Theatre
Ismene Brown
Sometimes I go outside and look at our kitchen drain. Where there should be a vortex there’s a largely static pool. Tree roots have recently grown through the old pipes, their clumps colonised with fat, dog hair and coleslaw bits, and though a bit of handpumping will shift some of the stale water for a while, it really needs systemic attention from Dyno-rod. A good Dyno-rodding is what Chichester’s new production of Noel Coward’s The Vortex needs too.The catchline for the staging is that a real-life mother and son play the sex-mad mother and drug-addicted son of the drama, the subtle and Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Just when you’ve relaxed a little, privilege duly checked and confident that you won’t be guilt-tripped for nipping into that disabled loo a few years ago at the National (c’mon, the interval was nearly over and needs must), FlawBored drop a bomb into the narrative. The temperature in the room plummets, a real coup de théâtre is effected and I'm still processing it. Yep, they went there. After garnering awards at the Vaults Festival (that’s not research, they tell you and they tell you why too), Aarian Mehrabani, Chloe Palmer and Samuel Brewer (pictured below) bring their meta- Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There was a jolting eco-themed work onstage in London recently, but sadly A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction, a Headlong company collaboration with director Katie Mitchell and a number of international producing houses, wasn’t it. The performance that jolted all who saw it was by Nederlands Dans Theater, whose NDT1 group brought to Sadler’s Wells Figures in Extinction [1.0], a powerful piece by Complicite’s Simon McBurney and the choreographer Crystal Pite. The dancers twisted their limbs and torsos into imitations of 12 of the now-lost species McBurney selected to read out Read more ...
Gary Naylor
It’s apt that this new play, with characters moving in and out of Paris either side of World War I, is staged at this intimate theatre, one that always has the ambience of a below-ground oubliette. These bohemians are not penniless and cold as were Puccini’s, but they still wrestle with the bittersweet complexities of a love that burns too brightly, one that fuels a ménage à trois that does not end well.Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play takes us back to Henri-Pierre Roché’s 1953 novel, best known as the source for François Truffaut’s celebrated 1962 movie, a staple of Best Film lists for half a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Men are bastards. Okay, not all of us, but enough to make the lives of millions of women a misery. This we know, but anyone who has any doubts might be educated by some of the horrific statistics of sexual assault and domestic violence in the programme of Deborah Bruce’s Dixon and Daughters, a new play at the Dorfman space of the National Theatre. It is produced by Clean Break, which works with women who’ve experienced the criminal justice system, so it has its own agenda about women and criminalisation. But for a drama to be worth seeing it surely needs to go beyond a programme and an agenda Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The cast of The Secret Life of Bees first parade onto the Almeida stage hefting big glass storage jars full of a golden substance: honey. The jars glow as if they are beacons, lights that guide. Which they turn out to be.Most of the people in this parade are the Black women who tend the bees that produced this honey, creatures with a covetable sense of community, ready to unite against danger to the hive. Along with them are white folk with a different idea of a model community, a white supremacist one where Blacks can’t vote.It’s 1964, as a timeline running throughout reminds us, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's saying a lot when a production lives up to its gasp-inducing set. That's the happy case with Josie Rourke's loving revival of Dancing at Lughnasa, which returns Brian Friel's modern-day classic to the building, the National, where this Olivier and Tony Award-winner first played London over 32 years ago.Upgraded this time round to the open expanse of the Olivier stage, the play occupies an Irish backwater from designer Robert Jones that seems to stretch to infinity and beyond, the vista defined by a striated stage curtain (it looks beaded, but isn't) itself suggesting the porousness of Read more ...
Gary Naylor
As the UK undergoes yet another political convulsion, this time concerning the threshold for ministers being shitty to fellow workers, it is apt that Bertolt Brecht’s parable about the challenges of being good in a dysfunctional society hits London. Anthony Lau’s co-production between the Lyric Hammersmith, ETT and Sheffield Theatres also catches a ride on the cultural zeitgeist, since it shares elements of its aesthetic with the multi-Academy Award winning movie, Everything Everywhere All At Once. Rather like that film, I suspect this show will divide audiences.We open on Georgia Lowe’s Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Ain’t Too Proud? Ain’t too good either, I’m afraid. Which is a shame as there’s plenty of the raw material here that powers juggernaut jukebox musicals around the world, but this production has the feel of a cruise ship show with a much tighter band and better singers. We follow the rise of the Motown megaband, The Temptations, from the dark alleyways of Detroit to the top of the charts, supercharged by hits like “My Girl”, “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” and “Papa Was a Rolling Stone”. Their stock-in-trade comprised power ballads sung in close harmony and stage shows that sold the songs Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There’s a moment in the opening stretch of Giles Terera’s The Meaning of Zong where you think the former Hamilton star has written a piece about slavery that’s in much the same idiom as the hit musical. Music will indeed be a strong presence in this piece, but it is crafted around the songs of West Africa, lovingly supported by the playing of a djeli n'goni (a traditional Griot stringed instrument) by Sidiki Dembele. He is playing a drum when the audience enters and soon involves us in mirroring his rhythms with our clapping. This is the tenor of what follows: it’s theatre as an Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's not often with Private Lives that you feel Amanda and Elyot are one step away from a visit to A&E. But such is the startling force of Michael Longhurst's Donmar Warehouse revival of arguably Noël Coward's most durable play that you are aware throughout of violence and pain as the flipside of passion at its most intense. Some will complain (and have) that the result negates the comedy coursing through this time-honored text; I would argue that the laughs are still there, tempered in this instance by an awareness of the lacerations oftentimes inflicted by love. After all Read more ...
David Nice
Dream versus reality, fate and free will, love and death, nature versus nurture: they’re all here in Calderón de la Barca’ s ever-startling baroque panopticon, a play so precociously meta that every theatrical game from Pirandello onwards deserves the epithet “Calderonian”. Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod heighten the Spaniard's play-within-a-play quality by framing it as the fantasy of half-awake, stargazing ruler Basilio, bringing long-term experience to provide an extra layer of roller-coaster ride between farce and potential tragedy.Back in 1999, a then not so world-famous Calixto Read more ...