Theatre
aleks.sierz
Greece has had a bad press in recent years. A place that used to conjure up visions of lazy days on sun-soaked islands, with summer food and warm seas, now just reminds us of the migration crisis, bodies in the water and economic collapse. The country is used as an example of the failure of the Euro, and of the iniquity of the IMF. It is a place of poverty, and riots; a symbol of the age of austerity. A basket case; a warning. Now Elizabeth McGovern, who sheds her Edwardian Downton Abbey garb for groovy 1960s wear, stars in a play about Greece that explores that country’s troubled postwar Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Alexander Payne’s adored 2004 film adaptation of Rex Pickett’s semi-autobiographical novel didn’t just pick up an Academy Award – it led to a plummeting in sales of Merlot, and Pinot Noir becoming the drink of choice. What might Pickett’s theatrical version accomplish?The good news is this midlife-crisis comedy will certainly encourage visits to the bar, if not to California’s Santa Ynez Valley. (Canny ads and paired wine tastings stoke the flames of the latter.) Both parody of and love letter to the oenophile, it savours the rituals and jargon, as Pinot fanatic Miles (Daniel Weyman) takes Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A Victorian transgender celebrity is a fitting and timely subject for this Brighton Festival premiere. Writer-director Neil Bartlett turns Stella’s scandalous life into a stark horror story, marked by the regular, jarring crash of glass which sounds like splintering flashbulbs, mirror images breaking and jabbing at an older man (Richard Cant) whose hand is already slashed and bandaged, as he awaits a fatal knock on the door. A young man (Oscar Batterham), meanwhile, becomes a beautiful woman expecting a lover. Both are, or were, Stella, telling their tale in intercut, elliptical monologues. Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Last seen at the National Theatre over 10 years ago, Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera is back in a new adaptation by Simon Stephens. But looking at Rufus Norris’s epic-theatre-lite production – all exposed stage-mechanics and makeshift sets – and listening to Stephens’s brutal but non-committal text, you’d swear it had never been away. There’s no aggressive update, no attempt to reinvent or make relevant, and the result is a clean, cold stab of a show, a theatrical assault every bit as cool and casual as Mack’s own murders.It starts badly. For all that this is a “play with music” Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Trouble remembering in which country Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers cross paths? Branagh’s panting paean to Fellini will sort you out. Stylish as a monochromatic Vogue spread, and as self-consciously Italian as Bruno Tonioli guzzling lasagne in a gondola, it’s not exactly a triumph of cultural nuance. Capulet is a sharp-suited mafia don who makes an affected entrance sipping espresso, the Prince is a fascist enforcer, al-fresco dining is interrupted by fiery gesticulation, and every loss is met with operatic wailing.In this context, the high-speed courtship and resulting fallout seem Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is there any point to political satire? The great thing about the glory years of this genre in, say, the early 1960s was that the jokes punctured people’s deepest held beliefs in a deferential society, or that, as in say the 1980s, they had a target that was an unbearable person, Maggie Thatcher.But today, when cynicism about politics is widespread and nobody trusts any authority, reality often seems to be more crazy than any satire: Donald Trump, the Brexit campaign... Director Max Stafford-Clark would doubtless disagree, and his evening of five short playlets makes the case for laughter as Read more ...
Miriam Gillinson
Running Wild is a theatrical safari with no expenses spared. This latest stage adaptation of a novel by Michael Morpurgo (of War Horse fame) boasts a jungle-full of puppets – a majestic elephant and some affectionate orangutans included – and a tsunami that sweeps right over the audience. The puppets may steal your heart but the play itself, which peddles a stern conservation message, left me cold – and not just because it was a nippy night outdoors in Regent's Park. The story occupies classic Morpurgo territory and once again features a bereaved kid who finds solace and purpose in the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
As I sit down to write this, a crow is cawing outside my window while night falls; for an awkard moment I think it might be a raven, and this reminds me of Edgar Allan Poe. Is the black bird saying “Nevermore”? And why should that worry me? Well, I’ve just seen Stef Smith’s resonant and disturbing new play, Human Animals, and it’s made me particularly sensitive to all of the creatures with which we share our urban spaces. And of all the possibilities that this co-existence might spawn.The play begins with some observations of small changes, nothing to get anxious about. One young couple, Read more ...
Alistair Beaton
It’s either serious or it’s funny. That’s a view I quite often encountered when working in Germany. A theatre professional there once advised me to remove all references to writing television comedy from my biography in the theatre programme.“Why?” I asked.“People will think you’re not a serious playwright.”“A serious playwright can’t write comedy?”“It’s a bit worse than that.”“How, exactly?”“Well, it’s not just that you’re writing comedy, it’s that you’re writing comedy for television.”“Is that bad?”“It’s not good.”“In what way is it not good?”“Television is Unterhaltung.”And there we had it Read more ...
Ismene Brown
According to Sellar and Yeatman in 1066 and All That, the true Bible of English history, King John was a Bad (to be exact, an Awful) King. Shakespeare had quite an interest in Bad Kings – Richards II and III were also subjected to his selective dramatist’s forensics, and like Sellar and Yeatman he only remembered the bits he wanted to remember, and then partially. Hence no Magna Carta in King John, no losing of the Crown Jewels in the Wash, and the monarch dies at operatic length of poisoning, rather than the unglamorous realities of dysentery.The play, which the Bard left Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange is one of the best plays of the past two decades. First staged at the National Theatre in 2000, with the dream cast of Chiwetel Ejiofor, Andrew Lincoln and Bill Nighy, it won an Olivier Award for Best Play and has been constantly revived ever since. Not only does it have a strong story, but the characters, and their interaction, are credible, engaging and dramatic, while the play fizzes with ideas as well as emotions. It is a contemporary classic.Like all the best well-made plays, it has a single set and a limited time span. Located in an NHS psychiatric unit, Blue/ Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
In the long tradition of fictional characters who embody their monikers, the naming of Nick Bright hardly counts as the most colourful, but it has a sardonic edge. Clearly the young American banker at the centre of Ayad Akhtar’s tight political thriller is too bright for his own good. A commodities trader for Citibank currently working in Lahore, he has been mistaken for his big-shot boss and kidnapped by Islamic militants who are holding him hostage in rural Pakistan while they wait for his employer, or the US government, to cough up $10 million to set him free.Fat chance, he reasons, and Read more ...