Theatre
Jasper Rees
When a book is published, there are broadly speaking three alternative fates which lie in wait. It goes global, it sinks without trace, or it sells modestly and steadily to the readership for whom it was intended. There is, however, another potential option, which is that it catches a thermal and veers off in an unforeseen direction.In 2008 my book I Found My Horn was published. It told of my fractured association with a musical instrument I learned for seven years in my youth, which I then resumed on the brink of my forties. I gave myself a target: at the end of the year I had to stand up in Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
The Husbands is set in a feminist utopia – or so it appears at first glance. Shaktipur, the place the characters call home, is a rural matriarchal community in which women are leaders and may take multiple husbands to address the demographic imbalance between the genders caused by the killing and abandoning of girl-children in other parts of Indian society. Their belief system is structured around giving women choices, and they prize baby girls as a sign that their goddess is pleased with them.At an individual level, though, this system is not quite so straightforward. The action of the Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
A collective shiver went round the arts community of Merseyside when the Liverpool Everyman announced that it was to be razed to the ground before rising again from the ashes like the theatrical phoenix of the region. And now, a little more than two years after the original theatre closed amidst much breast-beating, the Everyman is back, and with a spanking new production of Twelfth Night that constitutes a national event. The new theatre is light, airy, and accessible, and a massive asset to the creative hub that is Hope Street. And Gemma Bodinetz's way with Shakespeare's timeless comedy of Read more ...
Heather Neill
The full title of Jackie Sibblies Drury's play, first produced in Chicago in 2012, is deliberately gauche and in need of editing. No review is complete without it, however, so here it is: We Are Proud To Present A Presentation About The Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known As Southwest Africa, From The German Sudwestafrika, Between The Years 1884 - 1915. As they enter through the rehearsal room at the Bush, the audience encounters the group of well-intentioned young people supposedly keen to tell us the tragic story of the first genocide of the 20th century. The walls are covered, as they Read more ...
Simon Munk
Immersive theatre is a wonderful thing. It has closed up the cosy distancing of actors appearing on stage, the silent, passive audience below in the darkness; it has shaken up the way classic stories can be told – rebooting time-worn plays; and it has delivered some truly magical, mysterious experiences. But there's a problem. At the heart of most of the larger immersive theatre experiences such as Punchdrunk's The Drowned Man there's a passivity – the audience is still just an audience.Witness the frenzied scramble of attendees to The Drowned Man feverishly racing after actors, tweeting Read more ...
aleks.sierz
This venue continues its promotion of American drama with another prize-winning play from across the pond. Hot on the heels of Gina Gionfriddo’s Rapture, Blister, Burn, with its casting of Emila Fox, comes this play by David Lindsay-Abaire, who won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for his critically acclaimed Rabbit Hole, which also earned several Tony Award nominations and a film adaptation with Nicole Kidman. For Good People, Hampstead has tempted national treasure and Olivier Award-winning actress Imelda Staunton to play the lead.This is that rare thing — an American play about classHer character Read more ...
Naima Khan
From the creators of the much-lauded The Oh F*ck Moment comes I Wish I Was Lonely, a participatory look at modern communication and the human psyche. Flouting the rules of mainstream theatre, this by turns poetic yet provocative piece encourages the audience to keep all mobile phones on (imagine!), to answer whatever calls may come through, and even to use Twitter and Facebook to our hearts' delight. And having provided our mobile numbers on a piece of card, we receive the number of an anonymous member of the audience in return. So begins a newly fragile, temporary connection to a stranger we Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The board of Sheffield Theatres has a history of appointing actors to run the show. Michael Grandage had very little directing experience when he became artistic director of the city’s three theatres. Then came Samuel West. He was followed by Daniel Evans, who had directed no more than four plays.When the city’s theatres reopened after refurbishment in 2010, Evans (b 1973) began directing as if he didn’t wish to die wondering. Up first was Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People starring Antony Sher, and soon came Macbeth and Othello, and for his second Christmas he starred as the perpetual bachelor, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Few anniversaries have got off to such a strong start in our current culture as that of the outbreak of the First World War. This new play by Peter Gill, which opened last night, is original in that it focuses not on the start of the conflict, or on life in the trenches, but on the end of the war — and the peace negotiations in Paris in 1919, which led to the Treaty of Versailles. But does it draw connections between that time, so long ago, and life in this country today?Act One and Act Three take place in the drawing room of the Rawlinson home in Kent. The atmosphere is positively Edwardian Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If it's possible to have rather too much of a frolicsome thing, consider by way of example The Knight of the Burning Pestle, a giddily self-conscious 1607 romp from Francis Beaumont that would be more fun if it were at least a full scene or two shorter. Following on from The Duchess of Malfi as the second proper production to occupy the newly built Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (Eileen Atkins's sublime solo essay in Shakespeare came in between), Pestle proves that the candlelit venue can accommodate knockabout theatrics just as fully as it can sotto voce villainy.The problem lies not in the space Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The most ambitious musicals spring from the most unlikely sources – you need go no further than Stephen Sondheim to establish that – but turning those musicals from novelty into living, breathing, involving experiences requires very special talent. Back to Mr Sondheim. Everyone who writes in this medium owes him a huge debt of gratitude but some – like composer/lyricist Gwyneth Herbert, the fresh voice behind The A-Z of Mrs P – would seem to have evolved almost in spite of him, from another place altogether. What’s exciting about this show, for all its shortcomings, is the level of ambition Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You may have a slight sense of déjà vu about a stage production of The Full Monty. Wasn't it a Broadway hit at the turn of the millennium? Well yes it was, but that was an Americanised musical version of Simon Beaufoy's Oscar-nominated 1997 film; now his adaptation of the movie is in the West End after its acclaimed debut last year at Sheffield Crucible, and the setting is back in familiar territory.We're in Sheffield, South Yorkshire in the late 1980s, a time when it is suffering the full ravages of Thatcherism. The city's proud history of steel-making is all but gone and a group of four Read more ...