Theatre
aleks.sierz
There was once a time when grime music was very angry, and very threatening, but that seems a long time ago now. Today, Dizzee Rascal is less a herald of riot and revolt, and more of a national treasure, exuding charm from every pore, even if his music has become increasing predictable and safe. But, as wordsmith and dancer Debris Stevenson proves in her debut play, Poet in da Corner, Dizzee Rascal still can change minds and influence people. Now on the Royal Court's main stage, the electrifying semi-autobiographical show features Stevenson herself, as well as grime MC Jammz and music by Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The end-of-season contemporary writing slot at the Globe must be a proposal as full of promise for playwrights as it is perhaps intimidating. There’s the sheer scale of the space and the chance to write for a large cast; a historical subject seems to be part of the brief, so a chance to experiment for many writers, while despite a run that’s rarely more than a dozen performances, it brings an investment in rehearsal time and other support that commercial theatre couldn’t offer.The challenge, of course, is living up to the rest of the repertoire, as well as finding material that somehow also Read more ...
mark.kidel
Henry V is a play shot through with martial energy and the terrible chaos of war. The almost overpowering violence and energy that characterise the story give the unfolding of the drama a permanently disrupted form, as if the unpredictability of history and the reality of bloodthirsty men going berserk on the field of battle had undermined Shakespeare’s usual formal strengths.Elizabeth Freestone’s very lively and intelligent modern-dress production for Shakespeare at Tobacco Factory, which has moved to the company’s home stage in Bristol, struggles at times with the play’s disjointed nature Read more ...
James Graham
Thank you. It’s an honour to have been asked to speak here today. Although looking at the h100 List this year, I’ve no idea why I’m presumptuously standing here; given the talent, creativity and achievements far surpassing my own within this room. But I’m also excited, and genuinely inspired, to be part of such a group.I don’t know about you, but I find working in the arts often seriously discombobulating in either being a far-too-lonely and private endeavour one minute; an overwhelming public and intensely populated one the next.Those days where the only human contact you have is with the Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
As the Syrian conflict enters its final convulsions, renewing memories of how the Sykes-Picot agreement – between an Englishman and a Frenchman – would cause more than a century of political resentment in the Arab world, The Outsider seems particularly piquant. Yet Ben Okri’s beautifully measured adaptation of Camus’s piece of existential provocation – in which a man who doesn’t weep at his mother’s death then shoots an Arab – also derives power from the restraint with which it explores its troubling questions.We begin on a tone of a dark comedy as Sam Frenchum’s mesmerising Meursault begins Read more ...
Marianka Swain
This London premiere of Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keefe’s 2010 musical (based on Daniel Waters’ oh-so-Eighties cult classic movie, starring Christian Slater and Winona Ryder) had a development period at The Other Palace – no critics allowed – before cruising into the West End with a cult following already in place. A winning strategy, as it turns out, resulting in adoring audiences cheering on a show that’s largely worthy of their adulation.Veronica (Carrie Hope Fletcher, pictured below with Jamie Muscato) decides to strategically befriend it girls the Heathers (Sophie Isaacs and T’ Read more ...
Anil Gupta and Richard Pinto
Back in June 2017, in the days when English summertime was a lazy idyll rather than an apocalyptic inferno, RSC artistic director Greg Doran met us at his office in Stratford-upon-Avon and asked whether we wanted to write a new version of Molière’s Tartuffe. For a couple of hack TV sitcom writers, Stratford was a culture shock. We’re used to grubby Soho offices on streets strewn with chewing gum and diseased pigeons, with dried-out Pret a Manger sandwiches for lunch. Here, at the home of the Bard, there were half-timbered houses, meandering rivers and actual swans – a dizzyingly Read more ...
Katherine Waters
It’s night, and the woman (Leanne Best) is waiting for a phone call. She’s desperate for the voice of her lover – or rather ex-lover: they split three nights ago. Both have secrets they will disclose over the course of their final conversation. Both have positions to defend. The scene is set for a coupling of melodrama and banality. In Daniel Raggett’s version of Jean Cocteau’s La Voix Humaine, everything is somehow generic – grief included.Sarah Beaton’s set reeks of suburban claustrophobia and the woman on stage is nothing special either. She’s in her pyjamas on the sofa, hair Read more ...
David Kettle
Of the Edinburgh International Festival’s three productions by 2018’s resident company, Paris’s Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, The Prisoner is the most gnomic, the most baffling, and, frankly, the most disappointing. Which is a great shame, of course, because it is also the one possibly most hotly anticipated, being co-written and co-directed by the Bouffes du Nord’s guiding light across several decades: the legendary elder statesman of the theatre Peter Brook who, astonishingly, is 93.We’re in an unnamed foreign land – judging by the sun-scorched trees, dusty rocks and heat- Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Director Madani Younis, who since 2011 has transformed the Bush Theatre in West London into one of London's most outstanding Off-West End venues, is leaving in December, on his way to becoming the creative director of the Southbank Centre. For his last show at the Bush, he has chosen a project close to his heart, Vinay Patel’s An Adventure, an epic reading of one Asian family’s global migration story. It’s a typically ambitious choice, a beguiling tragi-comedy whose narrative is original and which, more importantly, makes its political points deftly and unobtrusively, using a three-part Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A sizeable Off West End success nearly eight years ago looks more than a little exposed in a new, scaled-up production that is one of several shows on now, or imminently, to feature a Game of Thrones actor in a leading role. The particular TV name in this instance is Iwan Rheon, an Olivier Award-winner back in 2010 for the musical Spring Awakening seen here to be rather dramatically changing gears in Dawn King's lumbering dystopian parable about, well, more or less whatever you want it to be about. There's more than a hint of Brexit and the American law enforcement agency ICE in King's Read more ...
Jeanie O'Hare
I admit it took me a while to give myself permission to do this project. We English are very squeamish about altering Shakespeare. Our cousins in Germany thrive on radical undoings of our scared son, but we cross our arms and say no. I started thinking about making this play when I was at the RSC ten years ago. Queen Margaret, aka Margaret of Anjou and wife to Henry VI, thumped me in the heart as I watched Katy Stephens's peformance in Michael Boyd's History Cycle (the three Henry VI plays and Richard III). She then nagged at me every day as I nodded to the enormous photo of Peggy Read more ...