Theatre
Katherine Waters
According to their mother, Luda (played by Madeleine Worrall, pictured below), each of the three sisters (pictured top) in Napoli, Brooklyn, bears one of their father’s admirable traits. Tina (Mona Goodwin), the oldest, who left school early to earn money for the family in a factory job, has his strength. Vita (Georgia May Foote), who is smart but has been banished to a convent school for crossing her father, has his tongue. Francesca (Hannah Bristow), who by cutting her hair short precipitated the violent row, has his spirit. But really, the attributes Luda is describing belong to her, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
"I am amazed to be still alive. Two hours of medieval torment.” Franco Zeffirelli - who has died at the age of 96 - had spent the day having a lumbar injection to treat a sciatic nerve. You could hear the bafflement in his heavily accented English.It was a warm Roman evening in Casa Zeffirelli in September 2009. The grandest old man of the arts — who worked with Callas and von Karajan, Tennessee Williams and Toscanini, Burton and Taylor and Olivier, who had the ear of popes, princes and prime ministers — was now visibly in the deep winter of a lifespan that began in 1923. “Il maestro”, as Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Terence Rattigan completists, and count myself among them, will leap at the chance to see a rare production courtesy the Orange Tree Theatre of While the Sun Shines, a 1943 monster hit for this great English writer that has languished in semi-obscurity ever since. (Theatre Royal, Bath, did an acclaimed version in 2016 but London hasn't seen it in an age.) Returning to a playwright whose previous French Without Tears enjoyed two sellout runs at this address, the director Paul Miller confirms a gift for mining the canon afresh.If one's actual experience of the play amounts to a rather more Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a joke early on in Sweat, Lynn Nottage's superlative drama about American working lives, in which a lively bar-room conversation turns to the seemingly unlikely subject of NAFTA. It’s 2000, the Bush presidency just around the corner, and the impact of the acronymic North American Free Trade Agreement is about to hit the country's industrial heartlands. It sounds like a laxative, one character jokes – a throwaway remark that proves to have a bitter truth behind it. By the end of her 2015 Pulitzer prize-wining drama, now transferred from the Donmar to the West End, Nottage will Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Nicholas Hytner’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Bridge Theatre is a feat of exuberant brilliance, a gender-juggling romp that takes Shakespeare’s subversive text and polishes it so that it glints and shines like a glitterball at a disco. No holds are barred in this ecstatic 21st-century take, in which sexualities – as well as lovers – are swapped, the rude mechanicals get distracted by taking selfies, and Oberon, rather than Titania, loses his head for an ass.Game of Thrones’ Gwendoline Christie has star billing here in the traditionally twinned roles of Titania and Hippolyta. Yet it’s not Read more ...
Matt Henry
When I first read One Night in Miami, I instantly felt a strong connection to the piece and its story. The fact that Sam Cooke, Malcolm X, Cassius Clay and Jim Brown, four iconic black men at the top of their game in 1964, actually hung out in a Miami motel room on the night that Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston was fascinating to me. I had no idea of this encounter and as I read, I could imagine myself watching as a fly on the wall. Stepping back in time, seeing these icons of the Civil Rights Movement brought to life and imagining their experience of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s hard, and finally fruitless to attempt to describe Okwui Okpokwasili’s Bronx Gothic in conventional terms of genre: combining elements of dance and theatre, this visceral solo performance transcends both. It engages with frantic movement at the same time as nursing a text – an utterance, rather than a narrative – that attains a fervid urgency, a state that demands immersion from the viewer. The concentrated effort of its 80-minute run clearly takes a huge amount out of the Nigerian-American actor-writer: it’s hard to call her just a performer, this is an experience that she lives.Her Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Director Declan Donnellan has a rich record of working with Russian actors: his previous walk on the Slavic side, the darkly powerful Measure for Measure that came to the Barbican four years ago, was preceded by some magnificent versions of Shakespeare, Pushkin and Chekhov. Which makes his latest Russian-language venture, a version of Francis Beaumont’s ribald, parodic early 17th century meta-comedy, a distinct change of direction: its subversive energy, suggesting broader elements of the carnivalesque, was surely attractive while also hinting, in this theatrical tale of an audience invading Read more ...
Katherine Waters
It's the 2nd May 1997, the morning after the night that swept New Labour into power. We’re in the staffroom of a school somewhere in Britain and the teachers are jubilant. They've been glued to their TV sets for the results and have shagged and drunk through the night to crawl in with hangovers and pouchy eyes to face the day with a particular brand of frazzled optimism. But they're also anxious, because — according to the relentless logic of musical theatre which permits only extremes — today is the worst day to be a teacher. Today, of course, is muck up day.Between the ordinary mayhem Read more ...
aleks.sierz
In one lifetime, the many loves that once dare not speak their names have become part of everyday chatter. But it would be shortsighted to believe that ancient prejudices are easy to overcome, or that change does not run the risk of creating familiar problems. In this new play, Wife, Samuel Adamson explores several decades of the trials and tribulations of forbidden love in a piece of epic theatre that is also exquisitely personal. At the same time, he has also penned a fan letter to the theatre, taking Ibsen's A Doll's House as a template against which to measure social progress.The story Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The huge achievement of the last two decades of August Wilson’s life, right up to his death in 2005, was his “American Century Cycle”, in which he charted the African American experience over that time frame decade by decade, its action set largely in the downtown Hill District of Pittsburgh where the playwright grew up.Premiered in 1999, King Hedley II represents the Eighties – the front curtain makes much of it being the beginning of the Reagan years – though Wilson’s concerns go far beyond standard documentary. History in this black neighbourhood extends back a long way, something that Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A small-scale Off Broadway venture late in 2009, The Starry Messenger has arrived in London to mark the belated British stage debut of Matthew Broderick, the movie name much-loved on the New York stage. Reuniting the two-time Tony-winner with his lifelong chum Kenneth Lonergan, who since this play's premiere has become an A-list Oscar-winner, Sam Yates's production is equal parts intriguing and irritating, and Broderick's singular theatrical deadpan may alienate as many people as it attracts. It may not help this play's cause that Lonergan has been represented in successive Broadway Read more ...