Theatre
philip radcliffe
“It’s all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind,” advised Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West when writing the spoof biography Orlando as a “love letter” to her. When she had finished the novel, depicting Vita as an androgynous time-traveller, she wrote defensively: “It is all over the place, incoherent, intolerable, impossible.”Molly Gromadzki as the alluring Sasha performs demanding aerobaticsWelcome to her world of topsy-turvydom, in which the eponymous hero changes sex, cross-dresses, transgresses barriers of gender, place and time. Along the way he/she derides Read more ...
Steve Clarkson
It takes a particularly hard heart to fail to be moved by the sheer scale of community fragmentation around the time of the Miners' Strike – for many, the single most devastating period in the north of England's social history. But maybe, just maybe, this Brassed Off play is not quite as stirring as it should be.Adapted by Paul Allen from the classic 1996 film, the story about a colliery and its brass band has been revived at York Theatre Royal to mark the strike's 30th anniversary year. Pulling the strings is Damian Cruden, an award-winning director of such vision and skill that his Read more ...
Naima Khan
“Consider the donut!” One might have assumed that a significant chunk of Tracy Letts’s Superior Donuts would be a heartfelt ode to the fried dessert cake itself. In fact Letts’s play, set in a donut shop nestled in an economically and culturally diverse borough of Chicago, dwells on the personal and political make-up of the shop’s most dedicated staff. All two of them.It’s a look into the ways we can evade life, skip its hardest tests and sink fast without the buoyancy of hope. But while the author of the play and film of August: Osage County gives us a very different sort of script, in the Read more ...
mark.kidel
Andrew Hilton, the creative force that drives the consistently excellent Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory, might be playing safe by returning to a play he put originally put on in 2003. But “As You Like It”, for all its light touches, is a challenging proposition: both in terms of the way the author treats complex relationships between play-acting and authenticity, true and projected love, goodness and evil, but also because the many-threaded story doesn’t unfold with quite the same elegance as in some of the other comedies.This is a play in which structure is a little too apparent Read more ...
philip radcliffe
We are witnessing the end of an era in the long history of Manchester’s theatreland: the disappearance, after more than 60 years, of the treasured Library Theatre. Coming full circle, it is ending as it began, with a production of The Seagull.Modestly located in the basement of the city’s grand Central Reference Library (pictured below), where it was opened by King George V in 1934, the theatre has a distinguished history, boasting European premieres of Sondheim musicals and quality productions, especially of plays by Neil Simon and Bertolt Brecht. Some successfully transferred to the West Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Another week, another postwar classic. Hot on the heels of last week’s revival of Oh What a Lovely War comes another legendary play from the Joan Littlewood museum of great one-offs. This time it’s a restaging of Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 play about poor parenting and teen pregnancy in Salford. Although this play is lauded in most history books as a great radical breakthrough, it has attracted fewer revivals in recent years than plays such as Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot or John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. Is there a good reason for this comparative neglect?The original play was penned Read more ...
kate.bassett
Winston Smith is alone. Isolated in a pool of light, with an anglepoise lamp at his shoulder, he is about to pen the first entry in his private diary. But he is, of course, being watched. Mark Arends' Winston is, after all, living in the nightmarish superstate where Big Brother keeps every citizen perpetually under surveillance, even when they don’t know it.In this impressive, disturbing dramatisation of 1984 – Headlong's experimental adaptation of George Orwell's novel (originally published in 1949) – Arends' Winston believes he has found a nook that's unobserved. However, as he Read more ...
David Nice
Showboys will be boys – gym-bunny sailors, in this instance – as well as sisters, cousins, aunts, captain’s daughters and bumboat women. We know the ropes by now for Sasha Regan’s all-male Gilbert and Sullivan: a loving attempt to recreate, she says, the innocence of musical theatre in same-sex schools (mine, for which I played Sir Joseph Porter with a supporting army or navy of recorders, two cellos and piano, was mixed).This time, the naval high jinks allow Regan to evoke a kind of Privates on Parade scenario, the show-without-the-show set below deck on a World War Two battleship – or so we Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The trend of celebrating anniversaries by digging out old classics might suggest that no good new plays are being written, but at least it gives us the chance to re-assess their worth. Theatre Royal Stratford East, the legendary Joan Littlewood’s old venue, presents a new production of Oh What a Lovely War in its 60th anniversary year to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the First World War. This classic, first staged in 1963, is a powerful anti-war tract — but is there any more to it than a flamboyantly theatrical humanity?The idea for the musical originally came from BBC producer Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
Would you be able to tell if the world had ended? For Beth and Franklin, the wannabe intellectuals at the heart of Stephen Sewell's play, it proves quite difficult to ascertain whether life as they know it has come to an end from their privileged life high in a luxury Melbourne apartment. Whether they are bickering about how the New Yorker has gone downhill or despairing about terrorism, they remain insulated from the world by their own self-absorption.The stoppage of the title directly refers to the electricity, water, telephone line, mobile network and internet. The baser side of these Read more ...
David Nice
An insider once told me that you get a grant for including puppets in a production. Which may account for the amount of crap puppetry haphazardly applied in the theatre. That certainly can't be said about the work of husband-and-husband team Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones of Handspring as they collaborate again with War Horse director Tom Morris, this time on Shakespearean texturing of organic discipline. The problem is that such focused visual imagination needs to be matched by verbal beauty, word magic, of the highest order, and it isn’t.I can't agree with Mark Kidel, who in his Read more ...
mark.kidel
Plunging into the lonely vortex of the long distance web wanker isn’t obviously gripping theatre, but Chris Goode’s seventy-minute descent into tawdry solitude and digital fantasy doesn’t do too badly.Nothing much happens on stage, as John, a wannabe erotic science-fiction writer, communes with the audience as well as with Carlos, a Los Angeles- based model who plies his trade on a porn site and chat room. As he talks to us spectators, we become implicated in uneasy voyeurism, alleviated by wry and sometimes intentionally facile banter, as if John were desperately trying to make us Read more ...