Theatre
Heather Neill
It is 30 years since Shadowlands, William Nicholson's much-loved play about CS Lewis's unexpected love affair with Joy Gresham, an American poet, was first seen on stage. The famous academic and author of the Narnia books, apparently content in his male world of Oxford high tables and intellectual cut-and-thrust, was transformed by his meeting with Joy, a clever, outspoken fan of his theological writing. Their idyll was short-lived; within a few years she succumbed to cancer and Lewis was overwhelmed with grief. Originally written for television and subsequently filmed (with Anthony Hopkins Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The joint is jumpin’ at Southwark Playhouse, now hosting an irresistible Fats Waller-inspired, Manhattan-set musical revue (a co-production with Colchester’s Mercury Theatre, where it opened last month). Though originating in the Seventies, this sizzling show benefits from a fresh infusion of talent, with actor Tyrone Huntley making his directorial debut, and Strictly Come Dancing pro Oti Mabuse making hers as a musical theatre choreographer.Murray Horwitz and Richard Maltby, Jr. supply the book, but this early jukebox musical is blessedly free of a story awkwardly pegged to existing Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Nicôle Lecky’s one woman show Superhoe has added fire to the reputation of an already fast-rising actress and writer. Based around Sasha, a Plaistow girl who aspires to pop stardom, it’s a clear-eyed, very modern play, filled with its central character’s motor-mouthed bravado and examining the Instagram generation’s relationship with sexual objectification. It comes to the Brighton Festival in May.Raised in London, Lecky, 28, is of mixed British-Jamaican descent. Since training at the Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts she has gone on to appear in TV shows such as Death on Paradise, Fresh Meat Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Superstar Sally Field has come to town. With two academy awards and countless other accolades, the actor who played Forrest Gump's mother and dozens of other roles, from Frog to Mrs Lincoln, in Hollywood blockbusters and on television now returns to the stage to play a delusional and deceitful matriarch in Arthur Miller's All My Sons, part of the Old Vic's continuing tribute to the American playwright. She is joined on stage by Bill Pullman (Torchwood) and Jenna Coleman (Victoria) in a co-production with Headlong theatre company, directed by Jeremy Herrin.First staged in 1947, All My Sons is Read more ...
David Nice
While Bach's and Handel's Passions have been driving thousands to contemplate suffering, mortality and grace, this elegy for black lives lost over a century ago also chimes movingly with pre-Easter offerings. First seen in Southampton last year as a commission by 14-18-NOW marking the centenary of the First World War, it relives through song, dance and word the fate of the 618 men of the South African Native Labour Corps who drowned in the English channel when their ship, the SS Mendi, collided with a much larger vessel in thick fog.The very fact that few of us will not even have heard the Read more ...
Marianka Swain
For her swansong, departing Donmar Artistic Director Josie Rourke goes Swinging Sixties in this stylish but flawed revival of the Cy Coleman, Dorothy Fields and Neil Simon musical. From the numerous Andy Warhol homages to Charity’s silver minidress and the cigarette haze, it’s a period dream, but the production shimmers more than it grips.Anne-Marie Duff stars as the eternally hopeful New York taxi dancer, making a pittance at her “temporary job” at the Fandango Ballroom; she’s been there eight years. Too quick to trust, Charity has been let down by numerous boyfriends, but she finds a real Read more ...
aleks.sierz
About a year ago, director Rebecca Frecknall electrified this venue with an award-winning revival of Tennessee Williams's Summer and Smoke, rescuing the play from obscurity and showcasing the star qualities of actor Patsy Ferran. Now Frecknall and Ferran take on a much less obscure drama, Anton Chekhov's 1901 classic Three Sisters, which has been newly adapted by Cordelia Lynn, a young Royal Court playwright whose previous work includes the very impressive Lela & Co and One for Sorrow. But can this dream team adequately reveal the psychological richness of Chekhov’s masterpiece?Having Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Maggie Smith is not only a national treasure, but every casting director's go-to old bat. Now 84 years young, she is our favourite grande dame, or fantasy grandma. With an acting career of nearly 70 years, an instantly recognisable face and voice, and several shelves groaning with awards, she returns to the London stage for the first time in 12 years, tempted by Nicholas Hytner to perform a one-woman show at his high-profile Bridge Theatre. This time, the much-honoured Dame will be playing neither a dowager nor a professor, nor a Shakespearean heroine, but instead a real-life German secretary Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Theatre can give a voice to the voiceless – but at what cost? Abhishek Majumdar, who debuted at the Royal Court in 2013 with The Djinns of Eidgah – about the situation in Kashmir – returns with his latest play, Pah-La. Just as his debut was controversial, his new one is likewise politically sensitive. It is about Chinese oppression in Tibet, and its staging has been delayed for more than year due, says the playwright, to pressure from the Chinese authorities. Not only that, but the production process has been overshadowed by unhappiness about cultural appropriation since not a single Tibetan Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
A loo with fuschia-pink carpet to catch splashback; an Archbishop of Canterbury who’s in it for the skirts; a gobbing Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. A Jacobean theatre like the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse will have witnessed most extremes of human behaviour, but this soaringly irreverent, camper than tinsel, and – let’s face it - outrageously Eighties evening, takes it down alleys it’s never ventured before.It starts with a literal bang: heavenly music from above, a bit of a shriek, darkness, and then a man lying prone on the stage. The next thing we know, the Archbishop of Canterbury is Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“We don’t love you any less.” A natural sentiment to express to your child when you’re separating from your partner, but the very fact of saying it plants doubts in the child’s mind as to whether you really mean it. As the audience of Wilderness at the Hampstead Theatre Downstairs, a new play written by Kellie Smith and directed by Hampstead regular Anna Ledwich, we feel Alistair’s doubts and fears keenly – mostly because we are him.The story treads familiar territory as parents Joe (Finlay Robertson) and Anne (Natalie Klamar) try to stay amicable for Alistair’s sake, and inevitably Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Caryl Churchill is a phenomenal artist. Not only has she written a huge body of work, but each play differs in both form and content from the previous one, and she has continued to write with enormous creative zest and flair well into her maturity. Now in her 80th year, she can look over her shoulder at a back-catalogue which is stuffed full of contemporary classics, and a handful of masterpieces. Her 1982 play, Top Girls, finally getting a revival at this national flagship, is her masterpiece of masterpieces. Yes, it's that good. It proves, if proof were needed, that she is clearly the best Read more ...