Theatre
alexandra.coghlan
Across London last night politicians waited anxiously to hear their fates, and things were no different at the Vaudeville Theatre, where the ongoing Oscar Wilde season took a topical turn with An Ideal Husband.Colliding drawing-room comedy and Victorian melodrama, the play is at worst uneven, but at best it has a violence that sets the bone china rattling. The stakes of this political satire are real and high, only further raised by the knowledge that Wilde’s own society idyll was about to be shattered. Before the play’s original run had ended he was arrested, trading rubbers of bridge and Read more ...
Neil Bartlett
Director, playwright and novelist Neil Bartlett has been making theatre and causing trouble since the 1980s. He made his name with a series of controversial stark naked performances staged in clubs and warehouses, then went on to become the groundbreaking Artistic Director of the Lyric Hammersmith in London in 1994. Since leaving the Lyric in 2005, he’s worked with collaborators as different as the National, Duckie, the Bristol Old Vic, Artangel, and the Edinburgh International Festival. Four of his previous Brighton Festival shows have been at the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Joe Penhall and the music biz? Well, they have history. When he was writing the book for Sunny Afternoon, his 2014 hit musical about the Kinks, he had a few run-ins with Ray Davies, the band’s lead singer. A couple of years ago The Stage newspaper quoted Penhall as saying that his initial “bromance” with Davies had “rotted into a cancerous feud”, and that the singer had wanted a writing credit for Penhall’s work. The pair have since patched up their differences, but the emotional fuel of this conflict powers Penhall’s latest play, whose production at the Old Vic gets a shot in the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Its origins as a concept album cling stubbornly to Chess, the Tim Rice collaboration with the male members of ABBA first seen on the West End in 1986 and extensively retooled since then in an ongoing quest to hit the elusive jackpot. Following hot on the heels of a (separate) Washington DC revival earlier this year, Laurence Connor's projection-heavy production, presented in commercial collaboration with the ENO, reminds one of the soaring power of this famously lush score even as one wonders whether the story appended to it will ever fully land. In some ways, Connor's approach here Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The good news about so-called black drama on British stages is that it has broken out of its gangland violence ghetto and now talks about a whole variety of other subjects. Like loss. Like death. Like mourning. So London-born actress Natasha Gordon’s warmhearted play, Nine Night, now making its first appearance at the National Theatre, is as much about family, music and mourning as it is about ethnicity or migration. Inspired by the ritual of Jamaican funerals, the play looks at grieving and tradition.Set in the London home of Gloria, who is dying of cancer, this rather traditional family Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Forget write what you know: writing what you feel would seem to be the impetus driving Ella Hickson's often-startling The Writer, a broadside from the trenches that takes no prisoners, least of all the audience. Demanding and sometimes irritating, the play exerts a brute force across nearly two hours (no interval) thanks to a galvanic performance from Romola Garai and an impassioned production from Blanche McIntyre that powers through remarks like "you are not skewed toward a systemic awareness" (!). If comparable talk of "intersectionality and voicelessness" leaves you numb, The Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Gob Squad is a “seven-headed” Anglo-German arts collective who specialise in multimedia performance. Beginning in Nottingham in 1994 and now based in Berlin, their work ranges from site-specific to installation and film but, more recently, mainly theatre. They major in using technology to “make connections with places outside the theatre or to create different spaces inside the theatre where we can talk to the audience in quite intimate ways”. Recent works include War and Peace and My Square Lady. For the Brighton Festival they're presenting Gob Squad’s Creation (Pictures for Dorian), based Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Rodney Ackland must be the most well-known forgotten man in postwar British theatre. His legend goes like this: Absolute Hell was originally titled The Pink Room, and first staged in 1952 at the Lyric Hammersmith, where it got a critical mauling. The Sunday Times’s Harold Hobson said that the audience “had the impression of being present, if not at the death of talent, at least at its very serious illness”. Hurt by such criticism, Ackland fell silent for almost four decades. Then, as he struggled against leukemia in the 1980s, he rewrote the play. Produced by the Orange Tree Theatre in 1988, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Anthony Neilson has always been fascinated by sex. I mean, who isn’t? But he has made it a central part of his career. In his bad-boy in-yer-face phase, from the early 1990s to about the mid-2000s, he pioneered a type of theatre that talked explicitly about sex and sexuality. I remember watching his searing and provocative plays, such as Penetrator (1993), The Censor (1997) and Stitching (2002), with my heart in my mouth, and my legs crossed. The content was explicit, emotionally grounded and rarely heard in public. Since then, the playwright has diversified his output, but his new Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A much tinkered-with show needs to go back to the drawing board, if this latest iteration of Strictly Ballroom: The Musical is any gauge. Having travelled across Sydney, Leeds, and Toronto on its extensively revised way to the West End, director-choreographer Drew McOnie's musical adaptation of Baz Luhrmann's enjoyably whacked-out film emerges as an overextended and bloated cartoon.Sure, the dancing grabs the attention now and again, as one might expect, and Zizi Strallen steps up to the plate as a genuinely charming female lead. But the forced grins on the cast's faces are likely to be met Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A one-time Martha and Maggie the Cat in the theatre, and a screen siren of the sort they don't make any more, might not be the first person you expect to see swaggering on to a London stage in a dark pantsuit ready to offer up two hours of song and chat. Can it really be Kathleen Turner – yes, that Kathleen Turner, whose credits range from Jessica Rabbit to Mrs Robinson in The Graduate – who is currently refashioning the American songbook to suit her own take-no-prisoners bravura, all the while revealing a capacious heart? The fact is that Turner, to her eternal credit, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Conflict and comedy can be unpredictable bedfellows, and Chicago playwright Joel Drake Johnson’s 2014 play occasionally risks overstretching itself in its attempts to reconcile the two – although its immediate context, the world of office politics, has a rich history of showing humanity at its worst, and such ghastliness can be painfully funny. At the same time Johnson explores a much more profound strand of social unease, the echt-American issue that is racism, the depths and ramifications of which sometimes sit uneasily with some of the surrounding elements of Rasheeda Speaking.But if there Read more ...