Theatre
Rachel Halliburton
What do you gain by casting Dr Faustus and Mephistopheles as women? In the programme for this often illuminating production, director Pauline Randall declares, “There’s always a rather intimidating, institutional question of ‘why’ when it comes to these decisions, and especially when it comes to handling a classical text. Sometimes the right refute is 'why not?', and we’re choosing to respond to that more productive challenge.”Yet it doesn’t take long, when sitting in the candlelit intimacy of the Sam Wanamaker theatre, to work out how utterly apt it is to make a character who seeks forbidden Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Don't be deceived by Kit Harington's matted, slicked-back hair that is immediately visible the minute the audience enters the boisterous West End revival of True West. By the time the director Matthew Dunster's production has roared to a close two hours later, pretty much nothing is still intact, its leading man's locks included. That's as it should be with Sam Shepard's now-iconic 1980 play that I actually saw somewhat by chance during its world premiere engagement in San Francisco in 1980 and have returned to many times since. Now marking its commercial London debut (previous local Read more ...
Marianka Swain
There’s a welcome alternative to panto hijinks in this gem of a Trevor Nunn musical revival – more attuned to the biting hardships of winter, and to the elegiac aspect of change, than to festive jollies. Which is not to say that there isn’t rousing fun to be had in many a slick set-piece, but this intimate, sensitive staging brings out the work’s soul, particularly its timeless call for empathy and compassion.Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick drew on Sholem Aleichem’s stories for their 1964 musical, and it initially feels like a folk tale: that of Tevye the dairyman (Andy Nyman) Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Actor Ellie Kendrick is a familiar face on television, but it's only as a writer that she reveals the depth of her rage against the world. At least, that's what it feels like. After starring in the BBC's The Diary of Anne Frank while still at school, she's gone on to act in Game of Thrones, Vanity Fair and Mike Bartlett's Press, a BBC series where she played the junior reporter on the Guardian-style daily paper. But there's nothing junior about her debut play, whose title is the same as the name of Courtney Love's 1990s alternative rock band, and whose performance at the Royal Court is often Read more ...
Heather Neill
Forget the cloak in the puddle. Never mind potatoes and tobacco. The children's book cliché of Sir Walter Raleigh (or Ralegh as he seems to have preferred in an age of changeable spelling) represents little of the real man and is at best misleading. The cloak incident was a later invention and potatoes and tobacco were already known before Ralegh's adventures in the New World. He did, however, popularise the smoking of tobacco at court.Good-looking and courageous, Ralegh was a favourite of Queen Elizabeth. He fought with the Huguenots in France, helped quell rebellion in Ireland, attempted to Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In 2009 Sean Holmes, then Lyric Hammersmith's artistic director, made a bold move by reintroducing panto at the lovely Frank Matcham house after a long break. It was a box-office and critical hit, bringing in young audiences and celebrating the theatre's roots in the community while producing a quality but unstarry show. This year's offering, Dick Whittington, written by Jude Christian (who also directs) and Cariad Lloyd, remains true to the theatre's urban street style of storytelling.The story of Dick Whittington still feels relevant for London audiences; an out-of-towner comes to ye olde Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
This production of Tennessee Williams’ neglected classic, Summer and Smoke, arrives from the Almeida into the West End with five-star plaudits for its pitch-perfect performances and pressure-cooker intensity. In an ideal world, this should guarantee a high-octane evening – but the chemistry of a space counts for a lot in theatre – so there’s inevitably concern that a larger venue will dissipate some of the essential dramatic steam.It is a pleasure to be able to report, therefore, that Rebecca Frecknall’s boldly expressionist production – with its electrifying soundscape – galvanises the Read more ...
David Nice
Getting the look right is half the battle: in that, Peter Groom's one-time-Captain Marlene Dietrich is a winner from the start. The looks at the audience nail it too, heavy-lidded and lashed but transfixing, charismatic, winning instant complicity. As with all the best one-(wo)man cabaret-style shows, though, this is no mere impersonation. Groom has the mannerisms and the mostly soft-grained delivery, but he delivers the familiar songs in his own register, with a special intensity that helps to make this selective light shone on a great 20th-century figure ultimately elegiac.It isn't Groom's Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Macbeth has rarely seemed quite as metrosexual as in this gorgeous shadow-painted production that marks Globe artistic director Michelle Terry’s first production in the Sam Wanamaker theatre. Even in a play that walks the tightrope between its anti-hero’s fear and his ambition, it’s a daring, occasionally counterintuitive ploy – yet after a precarious start, it proves a rich and rewarding reading of one of Shakespeare’s more problematic texts.That’s down in no small part to the smouldering on-stage chemistry between Paul Ready’s empathetic, emotionally mercurial Macbeth and Terry herself Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The road to full musical theatre production has been a long one for Hadestown. It began back in 2006, with Anaïs Mitchell’s song cycle – a folk/jazz take on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth – toured around Vermont in a school bus, then grew into an ecstatically received concept album in 2010, and has gone through further development with director Rachel Chavkin in Off-Broadway and Canadian stagings. Now, it comes to the National ahead of a Broadway run.Whatever its past or future forms, Chavkin’s staging is a superb fit for the Olivier. Rachel Hauck’s spare, multi-level speakeasy set, which Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The West End is specialising in two-parters of late. To Imperium and The Inheritance we can add the latest duo of Harold Pinter one-acts that has opened in time to spread ripples of delight even as the nights draw in. "Delight", you may well ask – from this of all sombre and murky dramatists? To be sure, that more spectral Pinter is on view, too, at no point more memorably than when a bedridden Tamsin Greig wakes from a woundingly long sleep in A Kind of Alaska, with which Pinter Three (★★★★) – the superior of the two double-bills – concludes. But I'd be surprised if you Read more ...
Tim Cornwell
War Horse at the National Theatre on Sunday’s Armistice Day centenary: there were medalled veterans and at least one priest in the rows in front, dark suits and poppies all around, and scarcely a youngster in sight. When the bells rang out in a closing scene, the tolling was extended, and the veterans in the audience stood. Eleven years after the play-turned-phenomenon began its first run at the National, many of the original creative team were there for this return of the touring production. Sir Michael Morpurgo took the stage for an introduction. “It’s not the show that matters, it’s the Read more ...