Theatre
Marianka Swain
The band’s back together. Alfred Molina plays Rothko for the third time in Michael Grandage’s revisiting of John Logan’s richly textured two-hander, first seen at the Donmar in 2009 and then bypassing the West End for Broadway. Another excellent Alfred – Alfred Enoch, of the Harry Potter films and American TV series How to Get Away with Murder – succeeds Eddie Redmayne as Rothko’s assistant, forming a compelling duo in this 90-minute meditation on the nature, process and purpose of art.We’re in Rothko’s New York studio in the late 1950s, where he’s working on a major commission: grand murals Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Five years ago, when New York playwright Rajiv Joseph started on his fantasy disquisition on truth, lies and the recent history of Russia, no one was talking about a new Cold War and trump was still a thing you did in a game of cards. Now, at the British premiere of Describe the Night, a wall in the foyer is beaming an image of Vladimir Putin and a pronouncement he made earlier that day. Full marks to Hampstead Theatre for being on the button. Eleven out of 10 to the playwright for attempting to fill in the blanks about a world leader who now seems to bend truth for a living.Over 12 scenes Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Problem is Brighton is down in the Festival programme as an “alt-rock/pop pantomime”, with actors involved and the inference it’s some sort of musical featuring “instruments specially created by David Shrigley for the performance”. This turns out to be seriously over-selling it. In fact, Problem in Brighton is a rock band put together to play an hour of songs created in league with the maverick artist and Festival Guest Director. Putting any expectations aside, it’s a patchy show.The band – four men, two women – initially arrive on stage one by one, in regulation black cowboy shirts with Read more ...
Katie Colombus
They say that behind every successful man is a strong woman. The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk is as much – if not more so – the championing of the unsung hero in this story of the famous early modernist artist, Marc Chagall. His wife, Bella – early muse, sharer of world views and buckets of milk and mother of their daughter Ida, is paid tribute to, for her devotion and dedication to her husband's art.The birth of surrealism is played out on a small stage, made up of geometric shapes from the hyper-colour backdrop, wooden structure set and the angles at which the actors lean, holding onto ropes to Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Barney Norris is as prolific as he is talented. Barely out of his twenties, he has written a series of excellent plays – the award-winning Visitors, follow-ups Eventide and While We’re Here – as well as a couple of novels and lots of poetry. After collaborating in setting up a theatre company, Up in Arms, he now works as a prestigious resident playwright at Keble College, Oxford, and has still found time to write a study of the dramas of veteran playwright Peter Gill. Named as one of the 1000 most influential Londoners by the Evening Standard, his latest play, Nightfall, has just Read more ...
theartsdesk
Brighton Festival is the UK’s leading annual celebration of the arts, with events taking place in venues both familiar and unusual across Brighton & Hove for three weeks every May. This year, the Festival boasts an eclectic line-up spanning music, theatre, dance, visual art, film, comedy, debate and spoken word, with visual artist David Shrigley as Guest Director.Enter this competition by entering your details here for a chance to win a fantastic break for two over the closing weekend of Brighton Festival (Fri 25 – Sun 27 May).The prize package includes:A two-night stay at Sooty’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Yorkshire theatre company IOU have a tool in their armoury that most of their peers do not. It’s an open-topped bus with tiered seating, as pictured above, built in Halifax and the only one of its type, replete with headphone sets for every seat. It is at the heart of Rear View, their show which takes to the streets of Brighton and puts the participant right at the blurred connecting point between art and reality. It’s a unique experience.Rear View starts at a barge venue in Brighton Marina. The Marina is a gaudy, ugly place of clunky, mismatched modern buildings and tacky, American-style Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Writer Robert Schenkkan’s Building the Wall imagines modern America in the not-too-distant future. The date is 22nd November 2019 and following an attack on Times Square in which 17 people were killed, martial law has been imposed. Demands for illegal immigrants to be thrown out of the country have resulted in mass round ups and swollen detention centres. Hysteria stalks the country.We find ourselves in an interview room in El Paso prison, Texas. Rick (played by Trevor White) is a Trump-voting felon incarcerated in a surveilled solitary confinement cell. Gloria (played by Angela Griffin) is Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When an acquaintance heard my first review of the Brighton Festival was a circus event they snorted, “Oh dear.” It’s strange; for a couple of decades there’s been a default setting among broad swathes of otherwise artistically-inclined Boho sorts: that circus is embarrassing and naff. Think of all those sniping jokes about jugglers at festivals and circus skills workshops. It’s all rather bizarre, especially pondered in the post-performance glow of Wales-based collective NoFit State Circus’s fantastic new show Lexicon. It’s hard to see what could possibly be naff about the human body doing Read more ...
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 ...