Theatre
Jenny Gilbert
Casting decisions do not usually make gripping theatre. But in Robert Icke’s version of Friedrich Schiller’s 1800 political thriller, newly transferred from the Almeida to the West End, settling the question of which of two actresses will play the title role and which her nemesis, Elizabeth I, is an edge-of-the-seat moment night after night. Heads or tails? Before the entire assembled cast, the spin of a coin (a sovereign, of course) decides it. And with the result shown on screens that flank the stage, the audience is the first to know.At Wednesday’s matinée, Lia Williams loses the call ( Read more ...
Katherine Waters
On their return home from Ohio to New York, young couple Jenny and Elias (Anneika Rose and Tom Mothersdale, main picture) make a detour to Gettysburg for a few days’ sightseeing. Elias has been fascinated by the town and its bloody history since he was a young boy; Jenny is ambivalent, and in the throes of an incapacitatingly painful period. The outline is simple, but this is Annie Baker’s John and nothing is quite as it seems. (The same writer's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Flick played this same address in 2016.) Their B&B is run by Mertis (Marylouise Burke, pictured below), a Read more ...
David Nice
Time flies so much more beguilingly in Daniel Jamieson and Emma Rice's 90-minute musical fantasia than it ever has, for me, in Bock and Harnick's Fiddler on the Roof – and the songs aren't bad, either. The inspiration here – and inspiration's the word – is not Marc Chagall's trademark violinist on the tiles but the artist himself and his clever, talented Vitebsk other half Bella Rosenfeld as they wing their way through the fraught first half of the 20th century. Rice and Jamieson, young and in love, played the couple 25 years ago, which makes this superb small-scale piece of total theatre a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Awkwardness is a challenging effect in drama, and one so rewarding when it works. When the movement isn’t easy, when the dialogue doesn't flow; when, with emotional revelations broken and coming with difficulty, the pauses speak more powerfully than the words. David Eldridge’s Beginning is a masterclass in its possibilities, a getting-to-know-you moment that plays out over 100 winning minutes.It’s also extremely funny, and Eldridge’s two-hander, which premiered at the National’s Dorfman in October, is certainly sure on its feet on the humour front. Which is more than you can say of its Read more ...
David Benedict
Imagine, if you will, discovering a ninth-rate old melodrama about upper-class nonsense, hiring a bunch of actors including a couple of starry friends big in comedy and putting it on stage. And then realising there’s a paying audience so, to make it work, they’re going to have to ham it up to the hilt… Hang on a minute, Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan isn’t ninth-rate melodrama. No, but that’s what it feels like in this frankly lamentable West End production. Kathy Burke has directed the plot but not the play.Three years (and four plays) before he was notoriously dragged through the mud, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In 2016 the Bristol Old Vic turned 250. To blow out the candles, England’s oldest continually running theatre summoned home one of its most splendid alumni. Jeremy Irons – Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, an Oscar winner as Claus von Bülow in Reversal of Fortune, not forgetting the lordly larynx of Scar in The Lion King – arrived at the theatre’s drama school in 1969 and in due course joined the company. The role that called him back was just about the biggest one going: James Tyrone in A Long Day’s Journey into Night.Eugene O’Neill’s monster play tells of a titanic family implosion in Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is modernism dead and buried? Anyone considering the long haul of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party from resounding flop in 1958 to West End crowd-pleasing classic today might be forgiven for wondering whether self-consciously difficult literary texts have had their day. In Brexit Britain, where everyone is a populist now, there might not be much of a demand for difficult art, but people still seem to crave entertainment. So it’s good to see that this 60th anniversary revival of Pinter’s most canonical work still works both as a funny situation comedy and as a thought-provoking disturber of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's the people who are problematic, not the play. That's one take-away sentiment afforded by Caroline Byrne's sparky and provocative take on All's Well That Ends Well, that ever-peculiar Shakespeare "comedy" (really?) whose title is in ironic contrast to its emotional terrain. Making her debut at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, having previously directed The Taming of the Shrew on the Globe's main stage, Byrne widens the abyss between the sexes that has always marked out this troublesome late play. Not for the first time, its supposedly tidy resolution makes one wonder what further Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The revival that almost didn't make it into town has got the Royal Court's 2018 mainstage offerings off to a rousing start. For a while, it looked as if this fresh appraisal of a benchmark 1982 Court title would close on the road, a casualty of the "metoo" campaign and charges of inappropriate behaviour that were brought against its original director, Max Stafford-Clark (himself a former Court artistic director). All praise then to current Court supremo, Vicky Featherstone, for reversing her initial cancellation and allowing Kate Wasserberg's terrific production to get the London run it Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The rolling stone is now at home in the West End, as Conor McPherson’s inimitable dramatic take on Bob Dylan transfers from the Old Vic, where it premiered last summer. Described as “a play with songs”, it’s the distinct harmony of two art forms, rather than straining one to incorporate the other in the usual jukebox musical fashion – and the resulting soulful tapestry allows form to articulately reflect its iconic inspiration.Set in Dylan’s hometown of Duluth, Minnesota, in the Depression-era 1930s, writer/director McPherson gathers a desolate gaggle of folks in a rundown guesthouse: owner Read more ...
Katie Colombus
For their eighth debut at the Royal Albert Hall, mesmerising French-Canadian performance art company Cirque du Soleil takes the audience on a journey into the world underfoot.As if minfied to the size of Wayne Szalinski's children in the 1989 film Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, we see what goes on underneath the canopy of grass. The fantastical creatures here inhabiting the earth's plant life include cutesy, choreographed red ants, foot-juggling slices of kiwi fruit and corn cobs; electric-blue lizards contorting and flexing; butterflies emerging from a chrysalis and soaring on aerial bungees; Read more ...
Matt Wolf
That ages-old dictum "write what you know" has given rise to the intriguingly titled My Mum's a Twat, in which the Royal Court's delightful head of press, Anoushka Warden, here turns first-time playwright, much as the Hampstead Theatre's then-press rep, Charlotte Eilenberg, did back in 2002. While some may cry nepotistic foul at a theatre insider grabbing such a coveted perch, Warden has as much a right as anyone to tell a story that in this instance finds an ideally sparky interpreter in the protean Patsy Ferran. Astonishingly, Ferran is delivering the 80-minute monologue twice nightly Read more ...