Theatre
Rachel Halliburton
This ingenious short work deftly investigates themes of love and identity with a breezy assurance that marks first time playwright, Ruby Thomas, out as a daring and exciting new voice. In an age where gender fluidity and polyamory are becoming increasing part of the daily discourse, Either casts a simultaneously humorous and breathtakingly bold light on whether or not gender affects the way you love.In 1897, Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler wrote the play Reigen, known more widely as La Ronde, which was initially banned by the censors and subsequently condemned Read more ...
Matt Wolf
“Every now and then the country goes a little wrong”: so goes one of the many lyrics from the Stephen Sondheim-John Weidman musical Assassins that makes this 1990 Off Broadway musical (subsequently chosen to open Sam Mendes’ Donmar Warehouse in 1992) a piece of theatre very much for our time. Some shows need textual tweaking when they come around again but not this one. If anything, this musical's excavation of an abiding societal fury seems more pertinent than ever today.Building in resonance every time I see it (at least if done well), Assassins has now been revived in a very smart co- Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You wonder about the title of French dramatist Sam Gallet’s Mephisto [A Rhapsody], an adaptation for our days of Klaus Mann’s 1936 novel about an actor unable to resist the blandishments of fame, even if they come at the cost of losing himself. Those who know the story from Hungarian director István Szabó’s celebrated 1981 film with its mesmerising central performance by Klaus-Maria Brandauer might come to this looking for an element of tragedy, one moderated by the merciless accusation of complicity directed at a character unable to resist the enticements offered by Nazism, a figure who Read more ...
Marianka Swain
A hit comedy about a textile scientist? It might sound unlikely, but Ealing Studios’ 1951 sci-fi satire, starring Alec Guinness, was one of the most popular films of the year in Britain. Now, Sean Foley hopes to repeat its success with his new West End stage version, which tweaks the formula to go big, broad and occasionally Brexit-referencing – with varying results.Stephen Mangan, who also collaborated with Foley on the similarly goofy, high-energy Jeeves and Wooster: Perfect Nonsense, plays chemist Sidney Stratton, whose great invention is fabric that never gets dirty or wears out. But Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Shuck 'n' Jive is an hour-long two-hander about writing a play about being black in a white industry. The industry? Theatre. Performance. The stage.Simone (played by Olivia Onyehara), an opera singer, is from Lincolnshire. Cassi (played by Tanisha Spring), an actress, is from south London (so south, in fact, it's the part of Croydon where you can see countryside). But hold on. Is the play really about what it says it is? On the one hand, yes: the anecdotes come thick and fast. Meta-pastiche minstrel shows take over the auditions which Cassi and Simone attend. Hamilton and Porgy and Bess are Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“Doors and sardines. Getting on, getting off. Getting the sardines on, getting the sardines off. That’s farce. That’s the theatre. That’s life.” Michael Frayn’s laugh-til-you-weep backstage comedy transfers from the Lyric Hammersmith (where it first appeared in 1982), and Jeremy Herrin’s superb revival has tightened up further for this encore run, resulting in the funniest night you’ll have in the West End.Since staging Noises Off seems to tempt fate even more than uttering “Macbeth”, the production was once again visited by misadventure – this time a minor prop mishap, rather than Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The American dramatist Katori Hall has created a work of rare accomplishment in Our Lady of Kibeho, a play that combines a beautifully established picture of a particular world – a church school in rural Rwanda, in the early 1980s – with profound themes such as faith and belief.That she brings her story, one that indirectly references the genocide that the country would experience a decade later, together with some choice character comedy is further testimony to her skill in combining the sacred and the secular. Premiered in New York in 2014, it reaches Theatre Royal Stratford East in James Read more ...
Heather Neill
Reviewing Ian McKellen's show is, in one sense, like appraising the Taj Mahal or Mount Everest: he too is an awe-inspiring phenomenon. In another sense, Sir Ian is not like that at all, going out of his way to be available to the adoring patrons filling the theatre, apparently enjoying every minute of up to three hours from a jokey beginning geared to Gandalf and Widow Twankey to shaking a collecting bucket at the door as the audience leaves. Apparently indefatigable - despite this show marking his 80th birthday - he can even be found chatting to punters in the stalls during the interval. He Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Peter Nichols died aged 92 last month, just before the opening of this starry West End revival of his most celebrated masterpiece. A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1967) is based on his own family experience of bringing up his disabled daughter in the 1960s, and it has the reputation of being one of the most ground-breaking plays of its generation. This revival stars Toby Stephens and Claire Skinner as the parents, Patricia Hodge as the mother-in-law, and Storme Toolis, who has cerebral palsy and is familiar from New Tricks, playing the daughter Joe. As a campaigner for the rights of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Time has been kind to Athol Fugard's "Master Harold"...and the Boys. It's a stealth bomb of a play that I saw in its world premiere production in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1982 and that has been a regular part of my playgoing life ever since. Yes, the apartheid-era South Africa that Fugard dissects with terrifying force has been dismantled, and we live in (supposedly) more enlightened times. Yet the ongoing lesson of a play first directed by Fugard is that racism and hate start from a place of self-loathing. Roy Alexander Weise's beautiful National Theatre production sends that point Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What a joy Laura Wade's latest play is. Transferring from its successful run at the Minerva Theatre at Chichester last year, The Watsons is developed from Jane Austen's unfinished novel (started in 1804 and abandoned the following year). But rather than give us a period homage or a modern pastiche, Wade serves up a delightful concoction that has elements of both, but also much, much more.She sets the scene by dramatising the surviving pages of Austen's story. Emma Watson (Grace Molony) returns home to Surrey after being raised by a moneyed aunt in Shropshire for 14 years. Her father is dying Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a fine balance between the cosmic and the closely crafted in director Paul Miller’s Macbeth, his first production in the expansive space that is Chichester’s main stage. It comes across as a drama unravelling in the wide open spaces of nature, with a design approach that feels operatic in style – generous use of projections accentuate the big stage picture, backed up with a complex sound palette – set against playing, John Simm’s Macbeth especially, that feels finely wrought. Simm offers a strikingly intelligent interpretation of the role, more considered than instinctual, a hero who’ Read more ...