Theatre
Katherine Waters
I’ve forgotten my wallet. This is both embarrassing (where did the fun lush part between callow youth and irrefutable senility disappear?) and upsetting because by the interval of the Finborough Theatre’s revival of French symbolist writer Paul Claudel’s immensely prolix, indulgently semi-autobiographical, astonishingly declamatory and undeniably self-flagellatory play Break of Noon, I'm in need of a drink as stiff as the acting.How many adjectives can fit into a sentence? How many words can be used when one will suffice? Why say “fearful” when being “scared” and harrowed to the “pith” of Read more ...
Heather Neill
This exuberant production both clarifies and further complicates the conundrum of Peter Pan. In any production true to Barrie there is an underpinning of sadness, an acknowledgement of the losses we must all suffer: children leave home and adult responsibility takes the place of childhood innocence. And yet, despite the tragedies which dogged both Barrie's own life and those of the family who inspired this work, it is also a celebration of the youth and joy which Peter himself claims to represent. In this version, first seen in 2015, Timothy Sheader and Liam Steel mark the centenary of the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Add Catalan writer Jordi Galcerán to the shortlist of European playwrights who are finding an international perch, in this case with a tricksy four-character play that has had more than 200 productions in over 60 countries. The UK premiere of The Grönholm Method follows six years on from a Los Angeles staging that boasted the same director (Mike Nichols protégé BT McNicholl) and leading man (Jonathan Cake as the bilious Frank), while a 2007 Spanish movie, The Method, expanded the premise for the screen. Given all this activity and attention, it's moderately surprising Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Calixto Bieito has a reputation as a radical theatre-maker, and by any standards The String Quartet’s Guide to Sex and Anxiety is an unusual, genre-breaking piece; Bieito has described it as “like a symphonic poem for a quartet of musicians, and a quartet of voices”. A mesmerising 90-minute melange on the subjects of its title – anxiety seems marginally the dominant emotion, somehow preceding sex – it’s a collaborative effort between the Heath Quartet (with whom Bieito worked on his ENO Fidelio five years ago) and four actors, Cathy Tyson, Mairead McKinley, Miltos Yerolemou and Nick Harris. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Ian Rickson’s route into theatre was not conventional. Growing up in south London, he discovered plays largely through reading them as a student at Essex University. During those years he stood on a picketline in the miners’ strike, and proudly hurled the contents of an eggbox at Cecil Parkinson. He is a lifelong supporter of Charlton Athletic. When he was appointed to succeed Stephen Daldry at the Royal Court in 1998, having been associate director for three years, he was portrayed in the media as a nowhere man. He could have been forgiven for wondering whether his surname had been changed Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a distinct feeling of back to basics to this opening double bill at the Globe under the theatre’s new Artistic Director Michelle Terry. The elaborations (some would say gimmickry) of Emma Rice’s short tenure have been reined back, and a new concentration prevails. This first presentation – two plays written around 1599, the year in which Shakespeare's original Globe opened: As You Like It was staged that year, Hamlet a little later – is built on a new approach to ensemble that draws on a broader casting base than usual.That involved a gender-neutral approach (with a 50:50 gender ratio Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The show’s subtitle – “Songs banned by the Nazis” – is a catchy one, and somewhere under the confetti, the stilettos, the extravagant nudity, the sequins and even shinier repartee that are wrapped around Effigies of Wickedness like a mink coat on the shoulders of an SS officer’s mistress is the bruised and grubby story of one of history’s foulest episodes. As the evening progresses and the glossy fur slips lower and lower we see a reveal more shocking than any burlesque club or Weimar cabaret could offer.Effigies of Wickedness (a phrase borrowed from an official description of the Nazis’ Read more ...
David Nice
Towards the end of the Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg's Life and Fate, a long scene in director Lev Dodin's daring if necessarily selective adaptation of Vasily Grossman's epic novel brings many of the actors together after a sequence of painful monologues and one-to-ones. The social nuances and the glimmers of humour here in a mostly lightless play are pure Chekhov - a writer referenced several times by Grossman - and give us a preview of the warm, human laughter to come in the company's Uncle Vanya. Then the blackness envelops the drama again. It could hardly be otherwise in a tragedy Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The band’s back together. Alfred Molina plays Rothko for the third time in Michael Grandage’s revisiting of John Logan’s richly textured two-hander, first seen at the Donmar in 2009 and then bypassing the West End for Broadway. Another excellent Alfred – Alfred Enoch, of the Harry Potter films and American TV series How to Get Away with Murder – succeeds Eddie Redmayne as Rothko’s assistant, forming a compelling duo in this 90-minute meditation on the nature, process and purpose of art.We’re in Rothko’s New York studio in the late 1950s, where he’s working on a major commission: grand murals Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Five years ago, when New York playwright Rajiv Joseph started on his fantasy disquisition on truth, lies and the recent history of Russia, no one was talking about a new Cold War and trump was still a thing you did in a game of cards. Now, at the British premiere of Describe the Night, a wall in the foyer is beaming an image of Vladimir Putin and a pronouncement he made earlier that day. Full marks to Hampstead Theatre for being on the button. Eleven out of 10 to the playwright for attempting to fill in the blanks about a world leader who now seems to bend truth for a living.Over 12 scenes Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Problem is Brighton is down in the Festival programme as an “alt-rock/pop pantomime”, with actors involved and the inference it’s some sort of musical featuring “instruments specially created by David Shrigley for the performance”. This turns out to be seriously over-selling it. In fact, Problem in Brighton is a rock band put together to play an hour of songs created in league with the maverick artist and Festival Guest Director. Putting any expectations aside, it’s a patchy show.The band – four men, two women – initially arrive on stage one by one, in regulation black cowboy shirts with Read more ...
Katie Colombus
They say that behind every successful man is a strong woman. The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk is as much – if not more so – the championing of the unsung hero in this story of the famous early modernist artist, Marc Chagall. His wife, Bella – early muse, sharer of world views and buckets of milk and mother of their daughter Ida, is paid tribute to, for her devotion and dedication to her husband's art.The birth of surrealism is played out on a small stage, made up of geometric shapes from the hyper-colour backdrop, wooden structure set and the angles at which the actors lean, holding onto ropes to Read more ...