Theatre
Will Rathbone
Matt Hartley's personal take on London's housing crisis returns to the Hampstead Theatre's studio space downstairs and is sure to hit audiences where, so to speak, they live. First seen at the same address in a production not open to the press, the play examines the spiralling costs associated with property in the capital and how those pressures affect the current generation of 20- and 30-somethings trying to make this town their home.Two couples agree to share a one-bedroom flat in south London for a year in order to save for the future, only to find that the cramped living conditions, not Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The Globe’s artistic director Emma Rice has made no secret of her desire to go out with a bang, in this, the final season of her brutally truncated tenure at the company. With this Twelfth Night she stages a departure with bells (and whistles, and disco-balls, electric guitars, congas, Sister Sledge, and yes, a whole rig of lighting) on – a neon-bright, two-fingered salute to the board that forced her out.The trouble is that, for all its zany energy, its charm and its humour (and there is plenty of each), the show also ends up giving two fingers to Shakespeare, which rather makes the board’s Read more ...
David Nice
Men playing boys playing girls, women and men, all female parts convincingly falsettoed and high musical standards as backbone: Sasha Regan's single-sex Gilbert and Sullivan has worked a special magic on Iolanthe and The Pirates of Penzance, HMS Pinafore and now The Mikado, not so much. Energetic song and dance are still in evidence. But this time a hard-worked scout-camp setting – located, as advance publicity tells us to expect, some time in the heyday of Enid Blyton – brings very little to highlight Gilbert's immortal preoccupations with class and hypothetical sadism.Familiar Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Welcome back, John Boyega. Less than a decade ago, he was an unknown budding British stage actor, then he took off as a global film star thanks to his role as Finn in Star Wars: The Force Awakens after his debut in Attack the Block, the comedy sci-fi flick. After these extraterrestrial excursions, Boyega is now back to earth, playing the lead at the Old Vic in Georg Büchner’s 1837 classic, Woyzeck, translated this time by Jack Thorne, the playwright who wrote London’s two-part super-hit, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.It’s a radical rewrite. Gone is a lot of the mystery and the poetry of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tristan & Yseult has become something of a calling card for Kneehigh, which was founded in 1980 and is now the unofficial National Theatre of Cornwall. Emma Rice, currently artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe in London, created this production in 2003 with writers Anna Maria Murphy and Carl Grose, and it catapulted the company to national recognition. Here Rice directs a touring revival which is part of the Brighton Festival.The pre-Arthurian legend is a tale of forbidden desires and broken hearts. Tristan (Dominic Marsh) is sent by Cornish King Mark (Mike Shepherd) to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The subtitle of Richard Nelson’s new trilogy suggests an anti-Trump polemic. Instead, its miraculous, almost invisible craft fulfils the President’s most hollow promise. It restores full humanity to a family of lower-middle class Americans who often feel slighted and helpless. As they gather around their kitchen table, the Gabriels talk and live more fully than most media and politicians ever really believe of those they describe and rule. Nelson has said his aim is “verisimilitude”, a seemingly modest ambition which wonderfully succeeds.Like Nelson’s The Apple Family Plays, seen at the 2015 Read more ...
bella.todd
Dream palace, cesspit and church; celebrated, mopped (by Marlene Dietrich, no less) and fucked: Brighton’s Theatre Royal has seen a whole lot of history, of both the splendid and the seedy variety. Now it has found a magnificent if unlikely mouthpiece in the form of post-modern cabaret star Meow Meow. In the opening moments of her new song-cycle, inspired by the theatre’s half-remembered and misreported past, she clambers through the stalls trailing yards of historical costume, retrieves a page of script from her cleavage, and pinches an EXIT sign to use in the absence of stage lights.With “ Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
There may never have been a time when Shakespeare’s Richard III did not have contemporary relevance, but surely never more than it does right now. And it’s to the credit of director Mehmet Ergen that this production doesn’t go to town on it, but instead leaves the audience to make its own connections. From the start, Richard of York is shown to be a misogynist and a sociopath who is prepared to say anything, do anything to attain the seat of power. To borrow the words of a New Yorker profile of a certain presidential hopeful, his is “an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul”.Greg Read more ...
Matt Wolf
You have to hand it to Felicity Kendal: this ever-game actress is fearless about treading in the footsteps of the British theatre's grandes dames. In 2006, she starred on the West End quite creditably in Amy's View, inheriting a part originated on both sides of the Atlantic by Judi Dench. And here Kendal is at that ongoing West End incubator, the Menier Chocolate Factory, reviving the 1987 play, Lettice and Lovage, that the late Peter Shaffer wrote as an extravagant bouquet for his beloved Maggie Smith. The flowers on this occasion, alas, are starting to wilt. The problem partly rests Read more ...
bella.todd
A whacking great story has gone largely untold in British theatre: the legacy of colonialism in India, including the cultural ghosts the British left behind. With the 70th anniversary of Indian independence just round the corner this summer, poet and playwright Siddhartha Bose has set out to address this "historical amnesia". Premiering at Brighton Festival ahead of a UK tour, No Dogs, No Indians shuffles three periods in Indian history and aims to deal big questions about the values of remembering and forgetting, resisting and assimilating, loving and leaving. Let’s just say we had the word Read more ...
Heather Neill
Never mind breaking the fourth wall, Joe Wright and the Young Vic have smashed the other three as well. This isn’t simply because their engaging production of Life of Galileo, demonstrating the struggle between science and prevailing authority, is played in the round, but because the audience is such an integral part of the proceedings. To begin with, characters pop up from among spectators sitting in the circle under an enormous ceiling disc which will later act as a cosmic screen or Renaissance dome, but actors also address the audience (even once name-checking the director) as the action Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This monologue first saw the light of day at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2015. It's a frank – very frank – piece about female sexuality by an anonymous heterosexual female author, performed by a different male comic each night, who reads it sight unseen.The piece begins with the author explaining the kind of man whom she finds attractive; “chiselled jaw line, nicely formed butt, facial hair”. It's a terrifically sly piece of male objectification, of course, and a reminder, should we need it, that women have had to put up with this nonsense for a very long time. And then she goes on to describe Read more ...