Theatre
Helen Hawkins
After her lyrical tribute last year to a gone-too-soon young poet, Letters from Max, Sarah Ruhl returns to the Hampstead Theatre with the same director, Blanche McIntyre, though this time in the main house and with larger forces. It’s a big-hearted, funny production. Stage Kiss has a plot that’s almost Noel Coward-like in its ambitions: two actors who were once lovers are reunited in a 1930s melodrama, The Last Kiss, about a married woman, Ada, who is dying and wants to see her ex-lover one last time. The leads are required to kiss nine times per performance, 288 in the run in total Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In the 70s, a science-inclined schoolboy like me was directed to young adult oriented biographies of Thomas Edison, of which there were many. They left out the more problematic aspects of his life, the dubious business practices and some of his more Victorian approaches to demonstrating the power of electricity (don’t Google it). Instead, they favoured the legend of a lone genius beating the odds to, quite literally, enlighten the world.The iconography of his story runs deep in the human soul. But there’s always an Icarus to warn us of the dangers of hubris, lurking on our left shoulder and Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
1536, Ava Pickett’s debut play, is a tribute to women who won’t shut up, especially ones living precarious lives in Tudor England in the year of the title. But this is not really a period piece.Pickett’s clever conceit is to give her three female protagonists the swagger and F-words of modern-day young women living a few miles from Colchester. When they get over-excited it’s like listening to a multi-tracked Catherine Tate not being “bovvered”. Their vocabulary isn’t remotely archaic, neither are their concerns and some of their ideas, especially those pronounced loudly by Anna (Siena Kelly, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In the 1920s, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was as famous as it gets really, author of the beloved Sherlock Holmes stories, a polymath and a rare British example of that most continental of figures, the public intellectual. Across The Atlantic, Harry Houdini was a phenomenon, the escapologist showman, personifying The Great American Dream, even making movies.A century on, Holmes and Houdini (both of whom are invented characters, lest we forget) persist as metaphors and memes that require no explanation.Ah, lest we forget. Neither man could, to the extent that memories became pathologised. The writer Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Those nostalgic for a time when the Haymarket offered big names in well-upholstered plays will have a field day at Grace Pervades, in which David Hare furthers his relationship with Ralph Fiennes. Their partnership includes Straight Line Crazy here and in New York and the solo play Beat the Devil, in which Fiennes actually played the dramatist (15 years his senior) in the tale of Hare's battle with COVID. This play inhabits notionally less troubled times in its story of two titans of the Victorian era, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, the latter of whom was the great-aunt of the legendary Read more ...
Gary Naylor
For a master dramatist - even for a tyro really - The Price is a strangely uneven play, brilliant psychological insights diluted by clunking structural issues. You wonder what it would be like in the hands of a less talented cast, a less experienced director, performed on a less convincing set - it could unravel very quickly. It was something of a surprise to find that amongst the credits in the programme, its weakest link proved to be its writer, Arthur Miller.We open on a middle-aged NYPD cop rooting through a treasure trove of stuff that you might find presented at an Antiques Roadshow Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Patriarchy is a trap for both men and women. This we know. But it’s not often that its takedown is as amazingly theatrical as this fabulous entertainment, Tender, by American playwright Dave Harris, now getting its wonderfully noisy premiere at the Soho Theatre. It’s a wildly immersive show, partly orgiastic, partly touching the bits other entertainments cannot reach, and brought to us by director Matthew Xia, who previously teamed up with the playwright to create the hit Tambo & Bones. Set in a dilapidated old theatre, this show explores the world of three male strippers, called the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The aftermath of school massacres for those left behind, and the pros and cons of restorative justice have become two strong themes for drama in recent years. Writer Fran Kranz combines the two, in an intense, claustrophobic piece that attacks both the brain and the heart. Mass has had an unusual journey: Kranz originally conceived it as a play, before turning instead to film (of the same name, in 2022), but then reworking it for his intended medium, which has its world premier at the Donmar. I haven’t seen the movie, so can’t compare; but it is perfectly at home on stage, and especially Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
There has been a trend in productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in recent years to portray Athens as a sexually repressive regime in which Queen Hippolyta is resentfully shackled to Theseus after he has conquered her in battle. The Bridge Theatre’s – ultimately gloriously escapist – Dream, portrayed Theseus as a tyrant from The Handmaid’s Tale. Meanwhile, the beautifully austere Dream which played at The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse last Christmas, showed him as a psychotic misogynist.This is a completely valid reading of the text – I personally have never recovered from the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The USA was still months short of Pearl Harbour’s shove into World War II when Bertholt Brecht wrote The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. It was many years into a Cold War by the time it was first staged in 1958. It will need a historian of the future to draft the next sentence, the one that heralds its revival at the RSC in 2026. But we were all thinking, and worrying about what exactly it would say – as Brecht intended.After a prologue and some banners (the more intrusive Brechtian stylings mercifully largely left behind after that) we’re introduced to the fat cats of the Chicago cauliflower Read more ...
Sarah Ruhl
Perhaps fate led me inevitably to the theatre as a great love because my first kiss was in a scene study class when I was 14 years old. My scene partner and I were working on a sweet little scene that ended in a kiss; at least, that’s what the stage directions told us.We were studying with the great Chicago acting teacher Joyce Piven. At the end of our performance for the class, the very sweet young man I was acting with planted one on me. I drew back in surprise, and Joyce said, in her unmistakable deep growl to the young actor, “Dear boy, you have to plan these things first!”I never became Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
David Pearson’s debut play, Firewing, part of Hampstead Theatre’s INSPIRE project for emerging writers, is a heartfelt two-hander about the importance of passing stuff on.“Stuff” is a key word in the dialogue, the portmanteau word with which a young man called Marcus (Charlie Beck, pictured below right) pads out his sentences, a sign of his unfinished education. He has now found a mentor, Tim (Gerard Horan, pictured below left), an older man who is steadily filling in some of the gaps. Marcus, we learn, is a son devoted to a mother who loves to paint but seems to have been felled by Read more ...