Theatre
Marianka Swain
This well-meaning biographical jukebox musical about icons Gloria and Emilio Estefan, which did two years on Broadway and a US tour, is good summer scheduling, what with its Latin-pop bangers, infectious dance routines and “Dreams come true” messaging. Yet its awkward housing at the austere Coliseum exacerbates this 2015 work’s major flaw: reaching for profundity in a skin-deep, conflict-lite tale, instead of enjoying the party.Gloria (Christie Prades, reprising the role from the US tour) is a talented but shy songwriter. Her grandmother (Karen Mann) eagerly pushes her into the band – Read more ...
aleks.sierz
For a while, child abuse has been banished from our stages. After all, there is a limit, surely, to how much pain audiences can be put through. Now, however, the subject is back, thanks to the Almeida Theatre's new stage adaptation of the 2012 Danish film thriller Jagten, by Dogme 95's Thomas Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm, and which memorably starred Mads Mikkelsen. The plot is about a male teacher who becomes the target of mass hysteria after being wrongly accused of sexually abusing a child in his infants school class, and this version by David Farr effectively turns the screw on our Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" can be heard pulsating through the Old Vic auditorium as the curtain rises on its wondrous revival of Present Laughter: a decisive feather in the cap of artistic director Matthew Warchus's regime. But all Garry Essendine, the vainglorious actor at the whirling centre of Noël Coward's 1942 play, really wants is to make it through the day (and night) intact. Possessing 18 dressing gowns but at odds with that ever-elusive entity known as happiness, Garry has men and women alike in thrall, and so – and how! – does its stratospherically gifted Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“How much does she owe us?” So ponder the now estranged parents of a former tennis pro, as they calculate the very literal investment they’ve put into their daughter. This probing new play from Oli Forsyth – well timed for Queen’s and Wimbledon – examines the consequences of achievement by proxy and a familial relationship that becomes transactional.Construction worker Ade (Jonathan Livingstone) and carer Nina (Phoebe Pryce, both pictured below) think tennis is “for other people”, but when their daughter excels at a free trial, they encourage her to pursue it – and a leisure activity Read more ...
David Nice
Is the terrifying past of Germany in 1933 also our future? Having had nightmares about the brilliant dystopian TV soap opera Years and Years, which built like all the best of its kind on present fears, I wasn't expecting to be confronted so soon by another pertinent disaster drama. In a sequence of all too unforgettable theatrical images, Ivo van Hove finds the present and the future in the pith of Visconti's's discomfortingly luxurious 1969 fantasia about a family which turns into a 1930s House of Atreus under pressure from the newly ascendant Nazi party.Visconti's Italian title was La Read more ...
aleks.sierz
John Malkovich is back in town - and he's starring in the most controversial play of the year. Trouble is, it might well also be the worst. When the subject of veteran American playwright David Mamet's new drama was announced as being about a Hollywood mogul, who, like Harvey Weinstein, is accused of abusive behaviour there was a predictable outcry. How dare Mamet write about this? How dare a man write about sexual abuse? How dare fiction trespass on fact? Although the Garrick Theatre in the West End was besieged by autograph hunters rather than protesters at today's press night, twitter has Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Lev Dodin has been artistic director of the famed Maly Drama Theatre for some three and a half decades now, over which time the St Petersburg company has earned itself the highest of international reputations. London audiences have been fortunate to see a number of its recent achievements, with a season last year that brought us Uncle Vanya and Life & Fate, and they return now, for just 10 days, with Chekhov's Three Sisters (played in Russian, with excellent English-language surtitling). Dodin's production premiered on the company's home stage in October 2010, and nearly a decade of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A Broadway show as melodically haunting and sophisticated as it is niche, The Light in the Piazza has taken its own bittersweet time getting to London. A separate European premiere in 2009 at Leicester's Curve Theatre whetted the local appetite for a show that won six Tony Awards in 2005 but is far from standard musical fare. And here it finally is in the capital, albeit for 20 performances only in a full production, directed by Daniel Evans within the unexpected confines of the Royal Festival Hall. The concert setting grants pole position to Adam Guettel's score and to the distinguished, if Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Irish playwright Dylan Coburn Gray's new play won the Verity Bargate Award in 2017, and his reward is a fine production of this beautifully written account of one Dublin family over several decades. It is a light-touch epic which is partly a humorous account of ordinary people's daily lives, partly a meditation on time and partly a social history of changing attitudes to family, and to sex, over the years in Ireland. Coming to the Soho Theatre after opening at the Abbey in Dublin last month, it is a short poetic tribute to the nitty-gritty of quotidian living.Opening with a taxi driver, and a Read more ...
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 ...