Theatre
Katie Colombus
With mentions of Theresa May, cricket jumpers and DMs, Trump slurs and a host of characters with Northern accents, The Old Vic's return version of Dr Seuss' The Lorax, proves itself to be poles apart from the recent, popular Universal Pictures movie.There are no zany Hollywood tricks here – no reliance on anything other than a strong cast, oodles of imagination and the artistic licence allowed by Dr Seuss that creates a cacophany of colours, sound and kooky characters. The entire script is spoken in rhyme; big song numbers burst out of the poetic verse, and dance steps lurk just Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Some site-specific theatre feels like a really good fit. You could say, in this case, that it seems like poetic justice. Agatha Christie’s 1953 play, Witness for the Prosecution, used to be a rep standard, and now gets a compelling new production in the echoing surrounds of the Council Chamber at London County Hall, which is situated on the South Bank, next to Westminster Bridge. The drama, which the Queen of Crime adapted from her own short story of the same name (originally published in 1933), centres on the trial of Leonard Vole for the murder of Emily French, a wealthy older woman who has Read more ...
aleks.sierz
A new baby is like an alien invasion: it blows your mind and it colonises your world. For any couple, parenthood can be both exalting and devastating, with the stress hugging the relationship so tightly that eventually all its lies pop out. In his new play, which opened tonight at the Bush Theatre, Chris Thompson takes this idea and chucks it at a broody gay couple and their surrogate mother: Daniel, a 46-year-old lawyer, and his husband Oliver, a 32-year-old freelancer, are having a baby with their best friend, Priya.As the story begins in their classy Shadwell flat, Priya is due any day, Read more ...
The Lady from the Sea, Donmar Warehouse review - Nikki Amuka-Bird luminous in a sympathetic ensemble
David Nice
What a profoundly beautiful play is Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea. It stands in relation to the earlier, relatively confined A Doll’s House, Ghosts and Rosmersholm as Shakespeare's late romances do to the more claustrophobic tragedies. And with what apparent ease, art concealing art, do director Kwame Kwei-Armah, the Young Vic’s next Artistic Director, and the diamantine new performing version by Elinor Cook transport us in the Donmar Warehouse from a Norwegian fjord in the 1880s to the Caribbean of the 1950s.Nothing is lost of the play's essence, the race issue only brushed in with the Read more ...
Katherine Waters
In David Ireland's new hour-long two-hander – a co-production between Soho Theatre and west London's Orange Tree – two strangers, Janet and Dermot, meet for a casual hook-up arranged over the internet. The glitch, or at least surprise: she appears dressed as a mouse. That opening gambit won't surprise those who saw Ireland's earlier Royal Court entry Cyprus Avenue, in which protagonist Eric is so convinced his granddaughter is Gerry Adams that he scrawls a beard on her face to prove himself right. And in this considerably more modest entry, Ireland's penchant for Read more ...
Marianka Swain
A hit on Broadway, David Ives’s steamy two-hander now boasts Natalie Dormer and David Oakes, well-known for their screen work, in its West End cast, with Patrick Marber on directing duties. That plus the tabloid panting over Dormer’s skimpy S&M attire should certainly sell tickets, but Ives’s piece has also gained spikiness from recent interrogation of the casting couch and the murky intertwining of sex and power.Actress Vanda (Natalie Dormer) arrives late to audition for a new play by writer/director Thomas Novachek (Oakes) based on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s kinky 1870 novel Venus in Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Prolific writer Mike Bartlett is the most impressive penman to have emerged in British theatre in the past decade. The trouble is that his work is so uneven. Although he wrote the amazingly imaginative play, Earthquakes in London, and the Shakespearean West End hit, King Charles III, he has also been responsible for the preposterous improbabilities of the second series of the BBC’s Doctor Foster. Is his new play, a three-hour state-of-the-nation epic billed by the Almeida Theatre as the story of one woman searching “for seeds of hope”, a triumph or another trawl through improbability?Albion Read more ...
Aaron Wright
Since its inception in 1997 Fierce, Birmingham’s International Festival of Live Art & Performance, has championed the work of performance makers not often seen in Britain. The pantheon of body artists under Mark Ball’s era as director included the likes of Franko B, Ron Athey and Kira O’Reilly. Under the helm of previous director duo Laura McDermott and Harun Morrison came experimental European choreographers and theatre-makers such as Eva Meyer-Keller, Kate McIntosh and Lundahl & Seitl. Many of these artists have made significant contributions to the art form but for some reason Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In a rather clever wheeze, Dominic Dromgoole, former artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe – who therefore knows a thing or two about historically accurate stagings – has established Classic Spring, a new company dedicated to celebrating work by “proscenium playwrights” and staging their plays in the theatres they were written for. Its first year-long season is devoted to Oscar Wilde and opens with a star-stuffed A Woman of No Importance, directed by Dromgoole.Wilde's play, written in 1893 and staged in a CJ Phipps beauty that opened in 1870, deals with the hypocrisy (sadly not confined to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“He has something of Dillane about him.” Thus Patrick Marber on David Oakes. “I rate him very highly indeed. One of the very best of his generation.” Audiences at the Theatre Royal Haymarket will be able to judge for themselves this autumn. Oakes, 34, stars opposite Natalie Dormer in Marber’s production of Venus in Fur, a sizzling two-hander by David Ives.Oakes’s main field of operation in recent years has been historical fantasy in the likes of The Pillars of the Earth, The Borgias, The White Queen and, currently, Victoria, in which he plays Prince Albert’s doomed romantic brother Ernest. Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Loneliness: in the age of the digital hook-up and the flaunting narcissism of social media, it’s become a strange sort of taboo – a secret shame, the unsexy side of singledom. So it’s good to see playwright David Eldridge putting it centre-stage in this tender, pleasingly unsentimental two-hander. Written with wry humour, warmth and compassion, and delicately threaded through with painful laughter and uncertainty, Beginning is like an emotional striptease, peeling away the defences of its pair of needy characters. In Polly Findlay’s assured, delicate production at the National Theatre, it’s Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The awful mother, the celebrity-obsessed teenager, the mediocre old writer who wants some young sex in his life – there are motifs in Chekhov’s The Seagull that fly merrily from one century to another, and Simon Stephens and Sean Holmes’ new modern-dress update for the Lyric, starring Lesley Sharp, is fresh and accomplished, even if the classic bird's flight is rather lopsided. The comic wing turns out to flap more strongly than its tragic one, but it's good the Lyric’s notably young audience can think of a 120-year-old play as a play for today.The vision borrows something from reality Read more ...