Theatre
Helen Hawkins
The alternative title of Jocelyn Bioh’s 2017 play School Girls, The African Mean Girls Play, might indicate that it’s a super-bitchy account of high-school rivalries, here with a west African accent. Which it is. But it’s much more besides. The school in question is an elite boarding establishment in Ghana’s Aburi Hills. Here two alpha females collide and slug it out for top-dog status. The year is 1986, almost 30 years on from Ghana becoming the first African nation to gain independence and 25 years before the event that inspired the play.In a programme note, Bioh states that what set Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Rebecca Frecknall’s Romeo and Juliet burns like ice, paring back and tightening the script so that love and death are constant bedfellows. She underscores her vision with a thrilling, furious physicality, interspersing explosive fight scenes with steely dance sequences heightened by Prokoviev’s immortal Montagues and Capulets.A Frecknall production these days arrives bearing the weight of high expectations; just whisper the words Summer and Smoke, Cabaret, or A Streetcar Named Desire, and most avid theatregoers will spontaneously combust. At her very best, this powerfully instinctive director Read more ...
David Nice
Siobhán McSweeney is to be loved as a person for her speech when she received a BAFTA for Best Female Performance in a Comedy Programme earlier this year, bringing up the way Derry people had weathered the “indignities, ignorance and stupidity of your so-called leaders in Dublin, Stormont and Westminster” (typically, the BBC cut that bit).Still more is she to be admired as an actor, ranging most recently from said performance as Sister Michael in Derry Girls to the most vivacious of the sisters (secular sort) in Dancing at Lughnasa at the National Theatre. She’d already taken on the role Read more ...
Jane Edwardes
Whining Donald Trump and snivelling Boris Johnson claim that they are victims of witch-hunts, although all the evidence suggests otherwise. In 1953, haunted by the iniquitous McCarthy trials that were designed to purge the US of communism, Arthur Miller turned to a real travesty, that of the Salem witch-hunt of 1692.Loosely based on an event which saw 14 women, five men and, yes, two dogs hanged, the play is an attack on the disastrous consequences when a community becomes fanatically gripped by a lie and descends into a post-truth world of false accusations, vengeance, and torture.Miller’s Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There are flashes during Idiots Assemble: Spitting Image The Musical of the old mordant humour from the show's heyday, when you could see Maggie the dominatrix, grey John Major eating his peas with his pants over his trousers and wee David Steel sitting in the pocket of David Owen. But today’s Spitting Image is more crude than cruel. This isn’t satire so much as an Aunt Sally show where selected villains get to stand up and have the writers’ rotten vegetables thrown at them. The script presents it as a given that these are Bad People (many of them are) who Read more ...
Tom Fowler
Recently, having just shared the rehearsal draft of my current Royal Court play Hope has a Happy Meal with two close friends, I found myself slightly offended when one of them said, "you can tell you were playing the Nintendo Switch obsessively when writing this." They then proceeded to talk about the play and its structure in video game terms. The plot of my play [favourably reviewed last week on theartsdesk] revolves around a woman called Hope returning to the People’s Republic of Coca Cola to find the family she left behind 24 years ago. As my friend (rightly) pointed out, the play Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There are better musicals in town, but can you find me a more spectacular show in a more comfortable theatre? I doubt it. Not that Jonathan Church's new production at Sadler's Wells is flawless. It's a 90-year-old blockbuster so, for all its references to breadlines, insecure employment and heat-or-eat decisions, one wonders if so much effort might be better expended on something a little more recent, a little less bound by the cliches of musical theatre? And there's also Les Dennis neither dancing nor singing. Why? If you set aside such minor gripes, one can delight in a show that Read more ...
Anya Ryan
Twenty-one years ago, critics were alarmed by Ben Elton’s deranged musical We Will Rock You. But, despite the "staggeringly awful" reviews, the show somehow went on to have 12 long (and painful) years of West End success. So, here we are again. The car crash of a show is back for a summer run at the London Coliseum. But has it made any progress in its nine-year hiatus? Sadly not.And in many ways, why should it? The Queen musical has collected more than its fair share of loyal devotees over the years. But, with a totally nonsensical plot, cringeworthy dialogue and songs shoehorned into the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The short story F Scott Fitzgerald wrote as a challenge, of a man born 70 years old whose body gets younger as the years pass, has already been blown up into a lengthy film of the same name starring Brad Pitt (and lots of CGI). Jethro Compton decided a bare-bones musical for six multi-instrumentalists and no special effects was what it needed to be, and how well it works.Four years on, for its second run at Southwark Playhouse, Compton is directing a cast that has ballooned to 12, who ably accompany themselves on a wide range of instruments (brass, wind, strings, keyboards, percussion) as Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The summer season at the Royal Court, London’s premiere new writing venue, features two plays which imaginatively explore the human condition using elements of the surreal and the dystopic as well as the real. Or, to put it more accurately, both Alistair McDowall (in All of It ****) and Tom Fowler (in Hope Has a Happy Meal ***) show us recognisable human emotions through the lens of highly original storytelling. The overall effect is an exciting contribution to contemporary playwriting – it’s art that seems to make your mind go woo-woo.The most mentally explosive experience, in the main Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Groundhog Day, appropriately, is back where it started. The hit film about a TV weatherman’s endlessly reiterated day in small-town USA moved to the Old Vic stage in 2016; but then its progress became bumpy, despite the awards showered on it and its lead, Andy Karl, on both sides of the Atlantic. Karl was injured during a Broadway preview and the show's US tour didn't happen.Leading it again, Karl is still a galvanising force, perpetually in motion and hardly ever offstage. And with Matthew Warchus back in the director’s chair, the piece is as full-on, raucous and tricky as before.Karl’s Read more ...
Ismene Brown
With apocalyptic floods pouring through the Kakhovka dam, and millions of Ukrainians displaced or bereaved, it doesn’t feel decent to be laughing at a witty black comedy about his rise from nonentity to full-blown tyrant. On the other hand, how can you not laugh when an oligarch injured in an assassination attempt sees it as a great way to get noticed in a crazed post-Soviet Kremlin?A year ago, premiering in the first months of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Peter Morgan’s crackling drama about Russia’s rich and powerful felt bang on topic. Now, watching the monstrous oligarch Boris Berezovsky Read more ...