Theatre
David Nice
We’ve now learned from the films of Paolo Sorrentino and honorary Roman Ferzan Ozpetek what great and nuanced ensemble acting the Italians can produce. Even so, the towering star of the current scene is the chameleonic Toni Servillo, already hailed as seemingly impassive capo di tutti capi Andreotti in Il Divo and as the (Oscar-winning) regretful playboy Jep Gambardella in the stupendous La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty).Servillo is, in fact, a stage animal of longer standing with feet firmly planted on thespian ground as actor/director, a Neapolitan to the core and as such the natural Read more ...
Madeleine Sackler
For the members of the Belarus Free Theatre, there are many risks to doing something that we might all take for granted: telling stories about our lives. These risks include censorship, blacklisting, imprisonment, and worse. But when the authorities forbid critical examinations of such topics as sexual orientation, alcoholism, suicide and politics, the Free Theatre responds by injecting these taboos into underground performances. Unfortunately, their activities eventually become too dangerous for even these individuals, and after a rigged election and a violent crackdown by the KGB, they are Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The names have been changed to protect the guilty but half the fun of I Can’t Sing! - the so-called X-Factor musical - lies in the relentless spoofing of a show we love to hate and a format so unremittingly predictable that its contestants, judges, and host now read like characters from a, well, musical. Put Harry Hill on the job and you know he’s going to throw enough gags at the subject for at least a handful to stick and were this an anarchic fringe offering with a cast of six and a budget low enough to render it inventive by necessity then you’d have more chance of leaving the venue with Read more ...
aleks.sierz
How do you explore extremes of feeling on stage? In cult pen-master Philip Ridley’s new play, a 75-minute monologue that won plaudits in Edinburgh last year, he takes us by the hand and throws us into a universe of pain. His mouthpiece is comedian and actor Gemma Whelan — who plays Yara Greyjoy of the television series Game of Thrones — and is now Andrea, a 15-year-old from the East End of London who is groomed for sex by an older man.Andrea and her friend Emma are a couple of teenagers whose upbringing has not encouraged them to bask in the warming sunlight of good self-esteem. On the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Just before the curtain came up for the second half of Fatal Attraction, a chap sitting behind me told his companion, “All I remember is that it ends quite badly.” It may seem like a cheap shot, from me, but the comment was apposite in so many ways, not least because the reason for this misbegotten production’s very existence is a writer’s desire to change his ending.James Dearden’s biggest claim to fame is as the screenwriter of the 1987 big screen potboiler – and, of course, bunny boiler – about a man made to suffer for his adultery, when his one-night stand turns out to be a psychotic Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When Julian Mitchell wrote Another Country in a couple of months in 1980, Anthony Blunt had just been exposed as one of the Cambridge spy ring. Donald Maclean and Kim Philby were still living in Moscow and the Cold War had another decade to run. The play was set in a boarding school in which adult authority figures are entirely absent, leaving prefects to run the place like a English establishment.In the nascent homosexual Guy Bennett and the incipient Marxist Tommy Judd, Mitchell created two roles that would launch a quartet of stratospheric careers. Rupert Everrett (as Bennett) travelled Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jon Robin Baitz learnt his craft writing on big American television shows including The West Wing and he created Brothers & Sisters, and Other Desert Cities - his first Broadway play - is another family drama with a political edge. The title comes from the signs saying “Palm Springs/Other Desert Cities” on motorways leading into the Coachella Valley, a vast sprawl of nine cities that have a profusion of resort hotels, spas and golf courses. A two-hour drive from Los Angeles, the area is both a playground for Angelenos, and the place where many choose to live when they retire.So Read more ...
Naima Khan
Performed by all-female theatre company, Fluff, Sarah Sigal's take on feminism through the ages drops us in and out of three time scenarios: the Royalist household of Lady Anne in 1646, the adventures of fashion journalist Pamela in 1936, and the discourse between corporate manager Celia and her recovering addict friend Lucy in 2014. Sound familiar in both structure and content? Well, if you follow the work of Caryl Churchill, it largely is. The play's elliptical scenes and female-centric focus suggest Churchill's contemporary classic Top Girls, to which Sigal further adds an aspect not Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
I hadn’t heard the term “cultural cringe” until I went to live in Australia. Holiday encounters had been so full of sunshine, art, water and music that it hadn’t occurred to me to doubt the cultural confidence and energy of the nation that gave us Patrick White and Peter Carey, Baz Luhrmann and Brett Whiteley, Joan Sutherland and Robert Hughes. But once I did, the phrase was everywhere. Google it and you’ll find hundreds of recent articles all devoted to the same basic premise: when it comes to culture, Europe is just better than Australia.It was 1950 when AA Phillips first coined the term. Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Political farces always start with a distinct disadvantage — the reality is so much sillier than the fictional version. Never mind, if anyone can make a stage comedy funny it is Ray Cooney, who is not only one of the most entertaining playwrights of our age, but also a national treasure in his own right. This play, originally written in 1984, predates the recent dip in the popularity of MPs, and also features a neat cameo appearance by its author.Here laughter is a poor substitute for orgasmThe set-up is classic. A Cabinet Minister, called Richard Willey (yes, really), wants to have sex with Read more ...
Naima Khan
When was the last time you took a swipe at someone, and I mean a real swipe - a physical, emotional, cruel, unapologetic swipe of the sort that comes thick and fast in Vicky Jones's exhilarating new play, The One? The three-hander returns the actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge to the site of her solo (and Olivier-nominated) triumph, Fleabag, only this time in a play written by the colleague who directed her last time out.Waller-Bridge's Jo and partner Harry (Rufus Wright, last year's David Cameron in The Audience) met when she was his student and he her lecturer, and they've been living in Read more ...
kate.bassett
Maybe, just maybe, Noël Coward is scarier than you think. As a rule of thumb, when ghosts feature in plays, they're meant to be creepy as hell, calling for some horrid crime to be revenged, and/or a manifestation of the living characters' profoundly troubled thoughts. In Blithe Spirit – which opened last night, with Michael Blakemore restaging his 2009 Broadway production – Coward’s protagonist, Charles Condomine, finds that he's prone to apparitions. But he hardly seems mentally agonized by way of explanation.Ensconced in the drawing room of his timber-framed country house, Read more ...