Theatre
Steve Clarkson
Some people say that, in the age of theatrical consultants, narrative deconstruction, and the so-called "multimedia performance", conventional theatre no longer cuts the mustard. But there are still those large swathes of any audience who love a smooth journey between a beginning, a middle, and an end. Who shuffle politely past others towards their seats, look expectantly towards the stage curtain, and know exactly what's coming. And then go home smiling rather than thinking afterwards.Noël Coward's Blthe Spirit is unapologetically a play for that public. It was mainstream before Read more ...
Naima Khan
As glad as I am that you've chosen to read this review, I can't help thinking you'd get more kicks out of the Daily Mail's take on Microcosm at the Soho Theatre, if indeed there is one. Written by Matt Hartley, whose Sixty Five Miles won a Bruntwood prize for playwriting in 2005, Microcosm is, as its title suggests, an attempt to home in on the paranoia and anxiety expressed across the country by right-leaning suburbanites. The play doesn't pull this off with any special skill and has to resort to the stereotype of hoodie-clad yoof to make its point, but it does bring to attention the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
When I first heard that the new play from Out of Joint was about the NHS I thought this might be a delayed result of the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympics: all those prancing nurses surely deserve a play of their own. In fact, the emotional fuel behind Stella Feehily’s new play comes from nearer home. In 2006, Max Stafford-Clark, her husband and the play’s director, suffered a stroke, which means that much of this drama’s depth of feeling comes from first-hand experience.The play tells the story of one family. When Nicholas James, a widower, begins to suffer prostate problems, he seeks Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Hilary Mantel’s two Thomas Cromwell novels have captured an enormous new readership for history with their crackling sense of place and immediacy of tension - the plays created on them, now brought to London by the Royal Shakespeare Company, are relishable creations of different virtues. Mantel’s exquisitely detailed, emotionally penetrating descriptions of weather, place or internal worries aren’t to be found. Instead, we get top-speed action and plot, as Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas More and the ubiquitous, observant Thomas Cromwell scythe through English history Read more ...
Naima Khan
"Debris - literally!" Or so spoke a fellow reviewer as she sat down next to me, having navigated her way through the rubble scattered across the floor of Southwark Playhouse's aptly-named Little auditorium. It's here that Openworks Theatre in association with the Look Left Look Right company is reviving Dennis Kelly's 2003 one-act, Debris, which centres on a brother and sister in their late teens as they relive the darkest, most disturbing episodes of their lives. This early work from the Tony Award-winning writer of the smash musical Matilda (as well as such plays as Osama the Hero and Read more ...
philip radcliffe
By picking his way through Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Virgil’s Aeneid - written 600 years later - Simon Armitage has it all, including the horse and Helen, each of whom in their way enable the hordes to breach Troy’s gates. What with that and the mingling of mortals and gods, not to mention the 100,000 troops that Agamemnon leads across the Aegean to rescue Helen, there’s a lot to attempt to pack into this theatre’s intimate space in three hours. Rather too much as it turns out.In order to accommodate the action, director Nick Bagnall has moved slightly away from the usual in-the-round Read more ...
edward.seckerson
On the Richter scale of catchiness Richard Adler and Jerry Ross’s songs for The Pajama Game are right up there. Quite who did what in their brief but shining songwriting partnership was never entirely clear, though Adler claimed supremacy in the music department. But one thing is clear: the man who brought them on and pushed them forward - the great Frank Loesser - is all over their work like a rash. It is said he wrote two of the Pajama Game songs uncredited but he could easily have written at least one other. Had Ross not died prematurely after their second consecutive smash, Damn Yankees ( Read more ...
bella.todd
There are echoes of Lost in the crashed B-25 bomber that fills this often brilliant production with its rusting corpse. And they’re probably intended. Joseph Heller’s cult World War Two satire is, after all, about a kind of purgatory: US Army bombardier Captain John Yossarian is trapped by the absurdities of bureaucracy within a cynically perpetuated war where the ubiquitous Catch-22 states that anyone asking to be declared insane and discharged from duty must be well enough to continue to fly - fear of death being a rational human response.He is caught, too, by suppressed grief and guilt Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Waiting For Godot is one of those plays which even those who have never seen know something about. “A tragicomedy in two acts,” as Beckett's subtitle described it, in which two tramps in bowler hats blether on about boots and a bloke who never appears, and where, in Irish critic Vivian Mercer's immortal words, “nothing happens twice”. And if they know nothing else about it, they surely can quote the play's most famous line: "We give birth astride of a grave."Now comes Simon Dormandy's “reimagined” version aimed at a younger audience. Out go the bowler hats and in come baseball caps, one of Read more ...
Heather Neill
Yellow Face comes into the Shed a year after it was first greeted enthusiastically at the newly-opened Park Theatre. Its category was generally agreed to be "mockumentary". Fair enough as the author David Henry Hwang appears as a character in his own play, a mixture of autobiography and fiction. Hwang was inspired to tackle the subject - the lack of opportunity for East Asians in American theatre - when Jonathan Pryce was cast as the Engineer, complete with taped up eyes, in Miss Saigon, adopting "yellow face" in the tradition of "black face" minstrels. Hwang led the protests against Pryce's Read more ...
David Nice
If you’re tempted to see Fiona Shaw’s impressive solo performance as Mary the mother of a son she can’t bring herself to name – and see it you probably should – then bear two things in mind.First, anything you may have heard or read about this being the narrative of everywoman mourning an everyman who just happens to have been crucified is nonsense; despite the contemporary props, it’s unequivocally the New Testament story told from a perspective which Biblical literalists will dislike (and they hated it very vocally when the show opened in New York).Second, don’t expect the kind of nuanced Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When absorbing any artistic experience we can be confounded by our own expectations. Such was the case for me with Bonanza. Rather confusingly, Berlin are a Belgian outfit majoring in cinematic, multimedia theatre so, perhaps, I was expecting an element of performance to the evening, of direct human delivery. This was not to be, although the presence of a shadowy figure stage-side, sitting at a laptop behind a rustic wooden sign saying “Bonanza Fire House”, kept me wondering if something of this nature was about to occur. It wasn’t, and once I’d settled to that fact, the evening was engaging Read more ...