Theatre
Veronica Lee
We're saying goodbye to a much treasured friend. Fleabag will live on, of course – other actresses have and will inhabit the role – but Phoebe Waller-Bridge, its creator, has said this short run at Wyndham's Theatre is the last time she will perform the character on stage.And so that knowledge makes this deliciously filthy and witty monologue – about a twentysomething woman who attracts trouble – even more enjoyable. It was first staged at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013 and Waller-Bridge later performed it at Soho Theatre in London and, more recently, SoHo Playhouse in New York, gaining a Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Neil Armfield’s resonant, turbulent production of Kate Grenville’s classic Australian novel The Secret River sing out from the stage of the Olivier like an epic, with its conflicts, culture clashes, and quest for new territories. But there are no heroes in this tale of sound and fury, which details a tragedy of mutual incomprehension as an eighteenth-century petty London criminal fights to assert dominance over the Aboriginals of New South Wales.The play – which has been adapted by Andrew Bovell – gained an ardent following when it opened in Australia in 2013. This year its triumphant Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You can’t fail to feel the ghosts in Appropriate at the Donmar Warehouse: they are there in the very timbers of the ancient Southern plantation house that is the setting for Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s fraught – and often very funny – family drama. In the best traditions of that genre, when the three children of the Lafayette clan come together following their father’s death for the auction of their old Arkansas home, the experience proves difficult on all fronts – before it’s catapulted to new extremes when they discover an album of old photographs that depict horrifyingly Read more ...
aleks.sierz
After six years, associate director Robert Icke bids farewell to the Almeida Theatre. In this time he has pioneered contemporary versions of classic stories, such as 1984, Oresteia, Uncle Vanya, Mary Stuart and Hamlet with Andrew Scott. Against the trend for short and snappy shows, some of Icke's plays are examples of marathon theatre, where the sheer length of the performance wears down audience resistance and creates an experience of deep immersion. Now, directing his own very free adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's Professor Bernhardi, which stars the brilliant Juliet Stevenson, Icke Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The Red Pleasance Dome ★★★★Comic Marcus Brigstocke has spoken in the past about his addictions and now he has written this two-hander, which he directs, that goes some way to explain the constant internal dialogue he and others like him experience.Benedict has been sober for 20-odd years but faces a big emotional challenge when his father dies. On the day of his dad's funeral we see him in John's extensive cellar, where a bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild 1978, the year of his birth, awaits him, as he reads a letter from John gifting it to him.As Benedict confronts his emotions about Read more ...
David Kettle
Urgent, fast-paced, seemingly never pausing for breath, How Not to Drown is a real-life boy’s own adventure, an appeal for compassion towards refugees, and an interrogation of nationality and identity. That’s quite a mix for a show of 100 minutes. But this bold, confident work, directed with somewhat breathless energy by Neil Bettles for theatre company ThickSkin, pulls it off brilliantly, on a revolving raised platform in Becky Minto’s rugged set. And it’s all the more remarkable because it’s true.Dritan Kastrati grew up in Kosovo, but his parents became increasingly alarmed as war grew ever Read more ...
Marianka Swain
As British summer really kicks in (umbrellas at the ready), our thoughts might turn fondly to the sunny Caribbean. Good timing, then, for the return of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s 1990 musical set in the French Antilles. Based on Rosa Guy’s novel, it tells a familiar tale of boundary-crossing lovers – The Little Mermaid meets Romeo and Juliet – though with some location-specific details that give it fresh interest.One stormy night, villagers distract a crying child with the story of Ti Moune (Chrissie Bhima, pictured below with Martin Cush), a dark-skinned peasant girl who falls Read more ...
David Kettle
It’s the end of the world as we know it. At least according to Miles, scientist turned messiah, who lost his son in an accident at a frozen lake, and who experienced visions of an impending apocalypse in his subsequent coma.He’s established a colony of believers (let’s not call it a cult) in South America, and we’re here to bear witness to the arrival of his estranged wife, intent on reclaiming their daughter back to civilisation.And it must be so, for it is written in the book, copies of which await us like hymnals when we take our places in the seating circle. The book contains exquisite Read more ...
David Kettle
A fat cat who gobbles up everything in sight. A king who tests his wife’s fidelity with increasingly horrific trials. A man whose flatmate is Poverty. It’s hard to ignore the scathing contemporary resonances in theatre company 1927’s sly, witty new Roots, getting its first European performances at the Edinburgh International Festival.The 1927 team cut their teeth in Edinburgh, way back in 2007 at the Fringe, with the gleefully gruesome Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, a succession of miniature tableaux telling of devilish deeds and worrysome characters. Since then, they’ve gone on to Read more ...
David Kettle
Darren McGarvey AKA Loki: Scotland Today The Stand's New Town Theatre ★★★★★ Darren McGarvey (aka Loki the Scottish Rapper) won the Orwell Prize for political writing in 2018 for his book Poverty Safari, a startling, sometimes shocking examination of his own roots in deprivation and addiction in Pollok on the south side of Glasgow. The win shot him to stardom overnight, not least for the book’s unflinching dissection of poverty and privilege, and also for McGarvey’s equally uncompromising analysis of his own sometimes ill-considered opinions and perspectives. He Read more ...
David Kettle
Sea Sick CanadaHub ★★★★ She’s not a performer, Alanna Mitchell tells us. She’s a writer and journalist. But what she’s discovered about climate change, and specifically about its effects on the world’s oceans, has compelled her to tell us about it in this show.And it’s Toronto-based Mitchell’s unforced, unperformative directness – just a woman telling us a story, with a blackboard and chalk – that really carries her quietly gripping Sea Sick. That, and the increasingly worrying information she slowly divulges about the state of our seas, and about how that’s going Read more ...
Veronica Lee
On the Other Hand, We’re Happy Summerhall ****This affecting co-production between Paines Plough and Theatr Clywd of Daf James’s play takes a sideways look at adoption.Twentysomethings Abbi (Charlotte Bate) and Josh (Toyin Omari-Kinch) have been together for almost their entire lifetime. They’re solid, so it’s a shock when they can’t have a biological child, and they decide to adopt.The long drawn-out nature of the adoptive process is neatly essayed here, with endless discussion about what kind of child they wish/will be allowed to adopt, and the pitfalls to be avoided. One wrong step and Read more ...