Theatre
David Nice
"What could be more serious than married life?" asked Richard Strauss, whose operas became a surprising pillar of Glyndebourne's repertoire some time after the early days dramatised in David Hare's play. "Honour" might have been the answer of conductor Fritz Busch, who unlike Strauss never made accommodations with the Nazi regime. The two ingredients, personal devotion and public integrity, are interlaced with surprising shafts of depth as well as elegance in the artistic context of The Moderate Soprano. This reviewer certainly didn't leave the Duke of York's Theatre at the end of Jeremy Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Chicago has been on, in one form or another, for a very long time. The original Broadway production in the Seventies ran for 936 performances; the 1997 London revival was the longest-running American musical in West End history; and it feels like Cuba Gooding Jr’s face has been grinning out from escalator video screens on the tube for an age. This revival at the Phoenix Theatre is uneven, but eventually finds its groove and packs a real punch of a finale.The story, as usual with this kind of musical, is somewhat thin: wannabe vaudeville star Roxie Hart (Sarah Soetart) shoots her lover dead Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You could be forgiven for not remembering the “coughing major” brouhaha in 2001, coming as it did the day before 9/11, when we had rather more pressing matters to attend to than a contestant being accused of cheating on television quiz show. But playwright James Graham has mined an entertaining confection from the affair and its subsequent court case in 2003.The matter concerns Charles Ingram (Gavin Spokes) a British Army major who appeared on a show never explicitly named in Quiz but which we know to be Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, presented in the UK by Chris Tarrant and an Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Seth Kriebel, 45, is a performer, much of whose work involves audience participation. He is bringing the show A House Repeated to the Brighton Festival 2018 between 6th and 11th May. Of American origin, born and raised near Philadelphia, Kriebel moved to the UK in 2001 and, over the last few years, has achieved increasing profile and success with shows such as Beowulf, The Unbuilt Room and We This Way.THOMAS H GREEN: Was your background in the States arts-orientated?SETH KRIEBEL: This is always difficult to try and contextualise for a British audience. Where I’m from is roughly equivalent to Read more ...
Heather Neill
Even in its successful early days Wycherley’s 1675 comedy was notorious, but it was considered too lewd to be staged at all between the mid-Eighteenth Century and 1924. Although the play has found an affectionate place in the canon in more recent times, it makes a kind of sense to transpose the goings on of louche Restoration aristocrats to the era of the Bright Young Things, the time of its rediscovery. And the theme of the role of women, their desires and frustrations, has a continuing up-to-date resonance which adaptors Morphic Graffiti (director Luke Fredericks and designer Stewart Read more ...
aleks.sierz
There are few things more British than talking about the weather. What makes this play about a meteorologist interesting, however, is its historical setting: the eve of D-Day, the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe. Although stories from the Second World War are hardly a rarity in contemporary British culture, this one is fascinatingly original and arrives at the Park Theatre after a national tour, having originally been seen at Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum and Chichester in 2014. Already on its way to the West End, it is a huge personal triumph for actor and writer David Haig, who stars in Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Ros and Ray are old hippies made good. She’s a hard-bitten, hard-working teacher in an inner-city Pennsylvania school where her pupils rob 7-Elevens on Fridays and the staff have a betting pool on how many times she gets called "white bitch". He’s a member of the one percent, a corporate heavyweight who’s always trying to see “the bigger picture” but who drives a Merc and – by his own admission – pulled himself out of poverty to become a wealthy financier.Even on the cusp of retirement they’re still besotted with each other, their love conversely made stronger by the frank Read more ...
David Benedict
About a decade ago, theatre-makers started routinely describing themselves as being in the business of storytelling. And “storytelling” is most certainly the term that best describes Matthew Lopez’s two-part, seven-hour epic The Inheritance. Beautifully cast, economically designed and directed with strikingly elegant simplicity by Stephen Daldry, it has plenty to recommended it but there’s no denying a central problem. This gay male revamp of E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End is a case of too much telling of story at the expense, all too often, of true drama. “Who Read more ...
aleks.sierz
In the same week that saw the arrival of Arinzé Kene’s Misty, a play that passionately questions the clichés of plays about black Britons (you know, gun crime, knife crime and domestic abuse), Black Men Walking opens at the Royal Court. Having already had a successful outing in Manchester, this play about a black men's walking group is a triumphant vindication of Kene’s point that most of the stories of black Britons have nothing to do with gangs or drugs. They are about ordinary folk doing ordinary things – like going for walks. And talking about themselves. And about what home means for Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Arinzé Kene is having a bit of a moment. He won an Evening Standard Film Award for The Pass opposite Russell Tovey in 2016, is about to appear in a BBC drama with Paddy Considine, and has just finished lending his lovely tenor to Conor McPherson’s Girl from the North Country in the West End. He’s somehow also had time to write Misty, directed by Omar Elerian at the Bush Theatre, at once a powerful meditation on how we tell stories and a raw, beautiful Odyssey through the heart of London. Clocking in at a tight two hours, Misty begins, true to its title, with a lot of fog. A thick green Read more ...
Matthew Bourne
Nobody deserves the title of New Adventures “legend” more than Scott Ambler; nobody is remembered more affectionately – the generosity of spirit, the many kindnesses, the fierce loyalty, the tears of pride in company notes sessions, the endearing eccentricities and, of course, the highly embellished and hilarious stories are all legendary to those that knew and worked with him. A much-loved friend and colleague since the early days of Adventures In Motion Pictures (AMP), he was also instrumental in creating the unique style that is synonymous with New Adventures today.In 1990, having lost all Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Sean Holmes is artistic director of the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, yet his revival of this seminal Irish play has taken two years to come home to him. The production was commissioned by the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, to mark the centenary of the Easter Rising, the miserably bloody six-day revolt that gave birth to the Republic of Ireland. It has since been seen by more than 50,000 people.Given that Holmes is English (he’s a Sean, not a Seàn as in O’Casey, the author of the play), it was remarkable to be asked to direct such a famous Irish text addressing the issue of national identity. It was Read more ...