Theatre
alexandra.coghlan
Emlyn Williams may have been dubbed the “Welsh Noël Coward” and the action of his long-neglected Accolade may take place in a drawing room, but there’s little of the smiling social comedy to be found here. Trading sparkling cocktails and repartee for whisky and unpalatable truths, Williams’s play exposes the pinstriped hypocrisy of 1950s society – a society that will press its powdered cheek to all manner of sordidness in the name of Art, while recoiling from even a passing acquaintance with the workaday squalor of its members. Frank, and more than a little apt, the result is a stylish Read more ...
David Nice
But not for long. The first ever National Theatre Live worldwide screening of a Donmar production came to a halt between great Jacobi's mad musings on archery and toasted cheese; later, pedalling back from Notting Hill against a furious wind, I guessed the reason for the blip. The weather had scuppered Lear's fate, off stage as well as on.Sitting in a packed Gate cinema, we heard a voice apologise to a presumably mortified Donmar audience (thinking about it, we guessed the actors must have been primed to expect technical glitches, and had given their consent to any potential interruptions Read more ...
hilary.whitney
No prizes for guessing what the future holds for the four Irishmen ensconced in the empty swimming pool in Enda Walsh’s latest play, Penelope, which opens at Hampstead Theatre next week. For these unfortunate creatures are the last of Penelope’s suitors from Homer’s Odyssey, the pariah who invade Odysseus’s home and make merry at his expense whilst shamelessly trying to win the hand of his faithful wife – and their time is up. Odysseus is homeward bound and they must face up to what is basically going to be an unavoidable bloodbath.“These four men”, says Walsh, “have been having conversations Read more ...
carole.woddis
Back in the early 1960s, anyone with half a curious cultural brain in their heads would take themselves off to small fleapit cinemas like The Academy or the Classic in Oxford Street (now defunct). There you could catch the latest European art film. And at one of these I remember seeing Italian director Antonioni’s La Notte with Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni. Such was its impact that neither I nor the flat mates I was with were able to utter a word until we reached home.That, of course, may have been due to the fact that we were confused and not willing to show it; on the other Read more ...
aleks.sierz
British theatre prides itself on being contemporary, up to date - in a word, hot. So it’s odd that, over the past decade, there have been so few plays about climate change. While everybody, and I mean everybody, has been talking about global warming, while climate-change deniers have been branded the new fascists, and while well-publicised protesters have tried to stop electricity stations from functioning, British playwrights have - with only a couple of exceptions - blithely ignored the subject. So at first sight this new play, which opened last night at the flagship National Theatre in Read more ...
fisun.guner
Robert Lepage is not just one of the most fêted and sought-after theatre directors in the world; he is also one of the most prolific. His international breakthrough came with The Dragon Trilogy in 1985, and since then the French-Canadian’s work has been seen across the globe. His stunningly ambitious production of Wagner’s Ring cycle was recently performed at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and he conceived and directed Cirque du Soleil’s latest acrobatic blockbuster, Totem, which can currently be seen at the Royal Albert Hall. Meanwhile, he has also found time to add dancing to his Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Plays these days come not in single spies but in battalions of two, whether you're talking The Master Builder, King Lear or The Cherry Orchard, the last of which closes the visiting Sovremennik Russian theatre troupe's three-play season only to resurface at the National's Olivier in May, with Zoë Wanamaker playing the baleful, vainglorious Ranevskaya at this play's wounded heart. Here, then, is a chance to catch Chekhov's last work presented by his countrymen before the Westerners do their number on him (yet again) come spring. And the result? Wanamaker et al have a hard act to follow, let's Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Very early in 2003 I went to the offices of Faber & Faber in Bloomsbury to meet a first-time novelist. At 41, he looked slightly long in the tooth to be fresh out of the traps, even a bit roughed up by life. With seasoned teeth and capillaried cheeks, he had evidently survived a battle or two. It was his first ever interview. I remember asking him if he had any idea how good his book was. To be taken on by such reputable publishers after half a lifetime of epic underachievement was fairy tale enough. But that year the story moved rapidly on when Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre won Read more ...
james.woodall
But this comes at the expense of scale, both in characterisation - Jacobi is also simply too feathery - and in terms of space and time. We don't feel the outdoors at the Donmar, ever see and hear boorish Lear's knights, properly sense the passage of years from Cordelia's banishment to her return, or suffer the weight of battle.It would be wrong to call David Farr's Royal Shakespeare Company production a corrective, as it predates Grandage's, though it's brand-new at the Roundhouse and more faithful to the text. The space is perfect for it, too: high, resonant, dilapidated in places, gloomily Read more ...
David Nice
Anyone who's imbibed the common wisdom that Russians play Chekhov for the comedy - one eye wet, the other dry and smiling - might have been alarmed to find the Moscow Sovremennik Theatre's second London offering so doomy and subdued. And the more subdued it got, the more the majority of the company went in for what's become its trademark mumbling. Not even the apocalyptic waltzes and marches of Mieczysław Weinberg's pre-recorded score nor an outstanding joint characterisation of the illicit central love affair could stop the rest of the voices, and ultimately what sympathy we had, from Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
The spinning roulette wheel, the revolver, the devil’s mask, and above all that lissom semi-naked female gyrating in silhouette against flickering infernal flames: we all remember the opening titles to Tales of the Unexpected, which made its first TV appearance in 1979. Anyone who has also read the stories that spawned the series can vouch for their sublime slipperiness, the wicked, cackling glee that rattles through their understated prose, their winkling out of the awful and the uncanny in what appear socially ordinary situations.Now, in a follow-up to last year’s hit show Ghost Stories – Read more ...