Theatre
Will Rathbone
You say you want a revolution? Good luck locating one amid the tonally muddled Inside Pussy Riot. The immersive production from Les Enfants Terribles takes audiences on a promenade-style journey through the terrifyingly true story of Nadya Tolokonnikova, the Russian activist who (along with bandmate Maria Alyokhina) was sentenced to two years in a Siberian prison in 2012 after performing 40 seconds of an anti-Putin protest song in a Moscow church. The setting for the piece is the Saatchi Gallery in affluent Chelsea and a stone's throw from not a few Russian oligarchs: ah, the irony of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Woman in White insists on being told and retold. Wilkie Collins’s much loved thriller is perhaps the most widely and frequently adapted of all the great Victorian novels. In Marian Halcombe it has a resourceful heroine whose appeal doesn't rest remotely in her looks, and in Count Fosco with his menagerie of sinister pets it has an impeccably flavoursome villain. No wonder the BBC is unleashing yet another television version, while the Charing Cross Theatre has revived Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 2004 musical in a newly stripped-down version.A first theatrical version found its way onto the Read more ...
David Edgar
Since mid-August, I’ve been doing something I swore I’d never do again. I’ve been rehearsing a new adaptation of a novel by Charles Dickens. Sometime in the autumn of 1979, I received a phone call from Trevor Nunn, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. He explained that the company wanted to do a version of a Dickens novel, and would I be interested in adapting it?As my brain rushed chaotically through what I remembered of the Dickens canon, he explained that the choice was down to two: the dark and majestic late novel Our Mutual Friend and the earlier picaresque jollity Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse may be a historical recreation, but the same shouldn’t be true of the plays staged within it. Since it opened in 2014, this atmospheric space has spawned a whole sub-genre of historical new-writing – works that have too often been respectfully inert, struggling to find a contemporary voice among so much authenticity. That voice shouts, screams and swears its way in startlingly colourful terms through Anders Lustgarten’s The Secret Theatre: a passionate, politically loaded and gleefully counterfactual take on Elizabethan England.Taken from a John le Carré Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Everybody’s been talking about Everybody’s Talking About Jamie since its Sheffield Crucible debut earlier this year. It’s unusual to see a musical come steaming into the West End based on word on mouth – not star casting, or association with an existing franchise. Instead, inspired by humble BBC Three documentary Jamie: Drag Queen at 16, Jonathan Butterell’s production is, in every sense of the word, refreshing: a genuine homegrown hit.Jamie New (John McCrea, pictured below right by Johan Persson) has decided he wants to become a drag queen, and to make his grand debut by wearing a dress to Read more ...
aleks.sierz
War is morally acidic: it dissolves social rules, loosens inhibitions and gives permission to men to behave like animals. And the people who have to put up with this deluge of amorality and abuse are, of course, women. It is one of the strengths of Ukrainian playwright Natal’ya Vorozhbit’s savage war play, Bad Roads, translated by Sasha Dugdale and part of the Royal Court’s autumn international season, that she shows not only what war is like for women, but also its corrosive effects on masculinity. Especially how conflict collapses the boundary between humanity and animality.Set in the Read more ...
Owen Richards
During the 19th century, Tiger Bay in Cardiff was the beating heart of the Industrial Revolution and the most multicultural area in Britain. Visit today and the only signs remaining are the odd gothic buildings that sit between Doctor Who exhibitions and Nandos. The Wales Millennium Centre looks to remind Wales of its history with the debut of an original production, appropriately titled Tiger Bay.Racial and class divides come to the forefront in this large-scale musical. Themba Sibeko (Dom Hartley-Harris) is a recent arrival to Tiger Bay, who just wants to work the docks and forget his past Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Outrage knows no time barrier, as the world at large reminds us on a daily basis. So what better moment for the National Theatre to fashion for the internet age a stage adaptation of Network, the much-laureled 1976 celluloid satire about lunacy and, yes, anger in the televisual age. For a generation or more of filmgoers (myself among them), Peter Finch's Howard Beale ranting "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more" was part of our cultural DNA, and the first thing to be said about Ivo van Hove's theatrical iteration of the film is that its star, Bryan Cranston, does that Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Should Brexit ministers need help understanding the cultural mindset of their continental counterparts, they might consider a subscription to the Orange Tree, the compact Richmond producing house that is defiantly opening its arms to Europe. This year alone it has staged plays from Germany, France and now the Netherlands, its in-the-round presentations bringing characters and predicaments up close and personal. With the actors almost within touching distance, there is a strong sense of being a privileged voyeur, observing not so much a performance in a theatre as goings-on in a room.Lot Read more ...
james.woodall
Coriolanus is post-tragic. It never horrifies like Macbeth or appals like King Lear, though its self-damaging protagonist is disconcerting enough. Shakespeare had written the signature dark dramas by 1606, including the most magnificent of the four (truly) Roman plays, Antony and Cleopatra. Along with Julius Caesar and Titus Andronicus, all are transferring from springtime premières in Stratford to the Barbican.The Royal Shakespeare Company has chosen an apt moment to stage these chilly explorations of power and of who wields it over the people. How, the plays ask, do we want to be ruled? Read more ...
aleks.sierz
American classics dominate the straight plays in London’s West End. Whenever a producer wants to revive a straight drama, they will inevitably look first at the back catalogue of Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller or, in this case, David Mamet. Then they stuff the production full of stars: in this case, superstar Christian Slater, plus Robert Glenister, Kris Marshall, Stanley Townsend and Don Warrington all shining in the firmament. Together they make this revival of Mamet’s 1983 classic, Glengarry Glen Ross, a masterclass in testosterone-fuelled acting.From its haunting title, to its Read more ...
Jonathan Lewis
I was invalided out of the army in 1986. I’d been an army scholar through school and had a bursary at university. I went on to drama school then became an actor, and subsequently a writer and director. But I’ve always been passionately interested in how the military, and the people in it, are portrayed to the wider world.My first play Our Boys, about my experiences being invalided out of the military, was revived in the West End in 2012. One of my first big roles was as Sgt Chris McCleod for two series of ITV’s Soldier, Soldier. With awareness of PTSD being greater than ever, I thought it was Read more ...