Theatre
Jenny Gilbert
This show feels like an end-of-the-exams party, and in a way that’s exactly what it is. If the fruits of Emma Rice’s short tenure as Artistic Director at the Globe were a series of tests that she is deemed to have failed, then Tristan & Yseult, a revival of an early hit devised for the company Kneehigh, is her parting two-fingered salute. For here writ-large are the rowdiness and irreverence and – heavens above – microphones and electric guitar that so offended a certain faction of the board that it was persuaded to terminate Rice’s contract, despite having hired her precisely because of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Dorothy Parker’s take on suicide is called “Resumé”: it goes, “Razors pain you; Rivers are damp; Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live.” Although this seems to cover the terrain, Alice Birch’s powerful new play adds a couple more methods of doing away with yourself, as well as an argument for avoiding the necessity of suicide. And although this drama takes up some 237 pages of published text, director Katie Mitchell proves you can stage it in 120 minutes without a break.And what an excruciating, yet devastatingly Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The strapline for this joyful show is: “One day; six cities; a thousand stories.” Allowing for hyperbole, this is just about right. Performance poet Inua Ellams’s new show is set in a handful of cities that stretch across one part of the globe, from London to Lagos, Accra, Kampala, Harare and Johannesburg. Each of the 14 scenes in this co-production between the National Theatre, West Yorkshire Playhouse and Fuel, is set in a barber shop, with most of them in London, and the others are loosely connected to the main centre. But the main theme is not geography, but fatherhood and masculinity.The Read more ...
aleks.sierz
History is a tricky harlot. She is bought and sold, fought for and thrown over, seduced and betrayed – and always at the mercy of the winners. In a general election week, it is hard to deny that still now we are the progeny of the possessive individualism of previous centuries. This idea, that we are the children of dispossession, is at the heart of DC Moore’s epic new play which occupies the main Olivier stage of the National Theatre with a large cast led by the ever-pugnacious Anne-Marie Duff.It is England, 1809. In the countryside, a rapacious Lord is hell bent on enclosing the common Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Hope Mill Theatre in Manchester is an irresistible example of the can-do spirit. Less than two years ago the ground floor of a disused mill was being advertised on Gumtree as a storage space. Two actors who had been working as waiters – William Whelton and Joseph Houston – spotted it and, despite having no money, homed in on their chance to realise a dream: to create their own venue for musical theatre.A year after opening their doors, they won the theatre and performance category of The Hospital Club's h.Club 100 awards in 2016. The other finalists included Kenneth Branagh, Denise Gough Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Forty years after Annie swept on to Broadway, brimming with shining-faced optimism amidst wearying times, along comes Nikolai Foster's West End revival of the show to do much the same today. A tentative-seeming Miranda Hart may be the name player, making her musical theatre debut in the role created by Broadway legend Dorothy Loudon. But the heart and soul of the production belong to its pint-sized ensemble, not least (at the performance I caught) a 12-year-old newcomer called Ruby Stokes, whose unforced delivery of the title role really does make one hopeful about, as the song lyric so Read more ...
David Benedict
On 8 April 1952, screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green were chatting to Charlie Chaplin at a party when he started raving about a picture he’d seen the previous night at Sam Goldwyn’s house. It was called Singin’ in the Rain – had they heard of it? “Heard of it? We wrote it!” But then, this dynamic duo had form: five years earlier they wrote On the Town. But if you’ve only ever seen that prototype sailor-on-shore-leave movie, you’ll have missed the thing from their original stage version that catapulted Comden & Green to showbiz fame: the dynamite score they wrote with their Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Bard of Metroland and scourge of Slough, John Betjeman is, alongside Philip Larkin on parenthood, still one of the 20th century’s most-quoted poets. Hugh Whitemore’s play, part highlights reading and part biographical drama, offers a hugely charming account of a poet who, for many readers, epitomises a nostalgic but conflicted view of England. While the bonhomous atmosphere, similar to a Tony Benn or Alan Bennett diary reading, is part of the appeal, Whitemore focuses too much on the whimsy, and too little on the lust and vanity, creating an ever-so-slightly sanitised portrait.As Betjeman, Read more ...
David Nice
Hitting the essence of a Fellini masterpiece in a different medium is no easy task. Try and reproduce his elusive brand of poetic melancholy and you'll fail; best to transfer the characters to a different medium, as the musical Sweet Charity did in moving the action of Le notte di Cabiria from Rome and environs to New York. The film version even managed to find in Shirley MacLaine an equivalent to the unpredictable charm of Giulietta Masina, Fellini's wife, a great actor. But no one can really rival Masina’s most compelling role, the waif Gelsomina sold to a travelling strong man in La Strada Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The monologue is a terrific theatre form. Using this narrative device, you can cover huge amounts of storytelling territory, fill in lots of background detail – and get right inside a character’s head. But the best monologues are those that interlock with other solo voices, giving different points of view on the same situation. That’s what Welsh playwright Gary Owen (Violence and Son, Iphigenia in Splott) does with his latest, Killology, which opened in Cardiff in March and now arrives at the Royal Court in London. He also gives this theatre form a provocative twist. Or two.Bad fathering Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
When TV drama tackles Britain’s class divide, the go-to working-class type is the northerner: gritty, blunt of vowel and partial to a deep-fried Mars bar. The first and perhaps only pleasant surprise in Matt Parvin’s debut play Jam, produced by the ever-adventurous Finborough, is that it’s set in Cornwall.Kane McCarthy, a shuffling, sniffling Harry Melling (leaner and meaner than when he played Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films), has tracked down his old school history teacher 10 years after a classroom incident caused her to leave her job. Bella Soroush (Jasmine Hyde) now works at Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Make no mistake about it, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a playwright to watch. London receives its first opportunity to appraise his vibrant, quizzical talent with this production of An Octoroon, for which he received an OBIE in 2014 (jointly with his second Off-Broadway work of the same year, Appropriate). His follow-on play Gloria, opening at the Hampstead Theatre in June, was a finalist in the Pulitzer drama category in 2016.An Octoroon is a cracking piece of writing. Jacobs-Jenkins has taken on that defining American subject, slavery, and deconstructed it via the prism of an 1859 melodrama by Read more ...