Theatre
Rachel Halliburton
It’s particularly poignant to watch this story in the knowledge that a little over a year after US-led troops withdrew from Afghanistan, women and girls are enduring a renewed repression of their rights under the Taliban. The real-life story of The Boy with Two Hearts took place in 2000 – the year before the western invasion began; to see it today is a depressing reminder of how little was achieved through that ill-thought-out venture.Though the focus of the story is on Hussein – the older brother of narrator Hamed – the dramatic backdrop is the entire family’s forced flight from Afghanistan Read more ...
David Kettle
"The poem is real," intones entertainer-turned-courtier Ellen solemnly as a prologue and epilogue to Rona Munro’s vivid, vibrant new James IV: Queen of the Fight, presented by Scottish producers Raw Material and Edinburgh’s Capital Theatres in association with the National Theatre of Scotland, and getting its premiere at the city’s Festival Theatre before a Scotland-wide tour.It’s the follow-up – and latest in a projected series of no fewer than seven historical plays (the sixth, Mary, opens soon at London’s Hampstead Theatre) – to Munro’s James Plays trilogy unveiled at the Edinburgh Read more ...
David Nice
You know you’re in good company the minute these two appear on stage: they are so splendidly what they are, comfortable in their own skins and perfect in role-play. Justin Vivian Bond, consummate trans cabaret artist, meets Anthony Roth Constanzo, one of the world’s top countertenors, and nothing is out of bounds.Hot from Brooklyn, the partnership seems both unlikely and utterly natural, subversive from the start. The glamorous, sassy Bond can hit the bass register if necessary; Costanzo adapts what, at least with miking, sounds like the most powerful of falsettos to torchsongs and disco as Read more ...
Gary Naylor
It’s hard to keep up with what terms are in vogue amongst those who insist on classifying and vilifying young people, but one that you don’t hear so often these days is NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training). Back in 2015 when Gary Owen's lauded monodrama Iphigenia In Splott premiered, Effie was a NEET, and a proud one to boot.She is seen living the hedonism worthy of a fortnight in Ibiza for 52 weeks a year in er… Splott, a district of Cardiff, shit-faced, smoking and shagging. Effie may be a failure of society, but she's loving her life. Or so the lady protests. When she meets Read more ...
Mert Dilek
How can this beauty arise from such ugliness? The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s 1953 drama about the Salem witch trials of 1692, is rife with unwavering prejudices, selfish slander, and sickening motives. But under Lyndsey Turner’s aesthetically vigorous direction on the National Theatre’s Olivier stage, the play’s infected air becomes a breeding ground for visually arresting tableaux possessed of rampant emotional intensity. Painterly but unfussy, Turner’s staging fixes our gaze on those electric moments in Miller’s allegorical tale where unreason and blind faith lock horns with integrity. Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It always feels special when a play speaks so directly to an audience that you feel and hear the ripples of recognition across the auditorium. And when disgraced banker John Gabriel Borkman roars that, “There are different rules for exceptional people”, at London’s Bridge Theatre, it’s a brilliant reminder of Ibsen’s uncanny prescience.Borkman isn’t just a Ponzi or a Madoff, but a Boris Johnson and yes, let’s throw in a Kwasi Kwarteng for good measure, people who believe they can lie, steal, or play with people’s lives with impunity, simply because they’re better than the rest of us. Read more ...
aleks.sierz
What is the Royal Court theatre for? Is it a space that stages innovative new writing, or does it prefer to do documentary theatre? Is it concerned with reaching out beyond its regular audiences, or is it more focused on its own internal problems? In November 2021, it made an appalling blunder by allowing an antisemitic stereotype – a money-grubbing billionaire called Hershel Fink in Al Smith’s Rare Earth Mettle – to get through the rehearsal process despite protests from several members of the company. Eventually the character was renamed, and you’d think that the venue would Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Can a play peak too soon? That's the quandary that attends the Old Vic airing of Eureka Day, Jonathan Spector's on-point if overextended comedy that was written prior to the pandemic but has absolutely come into its own just now. A skewering of liberal pieties that puts one in mind of a fellow theatrical satirist like Bruce Norris (Clybourne Park), Eureka Day takes few prisoners on the way to a flat-seeming ending.But Katy Rudd's production, featuring Helen Hunt (pictured below) in a notably unstarry London stage debut, is lucky enough before that to have sent the audience into the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Lisa has lost an hour in a (somewhat contrived) temporal glitch. As a consequence, her world is always sliding off-kilter, not quite making sense, things floating in and out of memory. A watchmaker (himself somewhat loosely tethered to reality) tells her that she needs to get it back as a lost hour wields great power and can fall into the wrong hands. Lisa embraces her quest and travels to the strange land of Dissocia.It’s a convoluted framing device, but it gets Anthony Neilson to where he wants to go in his cult hit of 2004, given a timely revival by Emma Baggott at the Theatre Royal Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Hilary Mantel, who has died at the age of 70, was a maker of literary history. Wolf Hall, an action-packed 650-page brick of a book about the rise and rise of Thomas Cromwell, won the Man Booker Prize in 2009. Three years later its successor, Bring Up the Bodies, became the first sequel ever to win the prize in its 44-year history. Then came the RSC's stage adaptation of both novels, while the BBC adapted Wolf Hall, with Mark Rylance (pictured below) in the title role. Finally, after a long wait for her fans, came The Mirror & the Light, which followed its predecessors into the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Max is big and black and Tyler is slight and (very) white, an odd couple trapped in a dual-control car as Max barks out his instructions and Tyler prepares for his driving test. If their relationship is to get started, like the clutch of the Vauxhall Corsa, it’s going to have to find its biting point. When the men reveal a little more of their insecurities, it does and we’re away.Will Jackson was commissioned by the Bush Theatre to write this play and it’s a delight to see Clutch given a run in its studio space. It may not be the boldest concept (there are strong vibes of a 1970s BBC pilot Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A tender love story has arrived at the Kings Head theatre from the US, where its author, Tanya Barfield, is an award-winning playwright for both television and theatre. The plot is simple: two women — one white, one Black — meet in an office where one is a supervisor, the other a science teacher turned temp, and their lives become entwined over the next 25 years.But Barfield mixes things up by structuring the narrative like a jigsaw puzzle. The audience then has to put all the pieces together.The structuring device guarantees a degree of pathos — there’s a poignancy in learning a relationship Read more ...