Theatre
David Benedict
Fingers on buzzers… Question: What’s the connection between Days of Wine and Roses, Small Change, Making Noise Quietly and Versailles? Answer: They’re all past Donmar productions directed by Peter Gill.But it’s not just his directing skill – no one in British theatre has a finer ear for the rhythm, pitch and placement of dialogue – that makes Gill a primary figure in the Donmar’s past and present. Not only did he direct the sons-and-mothers struggle Small Change and the post-Edwardian drama of family secrets and lies Versailles, he also wrote them. Robert Hastie’s revival of his 2001 play The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If the Small Faces weren’t quite The Beatles or the Stones, they were one of the classic British bands of their era, and their recordings are treasured by ancient Mods, Damon Albarn, Noel Gallagher and even discerning representatives of today’s youth. Carol Harrison’s stage musical, evidently a labour of love by a devoted fan who knew singer Steve Marriott back in the day, successfully evokes the thrills and chaos of the mid-Sixties music business, and (better still) features an onstage band which manages to do the music justice.The quartet’s career only lasted from 1965 to 1969, which means Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Alan Ayckbourn basically comes in two flavours: suburban comedies of embarrassment and sci-fi fantasies. His latest, The Divide, which premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival last year in a two-part six-hour version, has been now been trimmed down to a single very long evening for its short stay at the Old Vic in London. Written not as a conventional play, but as a “narrative for voices”, it is a dystopian fable about the relationship between men and women in the aftermath of a terrible plague which has decimated humankind. Think Handmaid’s Tale; but also think Juliet, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
First the goats, and now the sheep – has this venue become an urban farm? Rural life, which was once so central to our English pastoral culture, is now largely absent from metropolitan stages. And from our culture. Apart from The Archers or the village gothic of shows like The League of Gentlemen, the countryside has become a lost world, a blank space on which any playwright can project their imaginary stories. So Gundog, Simon Longman’s Royal Court debut, comes across not as a real account of farming folk, but as a highly symbolic rural no-space of shepherds and sheep in a forgotten corner Read more ...
Long Day's Journey Into Night, Wyndham's Theatre review - Lesley Manville hits ecstatic, fatal highs
Ismene Brown
Eugene O’Neill’s 1945 play Long Day’s Journey Into Night is famously a portrayal of the hellish damage that a sick person can wreak on their family, closely based on his own family. Mary and James Tyrone are images of his own parents, down to details like the father’s compromised acting career, the mother’s post-natal suffering from her last childbirth and subsequent addiction to morphine, and of course the emotional havoc for the small sons when they discover their mother’s affliction.But there is another addiction being shown, even sadder but also redemptive, and that is the addiction to Read more ...
Katherine Waters
“Pussy is pussy” and “bitches are bitches” but Jen Silverman’s Collective Rage at Southwark Playhouse smashes tautologies with roguish comedy in a tight five-hander smartly directed by Charlie Parham.The play is set in New York and follows the ad hoc and long-standing relationships that develop between five women (two of whom are queer) called Betty over the course of a series of rehearsals for a skew-whiff rendition of the play-within-a-play Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that Betty 3 (Beatriz Romilly) decides to put on after going on a date to “The Thea-tah” with a posh Read more ...
theartsdesk
It was both astonishing and depressingly unsurprising that Suffragette, Sarah Gavron’s feature about the insurgent foot soldiers of the campaign for women’s suffrage, was the first fictionalised film specifically about the movement. There are more films about the miners’ strike – which clearly tells us something.It’s no surprise that literature has fared far better, since, in the words of Virginia Woolf, all one needs is a “room of one’s own” in order to think and to write. Often we see the movement featured as a side story of a male-focused storyline, such as the television adaptation of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Hype is a dangerous thing. It often raises expectations beyond the reasonable, and disappointment inevitably follows. It also prioritises PR over artistic activity, putting the publicity cart before the creative horse, sucking energy away from plays to feed the marketing machine. Take the example of Paines Plough, a new writing touring company led by James Grieve and George Perrin, which – in a co-production with Theatr Clwyd and Orange Tree Theatre – have brought a trio of new work in repertory to this Richmond venue. Hyped as the product of the “de facto national theatre of new writing”, Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Carry on out of London past the Finborough Theatre and you hit the A4. Follow it east as it becomes the M4, take a southern turn at Bristol for the M5 and you’re in the West Country. Bude and Bodmin, Liskeard, St Austell, Padstow, Mousehole, Newquay and Newlyn. Out here are fishing villages, tin mines, granite churches, wide seas, surfers, pixies, low mental health indicators, and a great deal of unemployment.Henry Darke’s Booby’s Bay takes on the half-twee half-spavined world of the Cornish fishing village in its oddball glory while bringing up the salty issue of regional deprivation. The Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
All hail! Shakespeare’s Roman drama may be enjoying something of a resurgence at present, but it rarely proves as vital and arresting in performance as this. Last summer in the US, a staging at the Public Theater caused a furore and frightened away sponsors by killing off a Caesar who was unequivocally the pussy-grabbing Dayglo President himself. There were also productions in Sheffield and at the RSC. This one, though, directed by Nicholas Hytner, is a splendidly many-headed hydra.It’s a slick, pacey, interval-free two hours that sees the Bridge Theatre transformed into something between a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The American family has seldom looked more desperate. Will Eno’s The Open House depicts a gathering of such dismal awfulness that it surely sets precedents for this staple element of American drama. Yet for viewers who relish humour in its most pitch-black form, and enjoy a dramatic turn-around that is as unpredictable as it is accomplished, the writer’s 2014 play (which won him the playwriting Obie award that year) is deliciously scalding.Eno introduces his five characters, assembled for the parents’ wedding anniversary, not by name but by their role in the family, suggesting something Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Do boys never leave the playground? Just when I was reasonably sure that the crisis of masculinity was an old-fashioned trope – I mean, so very 1990s – along comes a one-man show that investigates how lonely young men, seething with resentment, surf the internet, attracted like flies to shit by tech-savvy extremist groups of both secular and religious persuasions. And boy are they persuasive! Javaad Alipoor explores this dark world in The Believers Are But Brothers, his Edinburgh Fringe hit from last year, which now visits the Bush Theatre in west London.Because it’s about the internet, the Read more ...