Theatre
Helen Hawkins
Before Luigi Illica wrote the libretti for Puccini’s Tosca and Madama Butterfly, he had joined the composer as the librettist in a race to stage the first production of La Bohème. The race was against Ruggero Leoncavallo, a composer Illica had once collaborated with on a libretto – for Puccini, his Manon Lescaut.In the snakepit of the Milanese opera business in the late 1800s, these tangled connections were standard, as dozens of young composers fought for prominence to be the new Verdi, whose portrait hangs on Leoncavallo's wall. That there would be rival productions based on Henri Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The 2024 play at the National Theatre that put writer Beth Steel squarely centre-stage has now received a West End transfer. Its title taken from an Auden poem urging people to dance till they drop, it’s probably the most passionate show in that locale, and definitely the lewdest.It opens with the female equivalent of locker-room talk as the women of an extended family in what was once Notts and Derby pit country bicker and banter while preparing for the wedding of young Sylvia (Sinead Matthews). Topics of conversation range from the naughtiness of next door’s "sex pond”, ie hot tub, to the Read more ...
Heather Neill
The National Health Service was established 77 years ago this month. Resident doctors are about to strike for more pay, long waiting lists for hospital treatment and the scarcity of GP appointments continue to dog political conversation, while the need for reform of the system provides a constant background hum. The idea for a national health service free at the point of need was always ambitious and remains challenging, but the NHS has become a cross between a religion and a beloved – if problematic – family. And it still deserves to be celebrated as it is here, even ending with Read more ...
David Nice
Anyone seeking local genius in an international festival should look no further than the annual Ravenna concerts from Riccardo Muti – Neapolitan by birth, Ravennate by adoption – with his Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra. Well, maybe a little further if you have basic Italian: 2025 sees the completion of a second walkabout theatre trilogy involving citizens of Ravenna and beyond, masterminded by two greats equal to Muti in their own unique ways, Ermanna Montanari and Marco Martinelli.The first, spellbinding adventure, a Dante triptych, I discovered in its second year, a reinvention of Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Well, I wasn’t expecting a Dylanesque take on "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'" as an opening number and I was right. But The Zim, Nobel Prize ‘n all, has always favoured The Grim American Songbook over The Great American Songbook and writer/director Conor McPherson’s hit "play with music" leans into the poet of protest’s unique canon with his international smash hit, now back where it all began eight years ago.It remains a curious and unique piece, at once overly familiar (take you pick from Williams, Steinbeck, Miller or even Chekhov as inspirations) but also continually surprising. The songs Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Shakespeare’s Prince Hal may have rejected Sir John Falstaff as a symbol of his misspent youth, but the real-life monarch Queen Elizabeth I couldn’t get enough of him. Accounts vary of who precisely commissioned The Merry Wives of Windsor – or as some might call it, Falstaff III – but a key factor was known to be Elizabeth’s desire to see him in love.Shakespeare’s response to the commission was as fresh and frothy as a tankard of ale on a summer’s evening, short on soul and heavy on slapstick. Director Sean Holmes – who rousingly kicked off the Globe’s summer season with his Wild West-style Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Near the start of Chloë Moss’s latest play, Run Sister Run, one character tells his wife to “Calm your nerves”. A classic moment of emotional illiteracy perhaps, but given the heightened nature of the drama’s opening scene, it does also seem like an instance of unconscious self-reflection.For this is a story that starts off with high intensity and never really relaxes, one that dashes, stumbles and leaps through a variety of profound psychological states. And one that also has a troubled past. Originally opening in Sheffield in March 2020, with a different director and a different cast, its Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The corset is an unlikely star of the latest Lynn Nottage play to arrive at the Donmar Warehouse, 2003’s Intimate Apparel. After the more male-dominated Sweat and Clyde’s at the same address, this is a personal piece about the lot of Black women, inspired by Nottage’s discovery of an old photo of her great-grandmother Ethel.She set about excavating all she could about Ethel, but there wasn’t much in print about Black women of the time. She knew Ethel was born in Barbados in 1870, arrived, alone, in New York City at 18 and married a man she had corresponded with while he laboured on the Panama Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Many years ago, reviewing pantomime for the first time, I recall looking around in the stalls. My brain was saying, “This is terrible, the jokes are lame, the acting execrable and the set garish.” My eyes were saying, “These kids are loving it, their parents are liking it enough, and the cast are having a great time.” There was joy everywhere in the house, so who was I to play The Grinch?That memory went through my mind standing at the box office 90 minutes before the curtain, surrounded by merch aimed at the coach parties being disgorged outside. An American family from central casting – Read more ...
Gary Naylor
I think my problem is that when I should have been listening in school assemblies or RE lessons, I had the Tom Tom Club’s joyous “Wordy Rappinghood” buzzing through my mind. That experience has given me a lifelong aversion to phrases like “The Word was made flesh”, the gospel of St John proving somewhat less than indispensable for me so far. Curiously, that quote, coming very early, marked a high point for two reasons: the novelty of the lip-synch approach had yet to wear off and genuinely interesting insights into the origins, power and unique qualities of speech communication were offered. Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Sarah Kane is the most celebrated new writer of the 1990s. Her work is provocative and innovative. So it seems oddly unimaginative to mark the 25th anniversary of her final play, 4.48 Psychosis, by simply recreating the original production, with the original actors and the original production team in a joint Royal Court and Royal Shakespeare Company venture. Sadly this is typical of our reboot culture, which prefers the old to the new, nostalgia over experiment, but it does feel like a wasted opportunity. After all, when David Byrne, artistic director of this venue, was head of the Read more ...
David Nice
It amuses me that Dubliners dress up in Edwardian finery on 16 June. After all, this was the date in 1904 when James Joyce first walked out with Nora Barnacle and, putting her hand inside his trousers, she “made me a man”. So it’s National Handjob Day. But Bloomsday too, celebrating the jaunts of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom over 24 hours around Dublin, the song of a great city in Ulysses.This year, four adaptations proved how Joyce is to be heard and acted out, perhaps creating an even more vivid impression than simply reading him. The little company of actors with big ambitions called Read more ...