Theatre
Gary Naylor
Science on stage is quite the thing at the moment with a revival of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen opening at Hampstead Theatre next week and Lifeline, a British musical, injected into Southwark Playhouse for a six-week residency.It’ll be interesting to track the difference between the reactions of audiences and the critics as too many journalists dismiss anything beyond a bunsen burner or a percentage calculation as a matter reserved for boffins. Being proudly ignorant of such subjects appears to be on the person spec for a job at the BBC, but the explosion of science-based podcasts and YouTube Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
If ever there was a piece that epitomised the view that villains are infinitely more fun than heroes, it would be Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses and its subsequent adaptations. The amorality at play is positively delicious, not least when the culprits feast on each other. But how does that appeal work, as entertainment, at a time when real-life morality is under more constant, and more rigid scrutiny? Will Christopher Hampton’s celebrated stage adaptation become darker, more powerful, or simply leave a bad taste? I’m not suggesting that this latest Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Stories about slavery tend to be simplistic: white perpetrators are bad, black victims good. One of the more striking features of Winsome Pinnock’s new play, The Authenticator, is her insistence that reality is always more complicated. Staged in the Dorfman space of the National Theatre, this production signals the playwright’s return here after her success with Rockets and Blue Lights in 2021, and reunites her with its director Miranda Cromwell. But does the complexity of real life undermine the inherent drama of this fictional tale?Well, the situation is simple: Fenella Harford is an Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Time is a terrifying force in Romeo & Juliet, and Robert Icke's headlong production never lets playgoers forget that fact. Returning to a tragedy he first directed for Headlong touring company 14 years ago, Icke reprises many of the conceits deployed first time round, this time wedded to a starry company headed by Sadie Sink and Noah Jupe that, in the first act at least, gives pride of place to his supporting players.Some may resist the apparent tricksiness of devices that include repetitions or reprises of scenes, as often as not accompanied by searing flashes of light separating out Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
After Barber Shop Chronicles comes a female slice of pan-African life, set in Harlem in July 2019, at the fag end of Donald J Trump’s first presidency. Playwright Jocelyn Bioh never mentions him by name, but his shadow looms over the lives of the braiders, all aiming to become US citizens.At least, his shadow looms over them now. Bioh’s tweaking of the text for the London run has added topical plot points from the second Trump presidency to give this bouncy Tony-nominated comedy a real sting in its tail.For most of its 90 minutes, though, it’s a fast-talking joy. We spend a 12-hour working Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In its heyday, Rodney Ackland’s 1935 play The Old Ladies, adapted from a 1924 novel by Hugh Walpole, was a favourite with doyennes of the theatre world including Edith Evans, Flora Robson and Miriam Karlin. But it has languished unstaged in London for more than 30 years.The Finborough is to be congratulated for giving it another go-round as a stage play, though it's a piece that deserves to be filmed. It also makes a spooky radio play, as you can hear in the BBC Radio adaptation of the novel with Edith Evans as Agatha (available online). In the small confines of the Finborough it builds up a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright David Hare is on a West End roll. Not only is his new play, Grace Pervades, about super thespians Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, making its way from Bath’s Theatre Royal to the Theatre Royal Haymarket next month, but his 1976 play with songs, Teeth ’N’ Smiles, now arrives at the Duke of York’s. Both are star-laden accounts of performance, with Ralph Fiennes and Miranda Raison as the Victorians, and Rebecca Lucy Taylor as Maggie the 1970s rocker. Also known as Self Esteem, she’s an Ivor-Novello Award winner last seen as Sally Bowles in Cabaret a couple of years ago. She also Read more ...
David Nice
Are Seán O'Casey's Dublin plays good for theatre today, or just for the history of Irish drama? My limited recent experience makes it hard to be sure: Juno and the Paycock in London was a liberty-taking mess, and when everyone in a large cast needs to be top-notch - as they are, for instance, in the new production of Gorky's Summerfolk at the National Theatre - any weak performances in The Plough and the Stars scotch O'Casey's experimental ambition as he drops characters for whole acts, introduces others and takes us in unexpected directions, from late 1915 to the Easter Uprising of 1916. Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Though there are few starry, starry nights in Stockwell these days, nor flaming flowers that brightly blaze, you can find ragged men in ragged clothes outside the Tube station. One hundred and fifty years ago, when a fiery redheaded lad pitched up in SW9 asking for a room, something happened and, if we don’t know exactly what, we can have fun wondering can’t we?It wasn’t just Don McLean who was drawn to the legend of Vincent van Gogh. In 2002, Nicholas Wright used a fragment of fact and a whole lot of imagination to spin a play out of the youthful Dutch master’s brief sojourn in South London Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Which crimes are the hardest to forgive? Violence; sexual assault; aggravated sexual assault? Yes, that kind of covers the territory. In Sarah Power’s new play, Welcome to Pemfort, currently playing at the Soho Theatre, this ethical and personal dilemma comes wrapped in an oddly discordant comedy about a countryside castle planning its first Living History event. You know the kind of thing: jousting, dressing up in medieval garb and serving olde English grub. But what about the crime? Set in the cluttered gift shop of Pemfort castle (actually just a fort with a bell tower), the play Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If you’ll forgive me the first of two tiptoes into Gonzo Journalism, a few weeks ago I found out that I have a faulty gene - not a romantically tragic Romanov one, but a defect on the double helix that had already manifested itself in a condition affecting my family and that I may have passed to my sons.That crucial medical knowledge leads to early diagnosis and allows for preventative treatment if required, but what if I had known about it 30 years ago, just before my DNA was shuffled at conception's roulette wheel? What if its impact were greater, life-altering, even life-threatening for Read more ...
Heather Neill
Gorky's satire is set in the summer of 1904, between the opening of The Cherry Orchard and Chekhov's death that year, and the first Russian Revolution early in 1905. Summerfolk has echoes of Chekhov, The Seagull as well as The Cherry Orchard, to which it could be a sequel. Gorky's folk, lazily holidaying in their summer dachas, might be inhabiting the new development which Lopakhin was to build in place of the cherry trees chopped down at the end of Chekhov's last play. The closeness of the relationship is explicit here: there is a reference to trees having been cut down to make space for the Read more ...