Theatre
kate.bassett
We first see the bank clerk, who can’t bear his dull life, serving behind the cashier's till, like an automaton. In Melly Still's hugely inventive, visually stunning multimedia production of From Morning to Midnight – Georg Kaiser's fearlessly weird German Expressionist drama from 1912 – Adam Godley's Clerk starts out as a desiccated nonentity, nose to the grindstone.A huge, ticking clock hangs above him, cogs whirring, bells chiming. Shrill whistles blow as customers whirl in and out through brass turnstiles. Godley remains stiff as a corpse, except for his hands darting out to Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Vampire romance is a genre which has a mysterious tendency. Every time it migrates from one art form (say novel) to another (say film) it loses some of its darkness and acquires a strange sweetness. So it was with Let the Right One In, a 2004 novel by Swedish penman John Ajvide Lindqvist, which was made into a slightly less dark tale in its first Swedish film version (2008) and then into an even sweeter American film adaptation as Let Me In (2010). But if vampire romance lives by killing off its own dark soul, how will this stage incarnation fare?This is a dazzling and dramatically theatrical Read more ...
David Nice
Read Erich Kästner’s 1928 novel about young Emil Tischbein and the Berlin boys he enlists to catch a thief, and you’ll come away feeling warm if slightly incredulous at the strong moral compass of all the kids and most of the adults. Gerhard Lamprecht’s early (1931) “talkie”, with a screenplay by Billy Wilder, has darker undertones, much admired by the obsessive 19-year-old Benjamin Britten. Carl Miller’s adaptation for Bijan Sheibani’s racy new National Theatre production sees it from a slightly different angle, scrupulously mindful of Weimar Berlin, but last night I had the feeling that not Read more ...
kate.bassett
It has been a hard slog, but he's emerging victorious in the end. Essentially, Shakespeare's Henry V tracks a military campaign. In Act One, the eponymous king declares war on France. By Act Five, against the odds, he has won and is sealing an entente cordiale with a kiss – wooing the French princess, Katharine. At the start of Michael Grandage's eagerly awaited West End production, the Chorus (Ashley Zhangazha) darts to the apron stage to address the audience with: "Oh for a Muse of fire, that would ascend/The brightest heaven of invention!"He's a youth in jeans and a T-shirt printed Read more ...
David Benedict
How do you solve a problem like...no, not Maria, Candide? Musicals are loved for their scores – and Leonard Bernstein’s one for this really is a cracker – but they’re held together by their books, i.e. the script/dramatic context that makes audiences care about the characters and plot. Filled to bursting with good intentions, Matthew White’s exuberantly rough’n’tumble new Menier production does its damnedest but there’s no disguising the fact that Lillian Hellman’s adaptation of Voltaire’s satire of inexhaustible optimism remains tension-free. The gulf between the score’s strength and Read more ...
Katie Colombus
With the current nostalgia for all things Dr Seuss, now is surely a good time to treat your little ones to the zany nonsense-rhyme stories as they are bought to life on stage. Kirk Jameson’s production has arrived, courtesy of Sell a Door Theatre Company, at the small West End venue of the Arts Theatre, a quaint, quirky place befitting of a uniquely looney show.The plot is primarily a telling of Horton Hears A Who, narrated by the Cat in the Hat, with other story elements woven in. Horton the elephant races to save a speck of dust upon which lives a whole microscopic community, and thanks to Read more ...
Matt Wolf
For increasing numbers of people, food is theatre, so what better time to combine the two into the slight, sweet, determinedly socially conscious evening that is Gastronauts? The Royal Court "happening" of sorts is catering to audiences of 60 per show during its sellout run. A devised piece that turns playgoers into diners while also asking them to question the ethics and ethos of food, the show in its questioning impulse seems the perfect antidote to festive-season excess. That said, some may be too busy pigging out on the crispy kale - please sir, may I have some more? - to give the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
You can see why sport makes for good drama: it has competition, conflict and clashes of ego. It delivers a result, and it has a touch of glory. At its best, it can send you out of the theatre singing with joy. Or it can be a bit bathetic. Tom Wells, whose award-winning The Kitchen Sink was at this venue in 2011, returns with another small slice of life, this time about amateur Sunday footballers in Hull. Will this be a metaphor we can all relate to, or just a tale of cranky losers?And, believe me, they are losers. Even their name is a giveaway: Barely Athletic. The chief motivating spirit is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
I guess the BBC can't afford researchers or fact-checkers these days. If they could, perhaps something of substance might have arisen from their vacuous Culture Show profile of Vicky Featherstone, the gifted new artistic director of the Royal Court. Oh, and they have might have got the theatre's actual postcode right (SW1W 8AS, as per the Court website), rather than insisting twice on air that it's in (neighbouring) SW3. I mean, if you're going to be so careless with the details, what hope is there for the bigger picture? Precious little, on the evidence of this half-hour summation of a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When Mary J O'Malley's play had its premiere in 1977, it must have seemed quite shocking – vivid descriptions of sex and the male anatomy (albeit only in the minds of boy-obsessed 15-year-old schoolgirls at a convent school), spiteful nuns and the occasional fruity language. Nearly four decades on, though, audiences at Kathy Burke's businesslike production – the first major revival of a play that has become a touring warhorse - wouldn't bat an eyelid at any of this. And, post-Catholic Church sex scandals, even a joke about nuns and rape has lost its power to shock (although it remains Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The Anatomy of Melancholy (or to give it its full title - The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up) is not a succinct sort of work. Running at over 1,500 pages in some editions, this 17th-century answer to self-help is as long-winded as some of the medical sufferers it depicts. Fortunately it’s also slyly witty and wonderfully wide-ranging (covering kissing, crocodiles and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s difficult to give Simon Russell Beale a brief introduction, so encyclopedic is his list of stage and screen acting credits. He has cruised masterfully through Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, the Restoration playwrights, Shaw and Pinter, and recently camped it up madly in a revival of Peter Nichols’s Privates on Parade. He has been such a mainstay of the National Theatre that the building may have subsided into the Thames without him.On screen, he has appeared in such diverse fare as adaptations of Persuasion, An Ideal Husband and Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, and his portrayal of Falstaff Read more ...