Theatre
Marianka Swain
There will be blood. And expletives. And puppet sex that makes Avenue Q look positively monastic. But perhaps most shocking of all is that beneath the eye-wateringly explicit surface of Robert Askins’ provocative farce, which began life Off-Off-Broadway in 2011, lies a sentiment that makes this one of the cuddlier shows on the West End. Albeit one that features a graphically detached ear lobe.Askins’ play is based on childhood experience. Growing up in small-town Texas, he assisted his mother with puppet ministry – essentially telling Bible stories via Sesame Street. Like his protagonist, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Uncle Johnny instead of Vanya, a passing reference to sharia law, and nary a samovar in sight: surely this can't be the Uncle Vanya that has long been a cornerstone of the British theatre, especially in a new version from its take-no-prisoners director, Robert Icke, that presents the four-act text with three (!) intervals?Well, you can relax. Only the most authoritarian of purists will fail to find Chekhov's eternally wounding masterwork in correspondingly full flower across just as lengthy an evening as Icke's career-making Oresteia last year – and even more emotionally replete, as befits Read more ...
aleks.sierz
As a subject for drama, theatre history is always popular in the West End. Between Mr Foote’s Other Leg, which has recently closed at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, and Mrs Henderson Presents, which opens soon at the Noël Coward Theatre, comes Nell Gwynn, a West End transfer of the popular show from Shakespeare’s Globe, with Gemma Arterton as the eponymous heroine. But is this rowdy Restoration romp deserving of the lavish praise it has already garnered?The story of Nell, which begins in the 1660s once the anti-theatrical Puritans have been sent packing, is well known. Her rise from orange- Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Jack is an alcoholic. Stephanie is a whore. Joseph is stupid. Stevie is a broody neurotic. These identifiers are proudly proclaimed in the first minute of Matthew Perry’s debut play, but if you weren’t paying attention, fear not: they will be repeated, loudly and often. This is theatre as group therapy, and there is nothing left to the imagination.Though Perry (pictured below with the cast) has been wary of calling The End of Longing autobiographical, it’s not hard to read his character Jack as an avatar: the single, 40-year-old addict who masks self-doubt with sarcasm. But if Read more ...
Ismene Brown
If one says, accurately, that Richard Bean’s Toast is a comedy about Hull’s lost bread industry, trade unions and the poor working man, you will possibly yawn and turn the page. But it is no more just about that than Henry IV, Part II is about Tudor pub culture. Toast is a gloriously madcap blast about men’s insecurities and pomposities, with a groanworthy taste in jokes. For one thing, Bean originally wanted to call it Wonderloaf, a fine ironic pun on its subject, which is the artform that yesteryear's unionised working man made of loafing about on a break, all strictly legal.In his gap year Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Legendary director Peter Brook makes theatre that teaches audiences to be human. Now 90 years old, he brings his latest project to London from Paris, where he has been based at the Bouffes du Nord since quitting the UK more than 40 years ago. Called Battlefield, it is a 65-minute distillation of part of his 1985 11-hour epic, The Mahabharata, and revisits the ancient Sanskrit myth of the Kurukshetra War, and the struggle between the two warring families of the Kauravas and the Pandavas.Co-created with his long-term collaborators Jean-Claude Carrière and Marie-Hélène Estienne, Battlefield is Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
For a play about silence – its uncanny ability to tell the truth, to “persuade when speaking fails” – The Winter’s Tale is remarkably wordy. Of the sequence of late romances only Cymbeline comes close to the dense and elliptical verbal patterning we find ourselves tangled in here. But Michael Longhurst’s new production for the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is so richly cast, its verse-speaking so expressive that we see straight through the often opaque text to the humanity and the humour beneath.After a riotous Pericles and troubled Cymbeline, this third play in Dominic Dromgoole’s farewell quartet Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The death of a child is an unnatural loss. There’s no reassurance that the departed lived a full life, rather the jagged edge of one cut short. In the case of Becca and Howie, it’s also nonsensical: their perfectly healthy four-year-old son struck by a car in a freak accident while chasing their dog onto a quiet suburban street. How to find meaning in such absurd horror?The central problem of American playwright David Lindsay-Abaire’s empathetic, Pulitzer-winning work is that their respective coping mechanisms have taken them down different paths, opening up a chasm between them. Becca ( Read more ...
David Nice
Demons, trolls and dead souls have a habit of latching onto Ibsen's bourgeois Norwegians. Surely the best way for actors to handle them is to keep it natural, make them part of the furniture and, in Dostoyevsky's words, "render the supernatural so real that one is almost forced to believe it". But very little seems real or spontaneous in Matthew Warchus's production of The Master Builder. It certainly doesn't help that chilling events from the past or visions of the paranormal are underlined with creepy music and lighting when they should be torn from the characters' insides, the sounds Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"One... Two... You know what to do": that coolly delivered rehearsal intro from a trombonist called Cutler (Clint Dyer) could serve as a synoptic appraisal of the simply overwhelming National Theatre revival of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. The play in 1984 launched the late August Wilson on to Broadway, where I first saw it, and here announces itself as a bellwether achievement in artistic director Rufus Norris's still-young National Theatre regime and as, very possibly, the finest Ma Rainey yet.For that, credit the surpassing empathy of a director in Dominic Cooke, who brings much the same easy Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Lolita Chakrabarti’s impassioned debut has only gained topicality since its 2012 Tricycle incarnation. Trevor Nunn’s all-white Wars of the Roses and #OscarsSoWhite, among others, have fanned its flames, while quips about a paranoid Russian regime and the limits of English openness to change seem all too pertinent. Cameron might well borrow the woolly idea of “new based on the old” during the European referendum debate.Brooking no compromise is rule-breaking African-American actor Ira Aldridge (Adrian Lester), who, in 1833, succeeded the celebrated Edmund Kean as Othello at the Theatre Royal Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You might think that the combination of a play about one of the funniest comics of the second half of the 20th century, written by his biographer and directed by a member of Monty Python would be a winning one. But sadly Robert Ross's Jeepers Creepers: Through the Eyes of Marty Feldman is anything but.For younger comedy fans, Feldman might be merely a footnote in history, but his CV was extraordinary. He was a writer, performer and director, his writing credits include Educating Archie, Round the Horne, At Last the 1948 Show and The Frost Report (where he co-wrote the "Class" Read more ...