About two hours into this big, brash Beetlejuice, the door to Hell opens up, and I felt a sudden desire to rush the stage, dash through and take my chances. Well, perhaps not on press night, when it's poor form to leave before the end.Reflecting further (and this is one of those shows in which something is always happening, but everything is said at least twice, so you can take a time out) I realised that I was breaking one of my Golden Rules. This is a musical adaptation of an 80s blockbuster movie and has a wild-eyed, leering man with green hair as its marketing image, so what did I expect Read more ...

With impeccable timing, the Orange Tree in Richmond has scheduled a one-act play that’s exactly what a beleaguered public needs: 75 minutes of mind-bendingly ludicrous physical comedy in the form of Peter Shaffer’s 1965 hit, Black Comedy. It's still a lethal weapon.Farce was a theatrical staple at that time, regularly broadcast on primetime television from the Whitehall Theatre. A pants-down Brian Rix in flamboyant underwear invaded the nation’s living rooms long before serious dramas with suggestive sex scenes were allowed in. So Shaffer was working fertile soil. (Spoiler alert if you have Read more ...

The psychological masterstroke of this quietly devastating work is to portray it from the point of view of an elderly woman who is convinced that she should not be in an old people’s home. Like the vast majority of us, Joan – played with spiky elegance by Linda Bassett – cannot see why she should relinquish her independence to be surrounded by people who seem, in different ways, to be losing their minds. On Rosana Vize’s rigorously naturalistic set – with its formulaic framed paintings and armchairs set in a forlorn semi-circle – we watch Joan’s initial encounters with the home’s Read more ...

In a small Appalachian village, where people say “Y’all” and prospectors are still searching for silver in the mountains, Barbara Allen wants more than the humdrum life of a Trad wife (as I suppose you would call it these days). Already a bit of a rebel, she has a suitor, the dim, fighty Marvin, but there’s something just there, she knows, if only she could see it.She’s right, of course, else we wouldn’t have a show, and that something is Witch Boy John, part of a coven of sex-mad spirits whose hedonistic lifestyle has become dulled by its accompanying alienation. He wants to feel joy and Read more ...

Just a flimsy music stand on the RSC’s biggest stage greets us. Sir Ken, no longstaff in hand as we might have expected, dons his coat, perhaps left over from Abanazar’s costuming in an upscale pantomime, and raises his weedy, reedy baton. Instantly, all hell breaks loose on Bob Crowley’s beautiful sparse, now tilting set, supplemented by Akhila Krishnan’s Donner and Blitzen videos. The game’s afoot all right.The clue is in the title of course. Prospero, like a wizardy Leonard Bernstein, conjuring a storm to shipwreck his usurper brother, Antonio, Duke of Milan and shipwreck, amongst others, Read more ...

Maybe because we are aware now of too many cases of a paranoid schizophrenic suddenly unleashing violence on an innocent stranger, the teenager under treatment in Peter Schaffer’s 1973 play, who has blinded six horses, is no longer a character we feel that conflicted about.Unlike Martin Dysart (Toby Stephens), the psychiatrist whose encounter with just such a lad upends his thinking about almost everything, especially his own motives for pursuing his career. While Alan (Noah Valentine) struggles with his desire for someone to inspire his life and settles on the divine presence he senses in Read more ...

Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape had its world premiere in 1958, with Patrick Magee, at the Royal Court. That same venue happens to be the site of Gary Oldman's last stage appearance in Caryl Churchill's Serious Money in 1987 – which I saw back in the day. So it's a genuine occasion to welcome both the play and its current performer back to this address as part of a heavy-hitting lineup of work across the year to celebrate the Court's 70th year. Devotees of this past and present powerhouse of a venue will surely recall Harold Pinter nearly 20 years ago delivering a now-canonical monologue in Read more ...

This blistering account of Brecht’s classic – which he wrote in a white heat of fury as news reached him of Hitler’s invasion of Poland – pitches us headlong into the cynicism and casual obscenity of war. Elle While’s uncompromising production is like a Mad Max cabaret at the end of time, a post-apocalyptic vision of a world corrupted by violence and greed. The impact is heightened by a punchy, expletive-stacked translation from Anna Jordan that vividly demonstrates the corrosive impact of conflict on language. Eight years ago, her acclaimed play The Unreturning – written for Frantic Read more ...

Are Oscar Wilde's plays comedies of manners or just mannered comedies? Can they be kept afloat for today's audiences if they stick more or less to the period setting (this one does; the Lyric Hammersmith version reviewed, also today, by Helen Hawkins, doesn't)? An Ideal Husband offers Wilde's richest dramatic pickings, its timeless tale of political and personal corruption laced with an artifice that gives way to reveal the jungle beasts beneath the sharp, barbed facades.In its racy, trippy entr'actes, Irish-Catalonian director Marc Atkinson Borrull's Gate Theatre production seems to take its Read more ...

It’s safe to say Oscar Wilde enjoyed a good party, so it’s very likely he would give a big thumbs up to the Lyric’s An Ideal Husband, which director Nicholas La Barrie has souped up as an Afro-Caribbean comedy of manners, featuring added workouts on the dance floor.This turns out to be a timely play: a tale of a politician who once passed on key insider knowledge to a third party, whose return favour set him up for a stellar career. Insert the names of our former US ambassador and his cronies, and you can sense the magnitude of the error of judgment the younger Robert Chiltern made. Now his Read more ...

It took me a long time to "get" the English Middle Class, though I don’t think I completely understand them even now. Sure drowning in accents and assumed privilege in a Russell Group university Law faculty was a helluva’n education (some of it even on the curriculum). But it was only up close and personal, in their natural habitat, that allowed me to start on deciphering their arcane codes.Until then, as a kid does, I thought everybody just talked all the time, whether another person was speaking or not, said exactly what they thought and felt and that listening was optional (at best). If Read more ...

This is a real humdinger of a Holmes, an intoxicating swirl through the mind of the fictional detective who has fascinated figures as diverse as Harrison Ford, Agatha Christie, and the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Joel Horwood’s update takes Conan Doyle’s original The Sign of Four and liberally spices it with elements of Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, the BBC’s Sherlock and an opium dream, to create a storyline that keeps you on your toes at the same time as it leads you through a labyrinth. It’s a quarter of a century since I reviewed the then unknown Benedict Cumberbatch in the Regent Read more ...