Theatre
theartsdesk
Are you a young blogger, vlogger or writer in the field of the arts, books and culture? If so, we've a competition for you to enter.The Hospital Club’s annual h Club100 awards celebrate the most influential and innovative people working in the UK’s creative industries, with nominations from the worlds of film and fashion, art, advertising, theatre, music, television and more. For the second year running they are teaming up with theartsdesk – the home of online arts journalism in the UK – to launch a hunt for young talent.This year the Special Award is for theartsdesk / h Club Young Influencer Read more ...
David Nice
Who would have thought, when Phyllida Lloyd's Donmar Julius Caesar opened to justified fanfare, that two more Shakespeare masterpieces would be sustained no less powerfully within the women's-prison context over the following years? Faced with the "which of the three did you like best?" question – and I saw them all on a single day at the King's Cross makeshift theatre – the answer would have to be "each one at the time I saw it". So it's good to relive the first as screened on BBC Four – Henry IV and The Tempest are already available on the BBC iPlayer – which is as compelling, keenly paced Read more ...
Owen Richards
Despite the Welsh repute for singing, the Festival of Voice in Cardiff has always been more than just music. Indeed, on the Friday evening, Welsh/Cornish pop enigma Gwenno was appearing alongside the gloriously titled one woman show Lovecraft (Not the Sex Shop in Cardiff) and English, an interactive theatre experience on language in Britain.An apt subject for its audience, judging by the conversations flowing as we waited in the forgivable summer dusk. There’s a curiosity on the show’s content, with vague promises on building a contemporary Babel. English is a co-production between National Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Anna Deavere Smith contains multitudes. As the solo performance artist recounts the testimonies she has selected from the more than 250 people she interviewed for this portrait of inequality and the criminal justice system in America, it is as if each person she has talked to possesses her. For each separate account, the rhythms of her body change, her centre of gravity seems to shift, and the cadences of her voice are are distinctly different as if each speech were a piece of music; the play has arrived at the Royal Court as part of this year's LIFT. Yet even as each performance Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Lia Williams can be said to have been in her prime ever since the double-whammy several decades ago when she appeared onstage in fairly quick succession in Oleanna and then the original, and unsurpassable, production of Skylight. But she's rarely had the spotlight afforded her by Polly Findlay's altogether terrific reclamation for the Donmar Warehouse of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which tethers a familiar Muriel Spark title to a newly scalding adaptation by David Harrower (supplanting the Jay Presson Allen one of old). And whether sensual or severe, in full emotive flight or Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The American playwright/journalist Sophie Treadwell's 1928 expressionist drama crops up every so often in order to allow a director to leave his or her signature upon it, so the first thing to be said about Natalie Abrahami's Almeida Theatre revival of Machinal is that it puts the play and not the production first.Whether that is entirely beneficial is open for debate, given the jagged, staccato nature of writing that amounts to a sequence of extended snapshots from an Everywoman's descent into a gathering darkness that by play's end has all but swallowed her whole. Viewed up close, as it Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Forget about dark alleys, deserted parks and slippery slopes: the most dangerous place in the world is likely to be your family. That’s where the traps are, the minefields and the surprise betrayals. As its title suggests, Torben Betts’s new comedy is all about failing marriages and imploding families. The focus is on a celebrity chef, but does Betts have anything new to say about the state of our emotional nation, or is this just another rehash of the same old ingredients? After a national tour, Monogamy comes to the Park Theatre – and boasts Janie Dee and Charlie Brooks in its cast.The Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
In an era marked by virtue-signalling, it's perhaps no surprise that Isabelle Huppert – a woman who has always gone against the grain – has opted for a little vice-signalling. Unlike other French screen icons, she is not part of the female cohort that railed against the #MeToo movement, yet she has defined herself through roles mired in moral ambiguity, not least as the video games executive who seeks revenge on her rapist in Elle (pictured below). To therefore pair Huppert with her infamously lubricious countryman, the Marquis de Sade, seems like a marriage happily forged in the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It seems appropriate that an onstage blender features amidst Tom Scutt's sleek, streamlined set for Julie given how many times Strindberg's 1888 play has been put through the artistic magimix. Rarely, however, have the results been less illuminating than in this National Theatre rewrite by Polly Stenham that replaces Strindberg's charged three-hander with a lazy recap of themes and situations Stenham has explored to far more rending effect elsewhere. Running shy of 90 minutes, Carrie Cracknell's production nonetheless feels as if it is struggling to fill time, due in no small measure to Read more ...
Katherine Waters
One space, one person, one story, one voice – the monologue is theatre distilled, the purest form of entertainment. On a stage of packing boxes and boards, over the course of just over an hour, Paterson Joseph relays and plays the life of Charles Ignatius Sancho, the first British man of African origin to vote.As befits any good piece of bombast set in the 18th century, The Author opens Act One. In actual fact, the author is Paterson Joseph himself, who, having written himself, performs himself – a fictionalised, larger-than-life, theatrical simulacrum. He explains, “Politics wasn’t Read more ...
David Benedict
In Harold Pinter’s memory play Old Times, one of the women declares, “There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.” Elizabeth Strout’s heroine in My Name Is Lucy Barton is in the reverse position. When it comes to the difficult childhood she has long since escaped, she’s uncertain of what she can – or wants to – remember, yet she is anything but the standard issue unreliable narrator. In Richard Eyre’s flawless production at the Bridge Theatre, Strout’s writing, as adapted by Rona Munro and performed by a luminous Laura Linney, pulls off the considerable trick Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Two dynamite lead performances and the chance to savour an underappreciated score give genuine charge to The Rink, a decades-old Broadway flop that feels reborn for Southwark Playhouse. A short-lived star vehicle for Chita Rivera (who won a 1984 Tony for it) and Liza Minnelli, the musical more than survives the scaled-back if entirely impassioned approach of director Adam Lenson. It's also a great showcase for an inspired creative team - choreographer Fabian Aloise and a punchy powerhouse of a band led by musical director Joe Bunker. Stripped ot its starry sheen, one Read more ...