Theatre
aleks.sierz
Holy shit! After being closed for two long years, the old and battered Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn has been refurbished and relaunched, with a name change and £5.5 million-worth of improvements. It’s now a much more welcoming place, full of light at the front and with an on-street café, as well as easy access to the new plush seats and excellent sightlines. Although some patrons have grumbled that the name change is a betrayal of past achievements, Indhu Rubasingham, the artistic director, has created a much more hipster-friendly, much more middle-class venue than the previous community hive. Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
There's a clear theme running through this year's autumn programme at the Southwark Playhouse: new musicals with strong feminist roots. Wasted, centred on the Bronte siblings, is landing later this month, but first there's Unexpected Joy, written by Bill Russell and composed by Janet Hood, and directed by Amy Anders Corcoran. First seen Off Broadway, this is a solid, dependable sort of show that doesn't justify the first word of its title.The eponymous Joy (Janet Fullerlove) is a hippy musician straight out of the '60s, wafting about the stage in kaftans and shawls ( Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Underground Railroad Game is scabrous theatre – in every sense. To start with, Jennifer Kidwell and Scott R Sheppard’s two-hander is as down and dirty as anything you’ll find on the London stage at the moment, with one sex scene that’s belly laugh-out-loud funny, another which creates a silence of unease that chills the house.But it’s scabrous in the original sense, too, about a wound that doesn’t heal, the scab that has formed over it only precarious protection against the original hurt. That hurt, of course, is slavery, the legacy of which simply has not gone away for America, even a Read more ...
Heather Neill
The title of Tony Harrison's teacherly entertainment – it can't be called a play – refers to the square bullets invented by James Puckle to kill Muslims in the 18th century. This shocking morsel of information is provided by the brothers Hiram and Hudson Maxim, inventors respectively of the machine gun and smokeless gunpowder, who are two of the characters in Square Rounds.That apparent oxymoron might also imply attempts to square impossible circles, to the irony of scientific curiosity so frequently leading simultaneously to beneficial and destructive ends. Hiram Maxim (played energetically Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Transatlantic theatrical traffic is busier than ever, and now here at the Hampstead is not just Stephen Karam’s Tony-winning play, first seen in 2015, but director Joe Mantello and his full Broadway cast. It seems fitting that they should travel together, since Karam’s work is so dependent upon a company – as they do here – capturing the intricate rhythms of family, until the rich naturalism begins to convey something profound.It’s Thanksgiving, and three generations of Blakes have assembled to bless the new Manhattan apartment of younger daughter Brigid (Sarah Steele) and her boyfriend – not Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Lycra, jealousy and pubescent ambition are put under the spotlight in Clare Barron’s provocative probe into the American competitive dancing scene. Dance Nation is a tarantella through the convulsions of the teen psyche as its characters respond to the psychological and physical pressures of ambitious parents circling like piranhas, and a dance teacher (Pat) with a dictator complex."This is the future! I am making the future!! We’re gonna make those judges feel something in their cold, dead, pernicious hearts!" Pat bellows early on. Like brainwashed cult devotees his 13-year-old pupils jerk Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
If ever there was a play of “well bandied” words, it’s surely Love’s Labour’s Lost. The early Shakespearean comedy may once have hit a highpoint for verbal wit, but much of that context – the word play, the allusions, the sheer stylistic preening that must have had a certain in-joke quality for its initial courtly audience – has rather evaporated over the centuries.So it’s to the credit of Nick Bagnall’s new production that the Playhouse audience clearly comes away on an upbeat note. And that’s despite that perplexing final scene, one that disrupts the traditional marriage ending (“our wooing Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Theatre for children can often be dismissed – a box to tick for parents who want to keep up with cultural practices; a job for actors who haven't quite made it in the mainstream; theatre that mums and dads want to see that works for their little ones, too.It's actually quite rare to find theatre that works purely for children – something that excites, inspires and invigorates on their level without worrying too much about the olds. But at bOing! International Family Festival, contemporary dance, conceptual theatre, live art installations, classical and modern music, film and storytelling Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Asked to nominate the most important playwright in America since the war, theatregoers would probably plump for Arthur Miller, Edward Albee or David Mamet. But in terms of sheer popularity there is another candidate. Neil Simon’s wiseacre comedies, many of them set in New York Jewish milieu into which he was born in 1927, were immensely popular from the off. His debut Come Blow Your Horn in 1960 ran on Broadway for nearly 700 performances.A child of the Depression who came of age at the end of the Second World War, he started out in radio and television writing gags for Phil Silvers and Sid Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
A break-dancing mini Michael Jackson, a transvestite Neptune, and a hero who wears his hubris as proudly as his gold-tipped trainers, are unconventional even by Shakespeare’s standards, but they all play a key part in this joyful act of subversion. Emily Lim’s bold production – which marks the first time a community cast (of more than 200 everyday Londoners) appears on stage at the National – celebrates multicultural diversity with a zing that makes you want to dance in the aisles.Lim and the play’s adaptor Chris Bush have added to their immense challenge by taking on Pericles, a flawed work Read more ...
David Kettle
Home ★★★★ Philadelphia-based theatre artist Geoff Sobelle has scored highly with two previous Edinburgh Fringe shows. Flesh and Blood & Fish and Fowl, way back in 2010, imagined the natural world wreaking ruthless vengeance on the mundanity of modern business in bizarre visual spectacles, while the smaller-scale The Object Lesson in 2014 was a more reflective work on objects and memory, with a jaw-dropping magic trick as its poignant conclusion.Home is Sobelle’s debut at the International Festival, and his most ambitious Edinburgh offering to date, presenting Read more ...
Hannah Greenstreet
Dear RashDash,I know you don’t like critics because Abbi read out a lot of reviews of famous Chekhov productions very fast, wearing a ruff and sequined hot pants. But I promise I won’t rate you out of five or patronise you with a gold star or give you a quotable soundbite to put on your posters. Even though I know you got four stars from The Times and the Guardian and the Stage because it says so on the back of the play text, which I bought because I had to take a piece of the show away with me.I’m not going to write what happens because nothing happens in Chekhov and by getting rid of the Read more ...