Theatre
edward.seckerson
“Love and pain is like peace and war - you want one you have to have the other.” It’s a line that pretty much sums up From Here to Eternity. The title of James Jones’s novel and the classic movie which it spawned gets rather lost in the new musical from Tim Rice, Stuart Brayson, and Bill Oakes. It’s a moment that should stay with us long after leaving the theatre but having set up a promising double-duet between both sets of doomed lovers on this scary ride to the apocalypse of Pearl Harbour, 1941, Tim Rice and his composer Stuart Brayson signally fail to deliver the emotional climacteric Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The Royal Court is justly proud of being the home of British new writing, but it is also a venue which has a great tradition of staging work from abroad. From bringing Brecht and Beckett here in the 1950s to its more recent international summer schools, this is a place where you might make the acquaintance of Eastern European, Latin American or Russian playwrights. Now, following in the footsteps of Chennai-based Anupama Chandrasekhar, whose play Disconnect was here in 2010, comes another Indian talent.Abhishek Majumdar’s Royal Court debut is set in Kashmir. It is just before the Muslim Read more ...
Geoffrey Beevers
Adapting of 19th-century novels is sometimes looked down on as a kind of “heritage drama”. The assumption is that it is all about the externals, about the costumes and the coach wheels turning. It is certainly not what drew me to George Eliot. It is the quality of her mind: her wit, her intelligence and her compassionate insight. Middlemarch is a “classic” because it still has resonance today, and a classic should survive all kinds of different interpretations and still remains relevant.But only conscious interpretation here is in the translation from the novel form into the dramatic. Drama Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Southwark Playhouse's new production of The Love Girl and the Innocent is London’s first in over 30 years, and there’s a reason Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s play rarely reaches the stage: it’s a lumpy mammoth of a script, demanding a cast upwards of 50, with stage directions that would be monumental if interpreted literally.Matthew Dunster does the only thing possible, paring it all down to the roughest edges, and does so brilliantly. Visually we've got exposed graffitied walls, wooden pallets and planks and a heap of tyres that define the prison parade ground and construction sites, where metal Read more ...
Gary Raymond
Henry James said, “Realism is what in some shape or form we might encounter, whereas Romanticism is something we will never encounter.” The 19th-century Realists believed that “ordinary people” were “fit to be endowed” with the greatness of imaginative writing. Rachel Trezise’s first stage play, Tonypandemonium, an attempt at kitchen sink par excellence, understands James’ definition; unfortunately it does not seem to understand the second part; that realism is different from mere replication, and that it must belong to artistry.Trezise’s play seems intent only on replicating. Indeed the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The sixth artistic director of the National Theatre of Great Britain will be Rufus Norris, it was announced this morning. Bookies’ favourites such as Marianne Elliott, Michael Grandage and Dominic Cooke having long since ruled themselves out, Norris can be welcomed as a daring choice. For a start, unlike most of predecessors apart from Hytner, he has never run a large theatre company – although he has been an associate down the road at the Young Vic and at the National itself. Nor, as in the case of Trevor Nunn’s many musicals and Nicholas Hytner with Miss Saigon, has he a huge commercial hit Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is this the year’s most controversial play? When it opened at Edinburgh in August, David Greig’s The Events created a stir because its depiction of the aftermath of an atrocity is reminiscent of Norway’s Anders Breivik and the 2011 Utoya shootings. The more lurid commentators denounced this as exploitation theatre; concerned liberals shook their heads. But, with the play now visiting London, audiences have the chance of appreciating a much deeper work than the fuss suggested.This is a crisis of faith in the face of unreasonThe set up is powerful in its simplicity. In an unnamed village, a Read more ...
Helen Meany
“Come out to play” is the tagline for this year’s Dublin Theatre Festival, and a great deal of the work presented in the programme manifested suitably playful exuberance. Running over 18 days, and featuring 27 productions, the 56th Festival highlighted the breadth of contemporary theatre and performance from around the world, programmed by artistic director Willie White. Definitions of “theatre” seemed deliberately capacious: musical theatre, dance-theatre, film-based and multimedia performances came under its umbrella.From a musical adaptation for the Royal Shakespeare Company of Shakespeare Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
It's often a sign of a good drama when, as it concludes, you find it hard to tell which character you dislike most. And so it is with Adult Supervision - all the way through, first-time playwright Sarah Rutherford skilfully manipulates your allegiances, causing your sympathies to shift and shift again until there is no one left to be redeemed.The action of this play takes place on the night of the US election in 2008. Natasha, an uptight, anxious woman with a shiny, too-perfect hairstyle, is hosting a results party for what we assume are a group of her friends. However, it soon becomes clear Read more ...
kate.bassett
Once upon a time, there were two cultures, and they were at odds. A forested wilderness stretches between the kingdoms of Sealand and Lagobel, as we glean from the childishly-drawn, giant map that serves as a front cloth for the NT's new musical spectacular – directed by Marianne Elliot and opening in the Lyttelton last night. The map shows, on one side of the wilderness, Sealand’s coastal realm with winding rivers and a chateau bristling with turrets, all in shades of blue. On the other side, inland, is Lagobel’s walled city of Arabian-style domes where everything is orange or yellow-gold.Co Read more ...
kate.bassett
The setting is Dublin. We're talking modern-day and down-at-heel in this major new musical which has a deliberately scruffy look – with a launderette glowing in the dark and a concrete, four-storey housing block hulking upstage. The adaptation is by Roddy Doyle himself, based on his 1987 comic novel.As many will also remember from the 1991 big-screen version of The Commitments, Doyle’s young protagonists are scraping by in Ireland, with no scintillating job prospects. But then they get together, form a band, work hard at it and wow a guy who has a recording studio. Though looking set to go Read more ...
aleks.sierz
British theatre is obsessed with the new, with novelty. And one of the obvious casualties of this is old plays that are not by Ibsen or Chekhov. Plays that feature in every history of British theatre, such as Arnold Wesker’s 1959 classic, Roots, about the political and sentimental education of Beatie Bryant, with its uplifting final scene of her self-awakening. At last, this revival gives us all the chance to watch a legendary piece of our cultural history.The second in Wesker’s trilogy about 20th-century society, this version of Roots follows nicely on from the Royal Court’s revival of the Read more ...