Theatre
Liz Thomson
What to make of The Simon & Garfunkel Story, which began a week-long residency at London’s Vaudeville Theatre last night and which tours in the new year? A success “from Sydney to Seattle” apparently, with Elaine Paige having called it “amazing” and various regional newspapers offering superlatives. The programme proclaims it (with idiosyncratic use of upper case), "The World's biggest and most successful Simon & Garfunkel Theatre Show". Is there competition?The singing is pretty classy, Sam O’Hanlon as Simon and Charles Blyth as Garfunkel producing evocative close harmony, though Read more ...
Heather Neill
Robert Hastie is a little late for our meeting. Directing Shakespeare's darkest tragedy in London while also running Sheffield Theatres must sometimes cause a logjam of simultaneous demands, but whatever the morning's problem in the north of England, he remains smiling, relaxed, thoughtful and gracious during a break from rehearsals.Hastie (pictured below right © James Stewart) began as an actor. After reading English at Cambridge he won a scholarship to RADA, benefitting, he says, from a small window when the course led to a degree and there was still funding available. He was in the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Dramatic Exchanges is a dazzling array of correspondence, stretching over more than a century, between National Theatre people. It’s a chronologically arranged anthology that acts as a history of the institution, from its appearance as an idea around 1906, through its first incarnation at the Old Vic from 1963, then on to its continuing life as a three-theatre powerhouse on the South Bank today.We witness its remarkable talents hard at work, but also happily finding time to snipe, grumble, feud – and carry on; they do hurt feelings, paranoia and betrayed promises with élan, too. As editor Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Because of the #MeToo movement, and the revival of feminist protest, the theme of sisterhood now has a much stronger cultural presence than at the start of the decade. It seems to be a great time to be a female playwright, and Ifeyinwa Frederick's irreverently noisy, and often hilarious, debut play is proof that there is a lot of upcoming new talent waiting to make its mark. So it's great that the Hampstead Theatre, which under Edward Hall has had a very good record in staging work by first-time playwrights, is using its downstairs studio space to host her provocatively titled three-hander, Read more ...
Heather Neill
Don Quixote and his paunchy sidekick long ago escaped the pages of Miguel de Cervantes' novel. The image of the sad-faced knight on his bony nag Rocinante with his companion Sancho Panza atop his donkey are familiar in film, opera, paintings and everything from kitchen tiles to cartoons and furnishing fabric. The knight himself foretold their afterlife, predicting that his exploits would be memorialised in paintings and sculpture. These two - who never existed - may be the most recognisable Spaniards of all time.Cervantes' best-known work, credited as a fountainhead of Western fiction, is Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s clear from the start – from a Prologue that quickly dissolves familiar rhythms and words into a Babel of clamour and sound. This RSC Romeo and Juliet, newly transferred to the Barbican, isn’t much interested in what is said. Actions not words are what count in Erica Whyman’s swift, youthful staging – a production that dances on the balls of its feet like a boxer, always braced for attack, and ready to lunge in its turn. Do its dramatic blows land? Often they do, though it lacks the knock-out punch that really should floor you by the end.Tom Piper’s set is an unprepossessing thing. A Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s a story of a mad old man who imagines himself to be a knight errant. On his quests he sees virgins in prostitutes and castles in roadside inns. His adventures have spawned an adjective that describes delusional idealism, typified by the activity of tilting one’s lance and charging at windmills one has mistaken for an army of giants.For Milan Kundera, the modern era – “and with it the novel”, he adds – is born when Don Quixote rides forth on his nobbly nag Rocinante. The Adventures of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes was published in two parts, the first in 1605. By the time the second Read more ...
aleks.sierz
You can see why artistic director Indhu Rubasingham chose to stage this version of Zadie Smith's classic White Teeth as part of the Kiln's opening season. The bestselling 2000 debut novel is set in Willesden, Kilburn and thereabouts so it's a good fit for what is essentially a play that pays tribute to the area's multicultural character. Ironically, of course, the Kiln's previous incarnation, the Tricycle Theatre is mentioned in the book, and Canute-like protestors outside the venue continue to campaign in vain for the old name to be reinstated. But how does Stephen Sharkey's adaptation cope Read more ...
Matt Wolf
To the recent spate of shows that put their own narrative-building first, we can now add Still No Idea, with the addendum that this self-penned two-hander may be the funniest and fiercest of them all to date. Eight years ago, Lisa Hammond and Rachael Spence brought to the Young Vic their show No Idea; the starting point there was to throw open to the public a possible narrative for a theatre evening featuring one performer who is disabled (Hammond) and another who is not (Spence).Have prospects improved much in the interim? The title of this Royal Court-Improbable collaboration, written by Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Two countries; two histories. Being black in the US; being black in the UK. Compare and contrast. Which is exactly what debbie tucker green’s amazingly ambitious new epic, which straddles centuries and continents, succeeds in doing. Taking a forensic look at what it means to be at the sharp end when you are Black British or African American, the show has a thrillingly unexpected theatre form and is written in green’s distinctive style of reiterative and repetitive punchy dialogues, which here are both emotionally passionate and imaginatively modernistic. Covering both contemporary experience Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Adultery seldom looks less adult than in the form of the mild-life crisis – that much-satirised condition in which desire is eclipsed by delusion, wisdom by foolishness, and sensible coats by leather jackets. Joanna Murray-Smith’s scalpel-sharp drama – first performed in Australia in 1995 (and acted here at the National Theatre in 2003 with Corin Redgrave and Eileen Atkins in the starring roles), now revived at the Park Theatre - triumphs because it anatomises marital breakdown with a cold-eyed clarity that goes beyond cliché to ask profound questions about the meaning of love decades after Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Here's a good pub quiz question: after Shakespeare, who was the most performed playwright in America last year? Arthur Miller? Tennessee Williams? David Mamet? None of those. It was Lauren Gunderson, and here is the UK premiere of her intimate two-hander Young Adult play, I and You, which is directed by Edward Hall and has two striking stage debuts.We are in a teenage bedroom – messy, with lots of pinks, fairy lights and glitter. There's a slightly claustrophobic air about it which makes sense when we learn that its occupant, Caroline (Maisie Williams, Arya Stark in Game of Thrones), is all Read more ...