Theatre
aleks.sierz
Playwright Nick Payne has carved out a distinctive dramatic territory – neuroscience. In his big 2012 hit, Constellations, he explored the effect on memory of living with a brain tumour, while two years later in Incognito, the story of what happened to Albert Einstein’s brain was married to the case of a man who had parts of his grey matter removed to cure his epileptic seizures. Now Payne returns to the fertile landscape of inner space with a story about a lesbian couple who, when one of them fails ill with a dangerous cerebral condition, benefit from rapid advances in medical science.Set in Read more ...
bella.todd
Smoking weed on the Orient Express. Drinking at a brothel in Paris. Tricking the military police in Istanbul. Smuggling a Da Vinci into Paraguay. As travel itineraries go, it’s certainly no Saga break. But then Graham Greene’s Augusta is no ordinary literary aunt. The antidote to Oscar Wilde’s Augusta Bracknell, Greene’s 75-year-old heroine is a lusty free spirit who terrorises Victorian values and turns her nose up at the law. Having reentered her nephew’s life at what he supposes to be his mother’s funeral, she co-opts this retired bank manager as her travelling companion and tears him away Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The Cotton Blossom looks mighty fine in its latest London iteration, Daniel Evans's winning Sheffield Theatre revival of Show Boat joining the ongoing runs of Guys and Dolls and Funny Girl to offer West End audiences a synoptic view of Broadway musical history. And surely no Broadway title remains more iconic than this one – the 1927 collaboration between Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern that set the musical form on course towards a level of maturity and daring that few up until that time would have thought possible.But which Show Boat to stage? That as ever remains the question with a Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Blood, sexual violence, power games and lashings of nudity. Not Game of Thrones, whose new season has just premiered (yes, he’s really dead. Well, for now) – and whose shadow Kit Harington is trying to escape – but Jamie Lloyd’s graphic take on Marlowe. It’s a production determined to hold your attention, and, thanks to its comic carnival of excess, largely successful in that pursuit. However, like the magic tricks bestowed on its soul-selling protagonist, it’s rather more flash than substance.This is iFaustus, with an up-to-the-minute version of the play’s contested middle section from Colin Read more ...
David Nice
Banished from the Barbican are the hollow kings of the mediocre RSC Henrys IV and V. In their place comes a whole new procession of living, breathing monarchs in a vision that's light years away from bad heritage Shakespeare. Doyen of Dutch-Belgian - and world - theatre Ivo van Hove has filleted Henry V, the three Henry VI plays and Richard III to create his own trilogy of Greek-tragedy leanness and power, focusing above all on the totally different characters of three men making crucial decisions in times of civil, internecine and international war. Shakespeare, whose language remains intact Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Today marks 400 years since the death of William Shakespeare. To celebrate this and, indeed, put the two together, the Brighton Festival 2016 commissioned The Complete Deaths, a show based around the 74 deaths that take place onstage in the work of the most renowned playwright in history. It's a collaborative effort between physical theatre group Spymonkey and theatrical innovator Tim Crouch, both acclaimed Brighton talents. Here, digging deeper into this morbid, poignant, and sometimes unexpectedly comic subject matter, Tim Crouch reveals, exclusively for theartsdesk, his own Top 10 Deaths Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Vaudeville is having quite the West End moment, with Funny Girl inheriting the Savoy from Gypsy and Mrs Henderson Presents over at the Noël Coward. Gypsy is the pick of the bunch dramatically, delivering theatre history with real psychological heft, but Sheridan Smith’s luminous Fanny Brice gives Funny Girl a fighting chance. She’s such a natural vaudevillian that you begin to wonder if she’s somehow been transported from another age.Smith isn’t a vocal match for original Fanny Barbra Streisand (who is?), though the loss of otherworldly balladry actually makes for a more convincing Read more ...
Marianka Swain
A Pulitzer Prize and numerous walkouts: The Flick, infamously, courts extreme reactions. Yet this latest American import is dedicated to minutiae. In Annie Baker’s slow-burning (three hours-plus), microscopic epic, her lens is trained on ordinary people, mundane tasks, arid pauses and inarticulate speech that trails… off.Though this may initially seem like indulgent anti-drama, the brilliance of Baker’s strategy soon becomes clear. We become so attuned to life in the rundown movie theatre in Worcester County, Massachusetts that the smallest alteration feels like a seismic shift. The Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Charlotte Keatley’s 1987 feminist classic is one of the most often performed plays by a woman writer. It is typical of its time in that this story of four generations of women in one family not only explores the theme of mothers and daughters, but does so with an innovative and experimental approach to theatre form. This revival by the ever-enterprising St James Theatre stars national treasure Maureen Lipman, along with Olivier-Award winner Katie Brayben, who created the lead role in Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.The plot of Keatley’s play has a lovely elegance: Doris, who was born out Read more ...
mark.kidel
Andrew Hilton’s new production of All’s Well That Ends Well makes the most of the complexities of a "problem play", neither comedy nor tragedy, and navigates this startling mix of emotional depth and light farce with great deftness. This is Shakespeare as master trickster, playing with narrative genres, the tricks of his characters matching the sleight of hand and suspension of disbelief displayed in a story that combines the simple manicheism and magic of fairy tale with the realities of gender politics, reflections on the inconstancy of human nature and the inifinite and sometimes Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The playwright Anders Lustgarten has spent a considerable chunk of his life reading and writing and thinking about China, and clearly wants to set a few points straight. Tired of the persistent Western view of that country and its people as inscrutable and mysterious, and exasperated by what he sees as the clumsy anti-Maoist propaganda of popular works such Jung Chan’s Wild Swans, he has written a play that looks at the effects of the Mao years on a gaggle of ordinary people in one ordinary village – the fictional rural backwater Rotten Peach.The thrust of his argument is that the Chinese Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Why do young British Muslims go to join the so-called Islamic State? Since the entire media has been grappling with this question for ages now, it is a bit puzzling to see our flagship National Theatre giving the subject an airing, especially as this is a verbatim drama, which uses the actual words of interviewees, and is thus not so very different from ordinary journalism. But if Gillian Slovo’s Another World: Losing Our Children to Islamic State aspires to be a stage piece, how does it work?The interviewees’ accounts are never questionedThe 95-minute show begins with examples of IS Read more ...