound.It’s Thanksgiving, and three generations of Blakes have assembled to bless the new Manhattan apartment of younger daughter Brigid (Sarah Steele) and her boyfriend – not Read more ...