Theatre
alexandra.coghlan
Simon McBurney and Complicite have made plays about many things – maths, circuses, immigration, Japan, old age – but, at core, they’re all really about the same subject: storytelling. Their latest project is no different. The Encounter takes its audience into the remote depths of the Brazilian rainforest, beyond language and civilisation, but the narrative that emerges is one about tale-telling and the connections we forge through stories, empathy and imagination.Taking the story of American photography Loren McIntyre, and his extraordinary account of his expedition to document the Amazon’s Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Satire, we’re solemnly instructed in Dougal Irvine’s new musical The Busker's Opera, “has to strike a fine balance of entertainment and teaching”. Well yes, but it’s also generally wise (discretion, valour, and all that) to keep the theatrical crib sheet to yourself, just in case your product doesn’t quite measure up. This latest show from the award-winning composer and lyricist of Departure Lounge and Britain’s Got Bhangra leads with its chin, and despite energy and bags of insouciant confidence, can’t quite pull off the pose.John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera was a nose-thumbing attack on the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Joe Penhall first thwacked his way to the attention of British theatregoers more than 20 years ago with a series of plays about schizos and psychos and wackos. An iconoclastic laureate of lithium, his early hit Some Voices (1994), about a care-in-the-community schizophrenic, went on to be filmed starring Daniel Craig. In 2000 he returned to the subject in Blue/Orange.The play was first performed at the National’s Cottesloe Theatre and introduced Chiwetel Ejiofor as Christopher, a young man from a White City estate who has been sectioned under the Mental Health Act. He's about to be discharged Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Smoke and Mirrors is a show based around circus skills. It’s by the Ricochet Project, a performing unit consisting of Berlin-based US performers Cohdi Harrell and Laura Stokes. However, those expecting a spectacle offering visual pizzazz and the occasional laugh will be disappointed. These two are not clowning. Smoke and Mirrors is full of physical skill, precise choreography and attitude, but the 55-minute piece, which won an award for Best Circus at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival, is overwhelmingly stone-faced serious. It's not so much circus as an amalgamation of contemporary dance Read more ...
bella.todd
Of all the 400th anniversary tributes to Shakespeare, this ramble through an allotment just outside Brighton has to be one of the oddest, and most unexpectedly moving. Brighton Festival has a reputation for site-specific work, rediscovering secret pockets of the city and surroundings. This year it’s the turn of Roedale Allotments, a sprawling site of 200-plus plots hidden within a tree-lined valley. It’s a ramshackle rural idyll with a distant twinkle of the sea.Artist Marc Rees stumbled upon this “horticultural, higgledy-piggledy metropolis” a couple of years ago. He had been looking for Read more ...
bella.todd
You’ve arrived at a party in a pub, tagging along with a guy you just met. You’re attempting to catch the barman’s eye, while scouting for a friendly face. The band declares that everyone must dance to the next one, and you wish you’d ordered a double. A man you’d like to speak with keeps walking past, but you can’t think of a single opening line. This situation is seriously awkward. And that’s before you factor in the real reason you’re here.A collaboration between immersive theatre company Hydrocracker and interactive media artists Blast Theory, Operation Black Antler is a piece of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In his last minutes as the artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, Dominic Dromgoole took to the stage to reflect on his years at the helm. Behind him was the cast of Hamlet, home after two years on the road playing to audiences from every country on the planet. He acknowledged his predecessor Mark Rylance, who waved a hat from the throng of groundlings, and then pointed up to the circle where his successor Emma Rice was greeted with gales of welcoming applause.Rice has made clear her intention to stir things up. Her opening production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream recasts Helena as Helenus Read more ...
aleks.sierz
There’s something endlessly fascinating about T E Lawrence. In popular culture, he has been immortalised by Peter O’Toole’s dazzlingly blue-eyed performance in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, but is there more to this English eccentric than freedom fighting on the side of the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks? Howard Brenton certainly thinks so, and his portrait of this strange, curiously unworldly and painfully conflicted character is, like its hero, full of great potential, much of which it fails to realise.It’s 1923, and Lawrence has returned from the Middle East, now a national hero Read more ...
Marianka Swain
In this 400th anniversary year, amid what feels like 400 million shows and tributes, it’s increasingly difficult for a Shakespeare production to stand out. No such problem for Emma Rice’s opening salvo, which responds to those critical of her appointment in resolute fashion. Never thought you’d see fireman’s poles, amplification, Indian sitar and disco lights at the Globe? Think again.Rice’s Dream honours the spirit of the building without feeling bound by its period-perfect architecture. Rather than Athens, we are in the here and now, with Hippolyta a leopard print-clad Russian bride, Read more ...
bella.todd
If Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes were (a lot) more like Ibsen, our national viewing habits would be in good hands. But then, as the hero of An Enemy of the People discovers, presuming to know what’s good for the public is a dangerous game. In his first full stage role in 12 years, the Earl of Grantham, AKA Hugh Bonneville, returns to his local Chichester Festival Theatre as a whistleblower who thinks he’s doing his town a favour. Come the fifth act of Ibsen’s political comedy, he’s been driven out of job, house and inheritance and is fighting off the mayor with an umbrella.This is a Read more ...
David Nice
You rarely see a full production of Shakespeare's dream play so magical it brings tears to the eyes. But then you don't often get 42 players and 14 voices joining the cast to adorn the text with Mendelssohn's bewitching incidental music, plus the Overture composed 16 years earlier – certainly the most perfect masterpiece ever written by a 17-year-old. Add a fluent ensemble of actors, a sense of high style in costume design and, above a simple stage with audience on three sides and the orchestra on the fourth, a hammerbeam oak forest in the very hall where Twelfth Night had its first known Read more ...
David Kettle
And so, it’s farewell to Mark Thomson with his final production as artistic director of Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre, after 13 years in the job (incoming artistic director David Grieg unveils his new season next week). With Homer’s The Iliad, in a new dramatisation by Clydebank-born playwright Chris Hannan, Thomson is going out with a bang – it’s a big, bold show that tackles one of our culture-defining myths, albeit a lesser-known one (‘the greatest story never told" is how the goddess Hera describes it within the play itself). And while their Iliad has got its flaws, you can’t help but admire Read more ...