Theatre
Matt Wolf
The National Theatre is forging its own special relationship with American playwright Annie Baker, having now produced three of her plays within four years, all in their smallest Dorfman space. The result has allowed a gathering acquaintance with a genuinely startling theatrical voice that mixes detailed hyperrealism with a leap into the void. Baker in this latest play more than ever invites us into a twilight zone all her own, and the theatre is a richer place for her creative shape-shifting even as her worldview gets grimmer with each premiere.The Antipodes may represent her most Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Actor Miriam Margolyes is a phenomenon. Not only has this Dickensian starred in high-profile shows both here and in Australia, a country whose citizenship she took up in 2013, but she is also Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter films. And a familiar face from television. And a voice on radio. The programme lists her 12 major awards. Now she returns to the Park Theatre, having starred in its sellout show Madame Rubinstein a couple of years ago, in a family drama by another Park returnee, actor turned playwright Eugene O'Hare, whose bleak debut, The Weatherman, provoked controversy in its Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It is 70 years since Willy Loman first paced a Broadway stage; 70 years since audiences were sucked into the vortex of a man trying to live America’s capitalist dream only to see his life crash and burn around him. This production, which transfers from the Young Vic, famously recasts Arthur Miller’s vision from a black man’s perspective, a powerful idea that gains heightened potency in an era in which Trump continues so shamelessly to reclaim America for the oppressed white man.Director Marianne Elliott – who so brilliantly re-energised Sondheim’s Company last year by making the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
David Baddiel is a very fine comic, and over the past few years has become an acclaimed author of children's books. So I'm genuinely sad to say that his debut play at Soho Theatre really isn't very good. God's Dice does have its moments, for sure, and some laughs, but at two hours, 15 minutes it's massively overlong and over blown.Baddiel has set himself a big task by tackling a big issue – the interface of science and religion. Alan Davies plays Henry, a quantum physicist teaching at a provincial university, whose certainty about the world is shaken when Edie (Leila Mimmack), a young Read more ...
David Nice
When Sean Mathias wrote A Prayer for Wings 35 years ago, the subject of young carers devoting their lives to parents with disabilities had just come as a revelation. That it's still very much a shame under another Tory government keeps this play topical, More important, it's eloquently written, with no false notes to the tedious daily grind of life for Mam and Rita in the disused Welsh church they're renting, and nothing too incredible about the dreams and hopes of the monologues they address to the audience.That helps to make the seemingly fantastical, the presence of angels and devils in Read more ...
Marianka Swain
London’s latest new theatre opens with an appropriately otherworldly Halloween offering: American composer Dave Malloy’s teeming 2014 song cycle, which played at the Edinburgh Festival in 2016. It’s a superb piece for demonstrating the benefits of this intimate, flexible cabaret-esque space – played here in the round, with easy audience interaction and strict maintenance of the kind of atmosphere key to Malloy’s tender piece.Ghost Quartet is formally a double album, with the sensational actor-musician cast (including Zubin Varla, pictured below) introducing each ‘track’ on its four sides. Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Even the most ardent Bardophile has to admit that most of the time the Fool doesn’t shine in a Shakespeare production. Lamentable wordplay combined with philosophy limper than a dead capon means that with a few honourable exceptions, his interludes feel nasty, a tad brutish, and just not short enough. Yet in this RSC transfer to the Barbican, Sandy Grierson’s coruscatingly witty Touchstone, complete with bald patch, straggly hair, sequin vest, and tight tartan trousers, steals almost every scene in which he appears. In an evening filled with gentle comedy, there is a raw anger to his humour Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Memory involves places, people, things and words, especially words. This abstract proposition is given knotty life in Welsh playwright Ed Thomas's extraordinary new play, On Bear Ridge, which comes to the Royal Court after opening at the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff last month. Over a compellingly Beckettian 85 minutes, conceived and staged as a rare example of metaphysical theatre, he shows how the decay of language eats away at memory, identity and life. Yes, it's a grim story of loss in a metaphorically resonant absurdist fable. And one in which Rhys Ifans performs a masterclass in Read more ...
Simon Stephens
Light Falls is the sixth play that I have written for the Royal Exchange theatre in Manchester and the fourth that its outgoing Artistic Director, Sarah Frankcom, will direct.She directed On the Shore of the Wide World, Punk Rock and Blindsided. In many ways Light Falls marks a culmination of a collaboration that has informed my working life and a return to ideas I have been interrogating in that collaboration.I was born in Stockport and lived there until I went to university when I was 18. I live in London now and have done for 25 years. The relationship between the two places continues to Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Botticelli is a household name, but who knows the true story behind his most famous painting? The painter's 1480s masterpiece, The Birth of Venus, is one of the most striking images of Renaissance Florence – and has achieved iconic status. Because it has been minutely dissected by generations of art historians, it takes a bold playwright to smash through the scholarship and give a memorably fresh, in not necessarily accurate, account of its commissioning. Enter Jordan Tannahill, the Canadian polymath whose work spans theatre, film, dance, novels and everything else. And he's still only 31. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Time has been not just kind but even crucial to Little Baby Jesus, the 2011 play from the multi-hyphenate talent Arinzé Kene, who since then has gone on become a major name on and offstage: the West End transfer of his self-penned Misty brought him dual Olivier nominations earlier this year as writer and actor, and he segued from that to playing the volatile son Biff in Death of a Salesman at the Young Vic.All of which means that catching this play at this point in Kene’s career is to witness an embryonic creative chomping rabidly and electrically at the bit Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Even the mighty Almeida is allowed the occasional dud and it’s sure as hell got one at the moment with Vassa. Maxim Gorky’s 1910 play (rewritten in 1935) about a matriarch in extremis some years back proved a stonking West End star vehicle for Sheila Hancock. It offers a chance to go hell-for-leather that should set the pulse racing. That same role was to have been played this time out by Samantha Bond, who bowed out and has been replaced by a game if not ideally cast Siobhan Redmond: her breathy exhalations tire after a while, and one misses the whiplash authority required of a Read more ...