Theatre
Matt Wolf
No, this isn't the large-scale Kander and Ebb musical, which opened in 1992 in London before transferring for a sizeable run on Broadway. Laurie Sansom's expert production instead both revisits and revises the lesser-known source of that song-and-dance adaptation: an intimate two-hander (with a prison guard thrown in for good measure) between a gay window-dresser and an ardent revolutionary who find themselves sharing a prison cell in 1975 Argentina. William Hurt won an Oscar for the showier of the two roles, but the Menier Chocolate Factory revival boasts two ideal interpreters in Samuel Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's long been a theatrical given, especially in musicals, that characters need to be seen to change: a climactic duo in the eternally crowd-pulling Wicked makes that abundantly clear. ("Because I knew you," goes the lyric, "I have been changed for good.") But what happens when people can't or won't change, and are so ground down by circumstance and their own temperament that they retreat inwards until they implode?That's the situation at the provocative and ever-stirring heart of the Tony Kushner/Jeanine Tesori musical Caroline, or Change, whose revival at Hampstead Theatre boasts a central Read more ...
aleks.sierz
You could call it an absence of yellow. Until very recently British theatre has been pretty poor at representing the stories of Chinese and East Asian people, and even of British East Asians. In 2016, Andrew Lloyd Webber called British theatre “hideously white” and, despite the sterling work of groups such as Yellow Earth theatre company, there have been several casting controversies where white actors have played Chinese and East Asian characters. So the first thing to say about Francis Turnly’s epic The Great Wave, staged by the National Theatre in a co-production with the Tricycle Theatre Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Shakespeare's death-laden play is alive and well and breathing with renewed force in Hackney, the last British stop for an RSC touring Hamlet that moves on from London to the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC in May. Let's hope the American capital takes to Simon Godwin's characteristically acute, alert production with the palpable affection that was afforded the staging closer to home one recent evening. Of Paapa Essiedu's occupancy of the title role, one thing seems clear: were the play's States-side sightings continuing westward to LA, this charismatic actor might risk being lost to the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons: A Reimagining – it’s not a title that trips off the tongue. Nor one, frankly, that inspires much excitement, with its clunky functionality and on-trend buzzword. But set that aside and buy a ticket immediately, because Gyre & Gimble have made magic with their latest show.Founded in 2014 by former War Horse puppeteers Finn Caldwell and Toby Olie, Gyre & Gimble’s style of puppet-led theatre has established itself in productions including The Grinning Man, The Lorax and The Elephantom as some of the most thoughtful and joyful to be seen on stage. But with The Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Hot on the heels of International Women’s Day come three monologues written, directed and produced by women showing at Hoxton Hall. It’s kind of a treat, and kind of not.The current laser focus on gender risks the unwanted side-effect of alienating rather than including, and when an issue becomes so hot it’s hip, surface buzz easily takes over at the expense of meaningful action. Important voices registering dissent, noting difference, flagging up granularity and raising objections are not heard. But the balance between revolution and evolution is perennial and intractable, and the thing Read more ...
Antony Sher
In 1982 Antony Sher played the Fool to Michael Gambon’s King in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of King Lear. Shortly after, he came back to Stratford to play Richard III, for which he won the Olivier and Evening Standard Awards for Best Actor.Sher kept a record of his performance in Year of the King. Other Shakespearean memoirs have followed, including Year of the Fat Knight about playing Falstaff and, with Gregory Doran, Woza Shakespeare!, about staging Titus Andronicus in South Africa.In 2016 Sher returned to Lear, this time in the title role, for the RSC production, directed by Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Good programming is an art, and Paul Miller – artistic director of the Orange Tree Theatre – is clearly on a continuous roll with his inspired mixing of the old and the new, forgotten classics and new voices, revivals and premieres. And he loves to take risks. With this revival of Charlotte Jones's Humble Boy he breaks one of the unwritten rules of programming: never revive a play first put on by a major theatre until at least 30 years have passed. Humble Boy was a massive hit when first staged by the National Theatre in 2001. It was then often revived for a decade in theatres outside London Read more ...
Heather Neill
It would be so easy to make fun of the 1945 Noel Coward/ David Lean film in which, famously, nothing happens between two guilt-ridden married lovers. That oh-so-British middle class restraint, those flet, perfectly enunciated vowels, the overwhelming romantic rush of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2 – isn’t it all a bit OTT, just crying out for a French-and-Saunders-style send-up? Thank goodness, Emma Rice has resisted the temptation in her stage adaptation. She has brought her customary larkiness to the party, but treated the agonised love affair at the centre of the story with respect and Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
This year the state of Israel marks its 70th birthday. Which means it will also be the year Palestinians remember the Nakba, the catastrophe, the mass dispossession. With that in mind, the Public Theater in New York commissioned this adaptation of a short novel by the acclaimed Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, who was killed in 1972 by a Mossad car bomb.Returning to Haifa was possibly the first work of fiction in which both sides of the divide were presented with equal sympathy. Kanafani’s novella traces the impact of the events of 1948 and their aftermath on two families – one Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Fair is foul and foul is drab, gory and tricksy in Rufus Norris’s first stab at Shakespeare direction at the National Theatre, Macbeth. It embodies the play's most clichéd quotation (the one about sound, fury, and nada), though whether that's intended as a joke is hard to work out. Lovely Rory Kinnear plays Macbeth like a third Mitchell brother from EastEnders, bullheaded and thick-necked, all short jabbing breaths, strapped into his jerkin with parcel tape. His castle is a pile of old backpacks and broken chairs in a grotty shed reigned over by a starved-looking Lady M.Eyes and ears are Read more ...
Marianka Swain
That this 1948 Tennessee Williams play is rarely performed seems nothing short of a travesty, thanks to the awe-inspiring case made for it by Rebecca Frecknall’s exquisite Almeida production. Aided by the skyrocketing Patsy Ferran, it also makes a case for director Frecknall as a luminous rising talent in British theatre.During a long, hot summer in early 20th century, small-town Mississippi, minister’s daughter Alma (Patsy Ferran, pictured below) – whose name means “soul” in Spanish – yearns hopelessly for the boy next door: dissolute doctor’s son John (Matthew Needham), who believes Read more ...