Theatre
aleks.sierz
Theatre increasingly uses digital delights to enhance audience enjoyment. And you can easily see why. Visual effects that mimic the experience of plunging into virtual reality inject a much-needed wow factor into otherwise quite mundane stories. And if there are plenty of British companies who use such effects, currently it’s American playwrights, such as Jennifer Haley, who are leading the way in the art of the eye-popping visual. The latest arrival - at the National Theatre - is Lindsey Ferrentino’s play, Ugly Lies the Bone, which was first staged in New York a couple of years ago and now Read more ...
David Nice
There's no reason why ruffs and candles shouldn't mesh with bursts of contemporary speech, song and lighting, given a defter hand than director Ellen McDougall's. Shakespeare's timeless issues of racism and sexism have plenty of mileage in them, though in less skewed proportions than they find here. Many of this production's components are promising, but the whole is a strident mess.None of this is the fault of the admirable Othello, Kurt Egyiawan. Noble and low-voiced in fine speech for the opening Venice act, he also makes us aware of a man on edge and alert to slights about his skin, which Read more ...
Heather Neill
In a few days' time, Ellen McDougall will become artistic director of the dynamic little Gate Theatre in Notting Hill where she is already an associate artist. She's not taking it easy in the run-up to her new responsibilities though: her production of Othello in the Globe's bijou indoor theatre, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, opens this week with Kurt Egyiawan in the title role, Natalie Klamar as Desdemona and a female Cassio, Joanna Horton.McDougall had considerable success with her playful production of Idomeneus at the Gate in 2014 and was associate director there for two years from 2012. Read more ...
David Nice
How often do you leave a production of Shakespeare's most layered drama in tears, thinking "what an astonishing play!" even more than "what a fine Hamlet!" (or not)? Last night the Bard proved even greater than his Dane. Not that Andrew Scott was ever less than mesmerising and unpredictable. But it was Robert Icke, a director you might expect to play fast and loose with text and structure, who in giving us more Hamlet than most these days respected the slow burn and the long vision, with a few surprises but no gimmicks on the journey.Scott will not disappoint either his huge fan club or Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's something to be said for encountering a playwright fresh out of the starting gate. Since his debut play Speech & Debate premiered Off Broadway almost a decade ago, Stephen Karam has gone on to write two altogether wonderful plays, the most recent of which, The Humans, won last year's Tony. This fledgling effort isn't in that league but has its charms, and Tom Attenborough's defibrillator production further marks out the fast-rising Patsy Ferran as a talent busily making her own way towards the big time. Ferran's success in the play's pivotal part of Diwata is doubly notable Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“The nine men’s morris is filled up with mud, and the quaint mazes in the wanton green for lack of tread are undistinguishable.” Titania may mourn the landscape withered by her conflict with Oberon, but games and mazes hold no interest for director Joe Hill-Gibbins. His A Midsummer Night’s Dream has put aside such childish things (along with fairies and clean trousers), burying them deep in a pit of mud that spans the entire breadth of the Young Vic – a slippery stage for a very messy exploration of love.After the jelly smearing of The Changeling and the sex dolls that dominated Measure for Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Everybody’s a little bit gay in Simon Godwin’s giddy new Twelfth Night at the National Theatre. From Andrew Aguecheek, vibrant in candy-coloured check, cuddling up to Sir Toby, and Antonio’s aggressive affection to Sebastian, to Orsino’s passionate snog with the wrong sibling after the big reveal and the lustful looks from Tamsin Greig's repressed Malvolia towards the lovely Olivia (who still can’t keep her eyes off Viola), all’s queer in love and war, it seems. The effect? A stylish sexual free-for-all, with plenty of laughs and just the occasional jarring note.Because while Godwin is busy Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Why? That's the abiding question that hangs over The Girls, the sluggish and entirely pro forma Tim Firth-Gary Barlow musical that goes where Firth's film and stage play of Calendar Girls have already led. Telling of a charitable impulse that succeeded beyond all expectations, the real-life scenario makes for heartening fare in our seemingly heartless times. But the fact remains that this latest version of the narrative brings very little that is fresh to the table, unless you're so desperate for a new British musical at any cost that its mere existence is justification enough. As Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The 1980s were a great decade for British women playwrights. During those Thatcher-dominated years, Caryl Churchill produced two world-class masterpieces – Top Girls and Serious Money – while a host of other playwrights, such as Timberlake Wertenbaker, April De Angelis, Charlotte Keatley, Sarah Daniels, Winsome Pinnock and Andrea Dunbar lit up our stages. Many of them experimented boldly with the structure of their plays, using time shifts and different storytelling techniques to give a forceful picture of women’s life experiences.The central event of the play happens offstageThe late Clare Read more ...
Will Rathbone
Hot on the heels of Katherine Soper's award-winning Wish List, about the UK benefits system in crisis, and John Godber's This Might Hurt, about an NHS in crisis, comes this play about our education system in crisis. One suspects there will be plenty more plays about comparable flashpoints to come, but the passionate arguments found within Alex MacKeith's somewhat over-zealous debut play definitely hit home. Set in the headteacher's office of a south London primary school on SAT results day, the play vividly outlines the dilemmas at its heart. Schools must adhere to rigid systems based on Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The Other Palace’s housewarming party certainly lives up to its billing as a wild one – wet and wild, in fact, as the first three rows are sporadically doused with bathtub gin. The theatre formerly known as St James, revamped by purchaser Andrew Lloyd Webber as a breeding ground for musicals, opens with the UK premiere of an established show: Michael John LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe’s 2000 version of Joseph Moncure March’s initially banned narrative poem about the excesses of the vaudevillian Roaring Twenties.Curiously, Andrew Lippa provided a competing musical take on March’s tale in the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Sex workers come in all shapes and sizes. Everyone knows that. But why do they do it? Why does anyone take the risk of being intimate with a stranger for money? This new show, which was not only devised with the help of genuine prostitutes, but is also acted by them, introduces us to both the enormous variety of sex workers and to their wide range of motives. The play, which was created by director Mimi Poskitt and playwright Molly Taylor, takes us by the hand and gently ushers us into a darkened room, designed by Katrina Lindsay, to show us a slice of life that is mainly invisible to most of Read more ...