Theatre
alexandra.coghlan
Over in Southwark you can currently find Rodgers and Hammerstein exploring the seamier side of life among the prostitutes and drop-outs of Pipe Dream, but in the woody amphitheatre of the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre it’s all raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. Nuns, Nazis and singing children are an unlikely recipe for the most wholesome of all family musicals, but against all odds this 1950s classic is still an irrepressible hit – get out of the way or prepare to be reduced to a giddy, ecstatic wreck by a production that will send you home singing.Director Rachel Kavanaugh has no Read more ...
David Nice
Rodgers and Steinbeck: sound unlikely? Well, self-proclaimed “family show” man Hammerstein may have baulked at words like "whorehouse" when he created a play for music out of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. But by 1955 the R&H duo had already dealt with issues like miscegenation and ageism (South Pacific), domestic violence (Carousel) and slavery (The King and I), so Steinbeck’s north Californian coastal community of amiable social dropouts, drunks and whores might not have been totally unexpected territory. Tough Pipe Dream isn’t: "It’s a beautiful show," declared Steinbeck Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
If the past week or so has proven anything, it’s that feminism in 2013 has lost none of its power to inspire, anger and enthrall. Given the nature of the abuse meted out to those who raise their voices above the chorus, for Alan Bissett to turn his own feminist awakening into an hour-long show is brave, foolish or some combination of the two. But it’s not as if the author and playwright wasn’t prepared: long before Ban This Filth! was ready for an audience its central thread faced the toughest audience of all - Twitter.Part autobiography, part women’s studies class, Ban This Filth! is an Read more ...
fisun.guner
“Monet is only an eye, but my God, what an eye,” Cézanne once said of the Impressionist painter. Unlike Cézanne, British artist William Blake Richmond, named by his artist father after the elder Richmond’s visionary mentor William Blake, had no truck with Monet’s eye. Nor indeed Cézanne’s or the whole cabal of French avant-gardists. What are the French good for, rails Richmond in Rory Fellowes's A Victorian Eye, except for wine and cheese? Richmond, like all eminent Victorians before him, looks instead to Italy and to the classical ideal.Concepts such as truth, idealised beauty and spiritual Read more ...
David Nice
If there’s a more thinly written, loosely structured and hammily acted play than Samuel Adamson’s panorama of Purcell’s London, then I have yet to endure it. Baffling, because this is the writer who brought us Southwark Fair, a lively depiction of the local scene which never so much as hinted as the village-institute clichés and banalities piled high here in a production by Dominic Dromgoole which does little to finesse the sorry situation.Who could have resisted top-league trumpeter Alison Balsom’s proposal to put on a show at the Globe? It must have seemed like a good idea: Purcell: The Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
Cush Jumbo could very easily have put on a hit show about Josephine Baker. There would have been a chorus line of flappers, replete with spangles and feathers. She would have belted out some of the more enduringly popular hits from Baker’s glory days in Paris. Perhaps the infamous banana skirt would even have made an appearance in what could, essentially, have been a crowd-pleasing jukebox musical.Instead, Jumbo has written a one-woman show so layered and nuanced that occasionally you feel like asking her to pause her performance while you take it all in. Civil rights, domestic violence, Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
A decaying London outpost of the Hollywood movie-making machine, where dreams are spun on celluloid, and reality and fantasy intertwine in a nightmarish danse macabre of desperation and dark desire... that’s the concept behind this new immersive piece by the acclaimed site-specific innovators Punchdrunk. In execution, the experience is rather less mesmerising.Punchdrunk – for the uninitiated – have pioneered an interactive form of theatre that transforms unlikely found spaces with meticulously detailed, epic designs. Through these atmospheric, often sinister and unsettling hidden worlds, Read more ...
David Nice
No theatre in London, surely, has offered us more miracles of transformed space than the Young Vic. Small it may be, but its productions often feel big in every way, and none more so than Joe Wright’s total-theatre take on Aimé Césaire’s A Season in the Congo. Enter the auditorium and designer Lizzie Clachan immediately places you – in all but the humidity, which doesn’t seep through from outside – on a street or square in Kinshasa, quickly taking you back to its former status as colonial Léopoldville in 1955 where Patrice Lumumba is selling beer. None of this would work, though, if it weren’ Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
A joyful noise? Hell, yes. Alice Walker’s Pulitzer-winning 1982 feminist novel set in Georgia and spanning more than 30 years is crammed with suffering, injustice and cruelty. But in its characters’ journeys towards a realisation of identity – racial, sexual, spiritual – it is glorious. This musical based on the book received a lukewarm response on Broadway, where it opened in 2005, and admittedly it has its faults. The music isn’t unfailingly original or stirring; the lyrics are sometimes workaday and mostly literal. But in John Doyle’s stringently stripped-back production, the flaws somehow Read more ...
philip radcliffe
You know it must be the holiday season when comic caper-loving Told by an Idiot run riot in the Royal Exchange. Expect the theatre of the absurd, with glimpses of Keystone Kops and Marx Brothers-style zaniness. This time, director Paul Hunter has delved into 19th-century Russia and come up with Alexandr Ostrovsky’s self-styled “savagely funny comedy” Too Clever By Half, in the late Rodney Ackland’s adaptation.With its “gallery of grotesques”, as Ostrovsky called them, led or rather duped by the likeable rogue Gloumov, there’s plenty to go at. And you can rely on Hunter and his company to go Read more ...
aleks.sierz
There’s a united nations of Great Britain feel about this site-specific Royal Court show: it is a National Theatre of Scotland piece played at the London Welsh Centre as a co-production with the top English new writing company. It’s an entertaining treat — a riotous romp of rhyming couplets, devilish encounters and wild karaoke — curated by Vicky Featherstone, formerly head of the NTS, which premiered the show in Glasgow in 2011, and now supremo of the Royal Court.Devised by playwright David Greig and director Wils Wilson, The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart takes place in the London Welsh Read more ...
philip radcliffe
It isn’t so much man versus machine as man versus the man behind the machine. Famously, in 1997 the Russian chess grandmaster and world champion Garry Kasparov faced IBM's supercomputer RS/600SP, known as Deep Blue, in New York City. But behind the faceless machine was another genius, its Taiwan-born architect Dr Fen Hsiung Hsu. Both had much at stake – and not just a game of chess. Kasparov sought undisputed supremacy in the face of an opponent programmed – and reprogrammed between games – by a team of scientists and chess experts. Hsu sought to fulfil a computer scientist’s dream. And IBM Read more ...