Theatre
aleks.sierz
At the age of 81, Caryl Churchill, Britain's greatest living playwright, is still going strong. Her latest is a typically imaginative quartet of short plays. Each of them is vividly distinct, being linguistically agile, theatrically pleasurable and emotionally dark, yet all are also united by the common theme of folk tales and strongly archetypal stories. As one of the Royal Court's most characteristic writers, it is fitting that her newest work enjoys a superbly high-definition production, complete with actors of the caliber of Toby Jones, Deborah Findlay and Tom Mothersdale. It's as if Read more ...
Robert Beale
An all-girl rock group from the 1980s meet again, 30 years after an acrimonious break-up brought their shared stage career to an end … and the sparks fly as old resentments resurface and the bitterness of life’s blows emerges. Will their one-time all-girl solidarity overcome their pain and regrets? Will the show end with them back together, belting out their iconic anthem?It doesn’t take long to see where author Melanie Blake got the idea for The Thunder Girls from. The point of reunion gigs is to peel back the years and let an audience that’s aged along with the stars feel they’re young Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Are first ladies second-class citizens? Do they always have to stand behind their husbands? What are they really like as people? Questions such as these have inspired Irish playwright Nancy Harris to explore the relationship between two fictional first ladies, each of which bears an uncanny resemblance to a real-life figure. One is clearly based on Melania Trump, the other on Brigitte Trogneux, better known as Mrs Macron. As usual at the Bridge Theatre, the show is impeccably cast, with national treasure Zoë Wanamaker making her Bridge debut, and Zrinka Cvitešić, who returns to the London Read more ...
Heather Neill
Earthiness, lyricism, fatalism, the undeniable force of passion, of ecstatic attraction, known as "duende": these are the familiar ingredients of Lorca's plays set in rural Spain. Blood Wedding, written in 1932, was the first, followed by Yerma two years later and The House of Bernarda Alba in 1936, the year of Lorca's murder by Nationalists. As a gay, left-wing artist - he was a poet and musician as well as a playwright - he was an obvious target.Yerma - about a woman desperate to conceive - was given a stunning production here in 2016 with an emotionally shattering performance by Billie Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Mother of Him was written a decade ago, but its most prescient moment happens in the first five minutes of Max Lindsay's production at the Park Theatre. Brenda Kapowitz (Tracy-Ann Oberman) presents a sheaf of papers to Robert (Simon Hepworth, excellent), a family friend who’s also her 17-year-old son’s lawyer. “Report cards, awards,” she explains. “Grade six one doesn’t seem to be here but that shouldn’t make a difference.” We’ve just learned that the son in question, Matthew (Scott Folan, struggling gamely with a Canadian accent), has raped three women. Robert’s doing his best to Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The only novel by the Hungarian dramatist Ödön von Horváth, Youth Without God was written in exile after he fled Anschluss Vienna and published in 1938, shortly before his death. In the English-speaking world, we know von Horváth for his plays, largely through the translations of Christopher Hampton, and it’s Hampton who has adapted the novel for its UK premiere at the Coronet (now minus its Print Room moniker), where Stephanie Mohr’s production plays very satisfyingly, making the most of the venue’s spacious, uncrowded stage as well as its striking sense of period dereliction. When it Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The Permanent Way first roared its way into the national consciousness in 2003 when, after a triumphant opening in York, it toured the UK before transferring to the National Theatre. Under theatre director Max Stafford-Clark’s characteristically rigorous, intelligently exacting prescription, playwright David Hare collated a wide range of interviews with individuals ranging from politicians to train accident victims, to conduct an excoriating survey of the consequences of privatising Britain’s railways. Twenty-two years after the Southall train crash – one of the four major accidents Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch’s “refugee musical” – now there’s a phrase you don’t expect to write – is a treat. Harking back to the early 20th century pogroms of Eastern Europe, it’s darkly steeped in history, conveying the sorrows of leaving behind an old world as well as the slow, painful process of integration into a new one, in this case Canada. In case that sounds too serious, it’s also a delight of performance and music, liberally – and rather often, illiberally – infused with a Jewish humour that is sardonic and survivalist by turn.It’s the work of the 2btheatre company from Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The work isn't finished on Big, if this stage musical of the beloved 1988 Tom Hanks film is ever to, um, make it big. A Broadway flop in 1996 where it was among the last shows directed by the late, much-admired Englishman Mike Ockrent, the material finds a sweetness in its West End incarnation that eluded it Stateside. But even with onetime boyband member Jay McGuiness adroitly capturing the manchild played by Hanks onscreen, the show remains awkwardly positioned between the satiric and the sentimental. And a ruthless pruning wouldn't go amiss either: by the time we'd got to the long-aborning Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Alexander Zeldin continues his devastating analysis of modern Britain in this culminating play of a (very loose) trilogy that started with 2014’s Beyond Caring, followed by LOVE two years after that. These are bleak dramas that show human beings washed up on the edges of a society in which levels of social support have been brutally pared down, even as they contend with change that has drastically disbalanced established ways of life, from zero-hours contracts (Beyond Caring) to homelessness (LOVE). The Dorfman has become a signature setting for the anonymous, dilapidated institutional Read more ...
mark.kidel
It is a truth perhaps not quite but almost universally accepted that Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, beloved of GSCE English Lit examiners, and often adapted for the screen, is a part of the canon, waiting to be re-interpreted according to the fashions of the day. The part-musical, part-ironic pastiche, created by the Glasgow companies Blood of the Young and Tron Theatre, written by Isobel McArthur and directed by Paul Brotherston, takes the novel’s proto-feminist theme and concern with social inequality, and conjures a lively yet strangely heartless comic remix, with and all-female cast Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An excellent director makes a rare misstep with Amsterdam, in which a compelling if tricksy play is given an arch and mannered production that only distances the audience further. Not to be confused with either Rotterdam or Europe, two similarly titled plays that in name alone form a de facto triptych, Israeli writer Maya Arad Yasur's short, jagged play doesn't so much challenge playgoers as wilfully try their patience: the 80 minutes (no interval) pass very slowly indeed. (The translation is by Eran Edry.) The irony is that Yasur has an important story to tell about the weight of the Read more ...