Theatre
David Nice
Only one thing could equal the "wow!" factor of seeing and hearing a youngish Hugh Jackman launch into “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’“ at the start of the National Theatre’s 1998 staging of Oklahoma!: John Wilson and his orchestra trilling and swooning their perfectly-balanced way through the Overture at the Proms. Three and a quarter hours later, you might have felt you'd heard some of those tunes at least twice too often, and you might also have questioned, despite excellent work from nearly all concerned, whether it was such a beautiful mornin’ after all. When you get all the original Read more ...
David Kettle
Eve ★★★★Transgender issues are high on the agenda at this year’s Fringe, with the energetic Testosterone at the Pleasance and the breezy You’ve Changed from Northern Stage at Summerhall among the stand-outs. In addition, the National Theatre of Scotland brings two trans-themed shows to the Traverse Theatre. Eve is a deeply personal, autobiographical work from playwright Jo (formerly John) Clifford, co-written with Fringe regular Chris Goode, that reflects on the challenges and joys of her life from a fearful young boy – before being transgender was even considered as a concept – to the Read more ...
David Kettle
Rhinoceros ★★★★★Marketed by an image of a Trump-quiffed and -besuited pachyderm, Zinnie Harris’s new version of Ionesco’s absurdist 1959 comedy is one of the International Festival flagship shows for 2017, a collaboration between Edinburgh’s own Royal Lyceum Theatre and Istanbul’s DOT Theatre. And with its wild, scabrous humour and its blazing, furious energy, it doesn’t disappoint. This is a Rhinoceros very much for our times, with fake news, mistrust of immigrants and even a USA gone to the dogs under a tinpot dictator all firmly referenced, in amongst Ionesco’s tale of the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Could we be inhabiting a new golden age of theatre? It sometimes seems that way, not least in the blurring of boundaries that increasingly is the norm. Few might have guessed, for instance, that the author of the hottest play in years – Jack Thorne, who wrote Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – would be a by-product of the Royal Court. Or that the brilliant Sharon D Clarke, recognised by The Hospital Club's h.Club 100 Awards this year for her scorching star turns in Caroline, or Change at Chichester and The Life at Southwark Playhouse, would have done West End stints in We Will Rock You and Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The 1960s were “hilarious”, says one young character in this revival, starring Broadway icon Stockard Channing, of Alexi Kaye Campbell’s 2009 family drama at the Trafalgar Studios. How so? “Oh you know, the clothes, the hair, the raging idealism.” The thought of hippies marching for political causes, smoking Gauloises on the Left Bank or storming the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, and all the time wearing sandals and beads. Yes, to anyone under the age of 60 that must seem funny. But not, of course, for anyone who was actually there – especially if they were a radical and a Read more ...
David Nice
Like his smash-hit My Night With Reg, Kevin Elyot's first and last plays have a role to play in the history of gay theatre, but do they work? Emphatically not in the case of Twilight Song (★★), completed – one is tempted to say, sketched – shortly before his death in 2014, though four out of five actors at the admirable Park Theatre give it their best shot. Coming Clean (★★★) is a different matter: a frank and well-structured essay in a crumbling relationship from the early 1980s, before AIDS truly came to the fore in the London scene.Unfortunately Coming Clean – the innuendo isn't pertinent Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Sam Shepard came to live in London in 1971, nursing ambitions to be a rock musician. When he went home three years later, he was soon to be found on the drumstool of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder tour. But in between, not long after he arrived in London, he was waylaid by the burgeoning fringe scene, and the rock god project took a back seat. His reputation from the New York underground for courting danger, taking risks, living on the edge etc went before him, and the savage immediacy of his plays found a natural home in the small space houses of the capital.Outside the inner circle of the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Who'd have guessed that the London theatre scene at present would be so devoted to the numinous? Hard on the heels of Girl from the North Country, which locates moments of transcendence in hard-scrabble Depression-era lives, along comes John Tiffany's deeply tender revival of Jim Cartwright's vaunted 1986 play Road, which tempers its landscape of pain with an abundance of poetry.As it happens, one has to wait till after the interval to feel the gathering force of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child director Tiffany's approach here. But come the climactic scene in which a mismatched Lancashire Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Back in Margaret Thatcher’s middle England, teenagers got by somehow. Without recourse to wands or Ballardian games of extinction, we survived adolescence with the help of a story full of people we knew. People (a bit) like us. Every year I re-read Sue Townsend’s chronicles of Adrian Mole, hopeless lovestruck bard of Leicester. And each year he grew up with me, as experience uncovered the texture of Mole’s life. "Phoned Auntie Susan but she is on duty in Holloway." A line like that was simply information at first. A year or two later, it brought a smile, then a conspiratorial laugh.Laughter Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's enough plot for a dozen plays buzzing its way through Mosquitoes, Lucy Kirkwood's play that uses the backdrop of the Large Hadron Collidor (LHC) to chronicle the multiple collisions within a family. Veering off now and then into discussion of particle physics, Rufus Norris's furiously busy production is anchored by Olivia Colman and Olivia Williams as largely fractious siblings enmeshed in a spiralling landscape of sexting, career sabotage, incipient senility, and a helluva lot more.Any one of these topics might have made a play all its own, and the accomplished creative team here on Read more ...
bella.todd
Plays with songs in, or more precisely plays with famous songs in, can feel like the uncanny valley of theatre. They’re not quite musicals and not quite tribute shows. They deliver on familiar tunes and disconcert with fresh narrative. You’re constantly wrongfooted by the rush of recognition.Lazarus was good-weird – a mash-up of David Bowie and Enda Walsh with a vision so unique and uncompromising it didn’t matter if anyone else could quite see it. Girl from the North Country, the new play by Conor McPherson for the Old Vic with songs from Bob Dylan’s back catalogue, is also very weird. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Maggie the cat is alive: I am alive," or so remarks the feline, eternally frustrated heroine of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. That self-assessment has rarely been truer than as spoken by Sienna Miller in the terrific West End production directed by Benedict Andrews, in which the actress finally lands the stage role in which she can let rip.Casually updated to a contemporary landscape of mobile phones and luxury black satin sheets, Williams's portrait of pain, deception and death in the American south emerges with its potency intact, Miller and co-star Jack O'Connell the Read more ...