Theatre
David Nice
An amplified crunch in the dark, sound without vision, kicks off this take on Moss Hart and George S Kaufman's light comedy about the advent of the talking pictures. It's a typical Richard Jones leitmotif, not as fraught with horror as the baked beans of his Wozzeck or the spinning top in his Royal Opera Boris Godunov. This, bathetically, is merely the noise of "Indian" nuts being consumed by the play's holy fool George Lewis, an idiot everyone thinks is savant. The effect is sparely operated thereafter. But then nothing needs overegging in this piece of perfectly-executed seasonal froth. Two Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When Shakespeare visits the bearpit of the West End, it is usually in the company of a big name: Judi Dench, Sheridan Smith, Martin Freeman. This Christmas the bard enters the Theatre Royal, Haymarket without any such support. And there is a further hurdle to clear: Love’s Labour’s Lost is barely ever been seen outside the subsidised sector. It forms part of a pair which audiences might take a moment to get their head around: Much Ado About Nothing is presented as its Shakespearean twin called Love’s Labour’s Won.The double bill began at Stratford in 2014. The shows, set either Read more ...
Heather Neill
The cry "Let's pretend" must have been heard often when J M Barrie played with the Llewelyn Davies boys in Kensington Gardens or at Black Lake Cottage in Surrey. The five sons of Arthur and Sylvia, orphaned as children and adopted by Barrie, almost all had tragic lives: George died in Flanders in 1915, Michael drowned at Oxford, Peter later committed suicide. But during childhood they escaped into piratical adventures and an invented Neverland with "Uncle Jim".It is inevitable that Barrie's own strange childhood story should be scrutinised alongside his possessive interest in the Llewelyn Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
What stroke of prescience brought two Sam Shepard plays to London in the very month America voted for Trump? The kind of people we’re learning to call the disenfranchised have been Shepard’s focus for the last 40 years, and now they’re global news. In Fool for Love (which there’s still time to catch at the pop-up venue Found III) he exposed the grubby truth behind the working-class alpha-male ideal. In Buried Child (which won a Pulitzer on its first outing in 1978) he turned his X-ray gaze on the traditional American family.The USP of this revival is its casting, with Ed Harris, Hollywood Read more ...
Ismene Brown
This House arrives in the West End with magic timing - a comedy about the farcical horrors of being a government with a wafer-thin majority, frantically wheeling out dying, suicidal and breastfeeding MPs to vote, horsetrading with "odds and sods" to keep their nails on power. James Graham’s play about the 1970s Labour travails, produced by the National Theatre/Chichester Festival, opened in 2012 to a mixed reception, but its reappearance on Charing Cross Road acquired some serendipitous overnight oomph as Tory fellow-traveller Zac Goldsmith lost his seat to the Lib Dems yesterday, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For anyone disposed to treat the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse as hallowed ground – and such issues have gained much currency at the Globe recently following the announced early departure of artistic director Emma Rice – The Little Matchgirl may seem like a wanton deconstruction of its space, which is cheeked into a knowing update that comes close to Edwardian music hall, and with aperçus stingingly relevant to the venue’s recent backstory (“Candles are much more atmospheric than electricity” is one such textual quip). For those less reverentially inclined, this adaptation of Hans Christian Read more ...
Kelly Hunter
“I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, Were it not that I have bad dreams…” 2016, with all its protectionist voting, has been the year I’ve taken my production of Hamlet – with just six actors, a sofa and a drum-kit – around Europe. Having visited everything from a thunderstruck Kronborg Castle in Elsinore to an ancient Spanish bullring beset with fireworks, we will land at the Trafalgar Studios at the beginning of December with the roar and encouragement of our continental neighbours ringing in our ears.I began writing this adaptation of Hamlet three Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Coalitions make for drama, and for comedy. We know that from, respectively, Borgen and the final series of The Thick of It. It is little wonder therefore that soon after the 2010 election delivered a hung Parliament, the National Theatre commissioned a play. And yet the drama that emerged was not about deals struck in back rooms by the Cameron-Clegg government. Instead, This House spirits its audience back to 1974, the year Labour embarked on five years’ of horse-trading as it sought to govern the country with an overall majority of three.James Graham was born in 1982, the year of the Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Mark Rylance was once renowned for skipping thank yous to agents, friends and everyone he’s ever met in award speeches and instead giving us a blast of Minnesotan prose poet Louis Jenkins. Now the two men have co-created an oddball meditation, first seen in New York earlier this year, in which comedy meets soul-searching on an untethered frozen lake.Rylance the writer has given Rylance the actor a typically Rylance part: charmingly guileless and gormless Ron, the loquacious and gently dotty companion of serious fisherman Erik (Jim Lichtscheidl), whose suffering of this irksome presence Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Over the past decade, one new theme in particular has emerged in contemporary British new writing: generational conflict. In several bright new offerings – such as James Graham’s The Whisky Taster (2010) and Mike Bartlett’s Love, Love, Love (2012) – the baby boomers are condemned for having a cushy lifestyle while their kids, the millennials, are having a hard time (indebted, homeless and underemployed). Play after play asks: will the new generation ever enjoy the same living standards as their parents? Lucy Kirkwood’s latest, a follow up to her big 2013 hit Chimerica, is the newest, rather Read more ...
james.woodall
If you are new to the Donmar Warehouse all-female stagings of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Henry IV – 2012 and 2014 respectively – the biggest surprise is not so much that these highly masculine dramas are performed entirely by women. It is their being set in a prison. With the long-planned trilogy now rounded off with The Tempest, which has premiered in the Donmar’s purpose-built 420-seater just north of King’s Cross, the device has attained lock-stock-and-barrel totality.The acting space is a square, with steeply raked seating on each side. Behind the last row runs prison caging, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
At the conclusion of a year in which Britishness has come so resoundingly to the fore of the national debate – and with a play that at the time of its writing, 1605-6, was engaging with that concept no less urgently – the first impression made by Gregory Doran’s King Lear is how far removed it looks from any traditional sense of "British".That's the case not least in Niki Turner’s design, which moves from an introductory tableau of hunched figures and a noise like the rumbling of a ship’s engine room to reveal a minimalist, brick wall-backed space. Black dominates – Cordelia’s virgin white Read more ...