Theatre
bella.todd
As finales go, you can’t get much better than a pterodactyl flying from the torso of an iron giant and wheeling out over Brighton beach. Last night, as the 2012 Brighton Festival prepared to move into its final day, thousands gathered near the seafront for Waterlitz, the latest free, camera-phone defying outdoor spectacle from bonkers French company Générik Vapeur. A 30-ton figure made from eight metal shipping containers, the structure could apparently be seen from neighbouring Rottingdean, looking like a cross between the Wicker Man and the Angel of the North.It turned out to be more of a Read more ...
mark.hudson
The Winter’s Tale may not be one of the best loved of Shakespeare’s plays – not quite a comedy, not quite a full-blown drama – but the Globe was packed on the hottest night of the year for this vibrant Yoruba version direct from Lagos. South-East London has the largest Yoruba population outside Nigeria. The audience was maybe 40 per cent Yoruba-speaking (my daughter thought 70 per cent), and their gusts of laughter and murmurs of affirmation set the tone for the rest of the crowd’s responses.Swinging drum rhythms and the sung narration of a majestic turbaned woman in the role of Time Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Plays about media folk and creatives, such as Joe Penhall’s Dumb Show and Stella Feehily’s O Go My Man, are not uncommon in British theatre. They usually have recognisable middle-class settings, recognisable middle-class characters, and a couple of handfuls of punchy one-liners. The writing and acting usually veers from soap-opera parody to perceptive analysis of the way we are defined by our media-fuelled obsessions. So where on this scale of quality is writer, director and actor Matthew Dunster’s latest play?The set up has a certain symmetry. Michael and Gordon have been good mates since Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's both easy and fashionable to render ironic, or scoff at, the title of All's Well That Ends Well. This is the Shakespeare "comedy" in which the rabidly obsessed Helena finally ensnares her none-too-doting Bertram in a putative happy ending that tends to be played as if the pair are advancing toward the gallows. But it's in the way of Shakespeare's Globe in general and the miraculous Globe to Globe season in particular that, as served up by the Arpana theatre company from Mumbai, one of the Bard's three problem plays emerges as both jubilant and touching. And also every bit as colourful as Read more ...
Carmel Doohan
Transferred from the Royal Court to the West End, this is a very tight staging of a very messy evening. Ten members of the Riot Club come together for a celebratory meal after “two terms out in the cold”. In a modest pub on the outskirts of Oxfordshire, they hang a bin bag on each chair, down their wine by the bottle and start on a 10-bird roast. The plan: to get “absolutely chateauxed” and trash the place in the traditional manner of their aristocratic ancestors.When Laura Wade’s play first opened, polling day for the 2010 General Election fell in the middle of its run, and reviews mused Read more ...
Angie Errigo
Had one listened to the Chiten company from Kyoto performing Coriolanus with one’s eyes closed, it would have seemed as if the stage were teeming with performers. And without understanding a word of Japanese, a theatregoer could respond to the gamut of moods and rhetoric of the play, from mob fury met with autocratic disdain to political conniving and on to maternal grief and horror: all were audibly evident in a collective tour de force of verbal dexterity, range and expression.In fact, a nimble ensemble of just five - two men and three women accompanied by a pair of musicians Read more ...
Charlie Swinbourne
"37 Plays. 37 Languages." This is the tagline for the Globe Theatre's Globe to Globe season, hosting theatre companies from every corner of the world. The season may be international in outlook, yet the language used to perform this version of Love's Labour's Lost is at once home-grown, yet very different from the words of Shakespeare.His comedy is performed here in sign language, with no spoken words at all, just musical backing from a live band on stage. The genius of Deafinitely Theatre's interpretation of this play (and something that marks it out from their past work) is that there is no Read more ...
aleks.sierz
As the Olympic Park rises out of the desolation of East London, British theatre is also being regenerated by the sports fest that looms increasingly large on the horizon. Although it has recently lost its local authority funding, Edward Hall’s Swiss Cottage venue is no slacker when it comes to ambitious work. Having commissioned upcoming talent Mike Bartlett to adapt Hugh Hudson’s 1981 film, Hall has already secured a West End transfer for the play, in advance of its opening last night.Alluding to a line from that most English of inspiring poems — William Blake’s “Jerusalem” — Chariots of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
In the Globe to Globe season, the Caucasus is proving as fruitful a ground as any for new views on old texts. Georgia’s Marjanishvili company, under director Levan Tsuladze, proved the region has a special style with their version of As You Like It, no less strongly than Armenia’s King John had a couple of days earlier.Tsuladze emphasised the ensemble nature of the action, using a small front stage space, and keeping actors on stage in the wings most of the time. It’s played almost as a play within a play, complete with stage curtain for the court scenes, before we move into the forest, where Read more ...
philip radcliffe
It’s ironic that Oscar Wilde should escape to the Lake District in 1891 to write a play satirising London society, his first success in the theatre. He took such a shine to the region’s place names that he used them for some of the characters – Berwick, Carlisle, Darlington, Jedburgh. They do seem to lend themselves to titles - we could have had Lady Coniston or Lord Buttermere or Countess Rydal Water. But we got Lady Windermere, which has become part of the language, with that fan, a present from her husband on her 21st birthday, when the play opens.The four-act play is like a Carlton House Read more ...