Theatre
David Kettle
Time travel, Britpop, Sleeping Beauty. Classical ballet, the ravages of alcoholism, serial poisoning. There’s plenty going on in Douglas Maxwell’s idiosyncratic Charlie Sonata at Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre – so much, in fact, that it’s hard to know what it all adds up to.Girvan-born Maxwell is known for his poignant dissections of contemporary issues – he had big Fringe hits in the early 2000s with Decky Does a Bronco and Our Bad Magnet, plus plenty of well-received productions since then. Charlie Sonata feels like his most ambitious offering so far, but also his most uneven. It’s clearly a Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Arts Desk is delighted to announce a new partnership with The Hospital Club in Covent Garden. There are plenty of private members club in central London, but The Hospital Club is uniquely a creative hub with its own television studio, gallery and performance space, which for certain events are open to non-members.The Hospital Club, which takes its name from the hospital built on the same site in Endell Street in 1749, puts considerable effort into supporting the arts and media. The most tangible evidence of this is its own annual awards for innovative achievements in the creative Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It’s a bigly Trump-fest over at the Donmar, with adaptor Bruce Norris determined to make Brecht great again – or at least pointedly contemporary. Despite a legal disclaimer in the knowing prologue, the current tangerine regime looms large, replacing (or indeed merging with) Hitler as the main target in this parable of emerging demagoguery, set in Thirties gangland Chicago.All the Trump greatest hits are here, covered by Lenny Henry (pictured below with Simon Holland Roberts and Philip Cumbus) in the title role, from “nasty woman”, “losers”, “paid protestors” and “I have all the best words” to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Jez Butterworth is back. Even before the critics have uttered a single word of praise The Ferryman, directed by Sam Mendes and set in rural Derry in 1981 at the height of the IRA hunger strikes, sold out its run at the Royal Court in hours. It transfers to the West End in June. That’s good news for British theatregoers. in 2012, the last time Butterworth had a new play at the Court, almost no one saw it: The River starring Dominic West ran for three weeks in the theatre’s tiny upstairs space. Two years later it turned up on Broadway with Hugh Jackman in the lead.Will The Ferryman match the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
After the first preview of Mike Leigh’s play Two Thousand Years at the National Theatre, a young Guardian reporter accosted an audience member for his view of the play. The audience member gave his name as Nigel Shapps, his age as 42, his background as Jewish, and his opinion that it was one of the most brilliant things he’d ever seen. Much to Leigh’s delight, he was quoted in the paper the next day.Nigel Shapps was in fact Nicholas Hytner, the artistic director who commissioned the play. The reporter hadn’t recognised him. An easy mistake. “I have no idea who you are Read more ...
Stephen Unwin
“I’ve got a terrible confession to make”, I said to my long-suffering partner who had been away for the weekend with our young daughter. “Oh yes,” I could see her thinking, “what have you done now?” “Well, I’ve written a play about the Nazi persecution of the disabled,” was my shifty reply. The truth is it’s such a disgusting subject, I was almost ashamed of what I’d done.All Our Children has its roots in historical fact. I’d been reading Richard Evans’s remarkable three-part history of the Third Reich and was fascinated and moved by his account of the deeply conservative and aristocratic Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Martin Crimp’s 1993 satirical epic, The Treatment, is a fabulous work, but it’s rarely revived. Although much of his back catalogue – especially Attempts on Her Life (1997) – has been revisited, The Treatment has often been ignored, perhaps on account of its large cast, or because of its large scale. Now that the Almeida Theatre has decided to stage this story of how art cannibalises life we have the chance to judge its relevance 25 years after its premiere.Set in New York, the play tells the story of Anne, a young woman whose husband, Simon, likes to tie her up, silencing her with Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Everything in extremity”. That announcement that the Capulet party is about to begin could just as well serve to describe Daniel Kramer’s Romeo and Juliet as a whole. Opening the Globe's new season, it will provoke reactions as conflicting as the play’s warring families. Purists will pan it, that’s for sure, while fans may welcome a fiery energy that melds in considerable comedy. There’s precious little room for any in-between.The party scene says it all. It’s played out to Village People’s “YMCA”. Capulet is clad in a dinosaur suit (he’s accompanied through most of the action by a human dog Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Duncan Macmillan has had a good couple of years. In 2015, his play People, Places and Things was a big hit at the National Theatre, winning awards and transferring to the West End. His other plays, often produced by new-writing company Paines Plough, have been regular fixtures at the Edinburgh Festival, while his co-adaptation (with director Robert Icke) of George Orwell’s classic Nineteen Eighty-Four has been constantly revived in the West End. Now he tackles novelist Paul Auster’s masterpiece in a show that is visually intensive, as well as intellectually satisfying. City of Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
There is a distinctive look, feel, even sound to a stage production directed by Ivo van Hove, which is becoming rather familiar to London theatregoers after two cult hits, A View From the Bridge and Hedda Gabler. You know you’re in van Hovenland as soon as you see the modishly empty stage which before long one of the characters will trash, leaving everyone to wade through detritus for the rest of the play. Long stretches of dialogue will be underscored by music, looped so that the same cadence comes round and round again like toothache. You will also hear unnerving rhythmic sounds that can’t Read more ...
Julian Curry
Much of the brilliance of Shakespeare lies in the openness, or ambiguity, of his texts. Whereas a novelist will often describe a character, an action or a scene in the most minute detail, Shakespeare knew that his scenarios would only be fully fleshed out when actors perform them. He was the first writer to create character out of language. Falstaff has an idiosyncratic way of speaking that is quite distinct from Juliet, as she does from Shylock, and he from Lady Macbeth. An actor receives subliminal clues about their character, merely by the way they express themselves.George Bernard Shaw Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Text can sometimes be a prison. At its best, post-war British theatre is a writer’s theatre, with the great pensmiths – from Samuel Beckett, John Osborne and Harold Pinter to Caryl Churchill, Martin Crimp and Sarah Kane – carving out visions of everyday humanity in all our agonies and glee. But the mountain of written words that they have built is only a part of the live theatre experience, and it is increasingly being questioned by playwrights themselves. Now at the Royal Court, Simon Stephens, author of the West End hit adaptation The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, offers Read more ...