Theatre
Jenny Gilbert
God makes few appearances at the modern playhouse – so few that the Finborough Theatre saw fit to print a glossary in the programme for its latest production. What begins with Agnostic, Annunciation and Aramaic runs all the way to Spirit Guide, Utopia and Vespers, which gives some idea of the breadth of reference to be found in this tightly constructed three-hander by New York writer Keith Bunin.Hannah (Kazia Pelka) is an Episcopalian minister (the US equivalent of Anglican), wont to accessorise her clerical collar with combat pants and sneakers. She may be a fervent Bible scholar, but she is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What a difference an ocean and a change of scale can make. When I saw the Mel Brooks musical Young Frankenstein on Broadway a decade ago, the show seemed to take its cue from the lumbering monster contained within it, who stutters and sputters before eventually being kickstarted into something resembling life. All involved have since been back to the laboratory, and the happy news is that its West End iteration is a thing of joy. For once, I really did laugh until I cried, not least in amazement that so unapologetically bawdy, lowdown a romp has somewhere along the way acquired a heart. Read more ...
Heather Neill
Bold and fearless are adjectives that might describe playwright Rory Mullarkey as accurately as any chivalrous knight. He made his name in 2013 when, at the age of 25, his play Cannibals, part of which was in Russian, took to the main stage at the Manchester Royal Exchange and went on to win the James Tait Black Prize. He has written opera libretti, a play about revolution for the Royal Court, The Wolf from the Door, and a version of The Oresteia for the Globe. And now here he is filling the Olivier’s wide spaces with an epic modern folk tale.Saint George and the Dragon comes, in proper Read more ...
Elyse Dodgson
The autumn season of plays at the Royal Court leads with international work. B by Guillermo Calderón (from Chile), Bad Roads by Natal'ya Vorozhbit (from Ukraine) and Goats by Liwaa Yazji (from Syria) have a long history with our international department. We probably have to go back over a decade to look at the seeds of this work and the connections they have to one another and to each of us.THE ROAD TO BAD ROADIt is June 2008 and I am sitting around a table in Natal'ya Vorozhbit's new flat in Kiev with her mother Masha, her baby daughter Pasha and our co-collaborator and translator, Sasha Read more ...
Heather Neill
Nikki Amuka-Bird spent the summer in Antigua, swimming and scuba diving and could have claimed to be working. She is playing Ellida in Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea at the Donmar, in a version directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah transposed to the Caribbean. Amuka-Bird spent part of her childhood in Antigua and, home for a holiday, was thinking about Ibsen’s restless heroine, for whom the sea represents freedom.Born in 1976 in Nigeria, where her father is a newspaper editor, she grew up with her mother, a journalist and later a Body Shop franchisee, in the Caribbean and the UK, where she attended Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Simon Stephens and director Marianne Elliott are hyped as a winning partnership. Their previous collaborations include The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a massive Olivier award-winning hit, and her sensitive revival of his early play, Port, at the National Theatre. Now they are in the West End again, this time with a two-hander starring Anne-Marie Duff and Kenneth Cranham. Despite the title, this is not a play about science, but about love, but it does concern chance. And uncertainty.Inspired by a vague notion of the Uncertainty Principle, which suggests that Read more ...
aleks.sierz
What does it mean to feel contemporary? Feel. Contemporary. According to theatre-maker Chris Thorpe, whose new play Victory Condition has just opened at the Royal Court in tandem with Guillermo Calderón’s B, being contemporary is a really disturbing mixture of feeling all-powerful and completely powerless. In a short two-hander, Thorpe emphasises that something is very wrong at the heart of daily life. We all know this; we all feel this. But what is it? Well, it’s the sense that everything is on the verge of breakdown.Set in a modern new-built flat, Victory Condition is basically two Read more ...
Marianka Swain
A year after premiering acclaimed French playwright Florian Zeller’s The Truth, the Menier Chocolate Factory now hosts The Lie – which, as the name suggests, acts as a companion piece of sorts. Once again, we’re in a slippery Pinteresque realm, the seemingly conventional domestic set-up teasingly deconstructed as Zeller challenges our conception of honesty and morality.This latest Lindsay Posner-directed import is similarly light-hearted – compared with the weightier Zeller double of The Mother and The Father – and once again features two affluent couples, with the same names, plus Read more ...
theartsdesk
At a festive ceremony on Tuesday night at The Hospital Club in central London, the winners were announced for this year's h.Club 100 Awards. The distinguished broacaster John Simpson (pictured below) gave an impassioned keynote address about the value of the UK's creative industries which concluded with amusing advice on the wisdom of eating kedgeree. The comedian Stuart Goldsmith compered with wit, flair and sangfroid. The undoubted star of the night was Lady Leshurr, who accepted her award in the Music category - presented to her by theartsdesk's Thomas H. Green - with a speech that Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Prolific playwright James Graham aspires to be nothing if not timely. His latest, a play about the Labour Party, was originally due to open during the week of that party’s conference, when our ears were once again ringing to the chant of “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!” Unfortunately, the play’s TV star Sarah Lancashire had to pull out, so its West End opening was delayed until tonight. Her replacement, Tamsin Greig, joins Martin Freeman in this epic comedy about a Labour MP in an era of change. It’s a starry cast, but does the play’s content live up to its billing?Opening with familiar chords of the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
In the 1960s, we had the theatre of commitment; today we have an attitude of non-committal. Once, political playwrights could be guaranteed to tell you what to think, to describe what was wrong with society – and what to do about it. Now, as Chilean playwright Guillermo Calderón’s new play, B – which was developed by the Royal Court’s international programme – makes clear, the keynote is ambiguity and an ironic detachment. It sets the tone for this venue’s autumn season, in which “emerging writers from across the world make radical new work for Britain”.B starts innocently enough with Marcela Read more ...
Simon Stephens
All theatre workers have a day that they dread. For actors there is a particular terror about a first preview that can fuel those performances with adrenaline. For playwrights - well, for me at least - it is the first time a play is ever read out loud by a company of actors. This never fails to shred me. I had been working as a playwright for five years, though, before I realised how much directors hate the first day of rehearsal.The first day of rehearsal is the day many directors feel they most need to prove their validity. They need to inspire and galvanise a company of actors and ac Read more ...