Theatre
David Nice
Its roots are in an emotional truth: Matthew Lopez saw the film, then read the book, of Howards End when he was 15 and 11 years later came across Maurice. He joined the dots between an apparent period-piece offering timeless wisdom about the human condition and the gayness he found he had in common with EM Forster. Lopez's epic two-parter The Inheritance is best when it brings the connection directly to light, dramatiSing the playwright's dialogue with his beloved author, but given the predictability of parallel lives in the characters of Forster's Margaret Schlegel and Lopez's Eric Glass, Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The playwright Bathsheba Doran has blazed a stellar trail ever since graduating from Cambridge at the same time as David Mitchell and Robert Webb. After writing for them on the sketch show Bruiser, she earned her spurs as a comedy writer on Smack the Pony, won a Fulbright Scholarship, and eventually became a playwriting fellow at the Juilliard School.The fact that she has subsequently been festooned with prizes for playwriting as well as being award-nominated for her work on the Martin Scorsese-produced HBO series Boardwalk Empire means hopes are high as you descend into the charmingly Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If you're going to write a play that traffics in bafflement, it's not a bad idea to have on hand one of the most beady-eyed actresses around. That would be Dame Eileen Atkins, whose keen-eyed intelligence cuts a swathe through the deliberate obfuscations of The Height of the Storm, the latest from the ever-prolific Frenchman, Florian Zeller. More than any of his previous works, the fractured storytelling at work here adds up to an elaborate puzzle that is sure to leave audiences debating over post-show drinks what the hell actually happened. Such discussions need not be rushed, by the way, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Whatever you might think about Brexit, the dreaded B word, the current climate certainly seems to be reinvigorating both feminist playwrights and political playwrights. So welcome back, David Hare, the go-to dramatist for any artistic director wanting to stage a contemporary state-of-the-nation play. His latest, with the rather downbeat title of I'm Not Running, opened at the National Theatre, but it may be a disappointment to anyone looking for answers to burning current questions because it is more concerned with an imaginary female contender for the Labour leadership than with Brexit, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What better way to celebrate a homecoming than with a party? That is the capacious-hearted thinking behind this new musical version of Twelfth Night, which additionally marks Kwame Kwei-Armah's debut production at the helm of that undeniable dynamo otherwise known as the Young Vic. Resident of late Stateside where he was running Baltimore's Center Stage, Kwei-Armah has posited as his opening production a show that celebrates London in a giddy spirit of inclusion that seems a necessary antidote to our mean-spirited times.And if Kwei-Armah's production, credited to him and the powerhouse Read more ...
aleks.sierz
There are not that many plays about sport, but, whether you gamble on results or not, you can bet that most of them are about boxing. And often set in the past. Joy Wilkinson's superb new drama, The Sweet Science of Bruising, comes to the Southwark Playhouse, a venue which regularly punches above its weight (sorry!), armed with a beautifully evocative title and plenty of theatrical energy. It is also tells a story that is both original and affecting, about the Victorian subculture of female boxing. So hold tight, leave your squeamish side at home, and roll up to the ring to watch the Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It sounds like a marriage made in heaven. Charles Dickens and James Graham – both great chroniclers of the ambitions, hypocrisies, and eccentricities of their respective ages – have been brought together to tell London’s story through irreverent portraits of its high life and low life. This modern Sketches by Boz reboots the Victorian original to embrace computer hackers, a Syrian asylum seeker, and mock conceptual artists among others. The result is a lively, structurally ambitious work that somehow fails to add up to the sum of its potentially fascinating parts.Graham – who has Read more ...
aleks.sierz
We do love our spy stories, don't we? The idea of betrayal, both political and personal, seems to be a strong part of our national identity. And so is telling stories based on real events. Playwright Hugh Whitemore, who died in July, based his Pack of Lies on the Portland spy ring, a secret Soviet operation which was active from the late 1950s until 1961. This new production at Menier Chocolate Factory is the first London revival since it premiered at the West End's Lyric Theatre in 1983, starring husband and wife team Judi Dench and Michael Williams, for which Dench got an Olivier Award. Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
"I’m not a number, I’m not a grade, and I’m not a failure." The 17-year-old girl stands in front of the small class, who gaze at her goggle-eyed. "A robot factory. That’s all you’ve got here." The teacher’s response is caustically admiring. "Why are you here, Alisha, if that’s what you’re capable of? Why didn’t you do that last year?" This is the school - not so much of hard knocks as of tough skins – for those who have been treated badly by the world, and have a strong suspicion that things won’t get much better. Richard Molloy’s Every Day I Make Greatness Happen in Hampstead Theatre's Read more ...
Heather Neill
Ten years after Harold Pinter's death, Jamie Lloyd has set about honouring the 20th century's outstanding British playwright in an ambitious West End season of his shorter works at the theatre which now bears his name. Lloyd, already recognised as a skilled Pinter interpreter, has grouped the 20 pieces into seven programmes and attracted a starry array of actors to the project. Still to come are the likes of Tamsin Greig, Martin Freeman, Penelope Wilton, Mark Rylance, Janie Dee, Rupert Graves, Danny Dyer, Jane Horrocks and Celia Imrie.Pinter 1 and Pinter 2 are already launched, featuring Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You always wonder about those final scenes of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Are they really needed dramatically; do they work? We understand, of course, that a closing exhalation may add impact to high passions just witnessed. But is it just a romantic idea that tragedy might be better ending with the real bang of (multiple) death, rather than the relative whimper of a new order being established?In his new Antony and Cleopatra, Simon Godwin gives us a double whammy, playing the final scene – the closing tableau, at least, with its pronouncements over the dead heroine – as prelude to the action as Read more ...
David Kettle
“Well, that was really sweet,” one young audience member in front of me remarked on his way out of Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre. And yes, there’s no denying that director Wils Wilson’s colourful, psychedelic, summer-of-love-set Twelfth Night, the Lyceum’s season opener in a co-production with the Bristol Old Vic, is warm and generous, lovingly crafted, and – yes, touchingly sweet.More interestingly, perhaps, it’s enjoyably playful – and gently provocative, too – in its approach to gender. Shakespeare’s original sets the gender-fluid tone – with Duke Orsino falling for the aloof, recently Read more ...