Theatre
aleks.sierz
Refugees, it is said, have no nationality – they are all individuals. This new docu-drama, deftly put together by theatre-makers Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, is a sombre account of a couple of recent years of the great European migration crisis, and acts as a testament to the individuality and complexity of the refugee experience. As this co-production between Good Chance theatre company, the National and the Young Vic opens, in an immersive production steered by directors Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, it raises various troubling questions about this kind of theatre, most of which are Read more ...
David Benedict
From Nicholas Hytner and Alan Bennett’s wonderfully nostalgic version of The Wind in the Willows through Coram Boy, the international smash hit War Horse and beyond, the National Theatre has a startling track record in turning what used to be patronisingly regarded as “family shows” into first-rate theatre. But for most of the first act of Pinocchio, the latest entry in the National’s Christmas Hits stakes, it looks as if there’s nothing worse than great expectations. Despite entrancing visuals, the uninvolving storytelling is as wooden as its central character. Mercifully, however, once Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The city of love provides a backdrop for marital discord and worse in Belleville, Amy Herzog's celebrated Off Broadway play now receiving a riveting British premiere at the Donmar. The director, Michael Longhurst, is rivaling Dominic Cooke (of Follies renown) as the British theatre's current American chronicler of choice, with the glorious Gloria and Chichester's Caroline, or Change already well-received this year. Belleville is a more elusive and slippery piece: a Hitchcockian study in physical and emotional displacement that isn't beyond occasional forays into grand guignol. But Longhurst Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It raised some eyebrows when Al Murray announced he was to make his pantomime debut – top comics rarely make that crossover these days – but, considering his alter ego The Pub Landlord is already an over-the-top creation, the character fits right into this production.It's at a theatre recently famed for its starry and glitzy pantomimes; First Family Entertainment used to stage the pantos here, but now its old rival, Qdos, working in partnership with ATG, is running the show. On this evidence the new producers are yet to find the same magic. Yes, Jack and the Beanstalk has big names in Murray Read more ...
william.ward
Even more than some of Shakespeare’s other histories, Julius Caesar inevitably offers itself to “topical interpretation”, a Rorschach test of a play which directors short of an original idea can extrapolate to project their own political aperçus upon. Over the last century, Ancient Rome’s most famous autocrat has been endlessly re-spun as a leery dictator of the modern totalitarian variety.Angus Jackson (overall director of the RSC’s Rome MMXVII season now at the Barbican), has wisely chosen to eschew such modish nonsense and concentrate instead on clarity, drawing out of the text itself all Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
If this play really were “A Debate in One Sitting” as its author called it in 1909, it would have sunk without trace. “Talk, talk, talk, talk”, complains Hypatia Tarleton (Marli Siu), daughter of an Edwardian underwear magnate. Sick to death of the menfolk talking at her and over her, she longs to be “an active verb”, and we sympathise. One expects loquacity in a Bernard Shaw play but in Misalliance the ideas tumble forth like a river breaking its banks: the evils of Empire and British class snobbery; the benefits of socialism, feminism, physical exercise, free libraries and frank Read more ...
David Nice
Director Richard Jones watched all 156 episodes of The Twilight Zone as research for this Almeida production. I've never seen a single one, to the amazement of the American fan on the tube home who saw me reading the programme and, having grown up with the TV series in the early 1960s, told me a lot more about the skill of creator/scriptwriter Rod Serling and which instalments I should seek out. I shall now.The question why may trouble all but diehard enthusiasts as the opening actions unfold and intertwine, but by the end of this giddying evening Twilight Zone virgins may feel they've been Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Is there a key to “infinite variety”? The challenge of Cleopatra is to convey the sheer fullness of the role, the sense that it defines, and is defined by only itself: there’s no saying that the glorious tragedy of the closing plays itself out, of course, but its impact surely soars only when the ludic engagements of the first half have drawn us in equally. Monarchs, in the words of Shakespeare’s contemporary John Webster, may “brook no contradiction”, but this Egyptian Queen practically demands it – including self-contradiction, most of all. In Antony and Cleopatra we have a heroine who is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The play that famously got away when one of its stars (quite literally) jumped ship is back. In 1995, Stephen Fry abandoned the West End premiere of Simon Gray's espionage drama Cell Mates, leaving co-star Rik Mayall in the lurch and prompting Gray to write a particularly dyspeptic account of the bizarre goings-on called Fat Chance. Resurfacing for a well-cast Hampstead Theatre revival neither of whose leading men look likely to bolt for the exit, Cell Mates can now be seen for the pecularity that it is: a decidedly English variant on The Odd Couple that seems, weirdly, to leave the actual Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Pantomime may be a very old art form, but the Lyric Hammersmith has been injecting some freshness into it each year since 2009, and this year's production, written by Joel Horwood and directed by Jude Christian and Sean Holmes, is no exception.Good panto writing should please all ages, and Jack and the Beanstalk certainly manages that. It's a stirringly upbeat show but one with a serious undertow about the importance of being kind and not greedy (Jack's climb up the beanstalk is not to find gold, but to prevent the villagers being made homeless), and there are subtle political nods to Brexit Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Theatreland is currently awash with pantomimes and rehashes of A Christmas Carol, so all credit to this ambitious new production, an adaptation of the 1935 children’s book, The Box of Delights. Long before Narnia, poet laureate John Masefield was concocting tales of children dispatched to mysterious country houses for safekeeping but encountering deep magic, time travelling and talking animals. Serialised by the BBC in the mid-1980s, this new stage version is the work of children’s writer Piers Torday and takes full advantage of the wonderfully ramshackle Victorian relic that is Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
La Soirée is on the up-and-up. Beginning life as an after-hours show at the fringes of the Fringe in 2004, it won an Olivier in 2015 and has landed its first West End residency, a two-month run at the Aldwych Theatre over Christmas. Its acts – comedians, dancers, acrobats and aerialists – have performed all over the world, but the show lives up to its name: an entertaining evening, with nothing to really dazzle.Kudos to the producers for having the audacity to look at a 100-year-old theatre and think, "Let’s get a woman attached to that ceiling by her bun." The feat of engineering Read more ...