Theatre
Jenny Gilbert
As settings for musical comedy go, this one promised some boom for your buck. Las Vegas in the early 1950s was just emerging as a magnet not only for hedonists and gamblers, mobsters and showgirls, but also for the personnel of America’s Atomic Energy Commission, engaged in fortnightly A-bomb tests over the Nevada desert.Too bad that this fascinating scenario should be squandered on a run-of-the-mill show that scurries frantically from one well-worn musical-comedy trope to another without once pausing to reflect on the wider issues. In 1952 the words “mutually assured destruction” hadn’t yet Read more ...
David Kettle
Seldom can the suggestion of a post-show discussion have seemed so… well, unappealing is probably the polite way of putting it. Because discussion is precisely what Glasgow-based theatre company Vanishing Point’s devastating new show The Destroyed Room is all about – an hour of middle-class, liberal hand-wringing, of batting issues back and forth, weighing, challenging and rejecting opinions. And of showing up our delight at observing and our eagerness to express views, but also our inability to act on them. And, of course, of never arriving at a solution. Because, director Matthew Lenton is Read more ...
Gary Raymond
Kaite O’Reilly’s new play is a dark dark comedy, a Chekhovian family saga on a mainly bare stage that handles its subjects of aging, death and family with a rich and grounded intellectualism to be expected of the playwright’s work. The production itself skips lightly along the thin line that separates reality from a discomfiting dreamscape, the waiting room: everyone is waiting, for death, for life, for family members to arrive. It is an ominous comedy.We are meant to believe that this is a family reunion – and the interaction of aged, unlikeable matriach Rose, her three grown-up daughters, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Shorter feels longer in the West End iteration of Motown the Musical, a minor-league jukebox venture that became a Broadway hit courtesy of an unbeatable back catalogue – keep those hits coming! – and a well-drilled production that at least delivered what it promised on the tin. Despite trims for London, the production feels more attenuated and looks markedly less polished, even if there remains little doubt that people who go expecting to rock out to the world-class sequence of hits won't hesitate to do precisely that. On second viewing, the relentless gesture of self-hagiography that Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Birdwatching is not the most thrilling subject for a drama. In fact, next to watching paint dry, it is probably the poorer option. So there is something wonderfully clever and theatrically brilliant about Robert Holman’s 1977 play, which takes place at a popular birdwatching spot overlooking the mouth of the Tees, a location around which several lives meet and connect. You can see why this 90-minute play won Holman the prestigious George Devine Award, and it’s great that it has finally been revived in an absorbing touring production by Alice Hamilton for Up in Arms theatre company.Holman is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An innocently-intended Friday night out turns into something fearsome indeed in I See You, a Royal Court co-production with the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, that puts the tensions of post-apartheid South Africa under a sorrowful microscope.At the same time, the interval-free, 80-minute staging marks the directorial debut of the Olivier Award-winning actress Noma Dumezweni, here suggesting that the soon-to-be Hermione of this summer's Harry Potter plays possesses yet further strings to her considerable bow. (The performer made headlines at this address late last year when she stepped with Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It’s often remarked that are no new stories, only old stories retold. The French playwright Jean Anouihl got the idea for his first play from a French newspaper report of 1919, about a young man who turned up on a railway platform with no knowledge of who he was or how he came to be there. In the wake of the story’s publication, hundreds of bereaved families came forward to claim the unknown soldier as their own.Now Anthony Weigh – an associate writer at the Donmar – offers his “new version” of Anouilh’s Le Voyageur sans bagage. It turns out to be a thorough rewrite, with added Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Hurray, the two-part epic wizard-fest Harry Potter and the Cursed Child lands in the West End this summer, and its playwright is the ever-versatile Jack Thorne (who also successfully adapted the vampire romance Let the Right One In for the stage). But audiences who’d like to enjoy Thorne at his thorniest, rather than most Rowlingesque, might prefer to take a look at this, his 2015 two-hander about a couple and their loss of a child. It’s a Hogwarts-free zone and its main emotional fuel is horrific loss coupled with courageous honesty. Strictly for adults only.Like any romcom, the story of Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“Murder is hilarious,” quips Zawe Ashton’s scheming maid, and in Jamie Lloyd’s high-octane, queasily comic revival of Jean Genet’s radical 1947 play, it really is. It’s also lurid, strange, bleak and powerfully transcendent, as befits a piece that locates hunger for creation and liberation in the imitation and destruction of another. Lloyd employs Benedict Andrews and Andrew Upton’s salty new translation – the latter’s wife, Cate Blanchett, led a 2013 Sydney Theatre Company production – to emphasise the unflinching modernity of Genet’s piece, which uses and unmasks theatrical Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A prevailing sense of farewell ripples through this closing production in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse's hugely welcome season of Shakespeare's final quartet of plays. That valedictory feel is traditionally true of The Tempest, a text commonly regarded as Shakespeare's own leave-taking and one that here also marks the final staging after a decade at the helm of the venue's sure-to-be-missed artistic director Dominic Dromgoole, who now hands over the reins to Emma Rice.It's tempting, of course, at such moments to view the staging itself as some sort of summary achievement whereby a director's Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Shakespeare’s plays have proved remarkably resilient to everything that’s been thrown at them down the years, including – in the case of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its flowery bowers and fairies – cloying Victorian whimsy. Peter Brook’s white box production in 1970 effectively Tippexed out that option for the late 20th century. In turn, this version by the touring company Filter has put down a marker for the 21st.Premiered at the Lyric in 2012, and now back there after a long tour, it shows, as never before, how hootingly funny this play can be – and not just in the Mechanicals’ scenes. Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Theatregoers suffering from First World War fatigue may want to pass on Jonathan Lynn’s merely competent historical drama about two mythic figures: Charles de Gaulle and Philippe Pétain. It’s a fascinating subject – de Gaulle had his former mentor tried for treason in 1945 after Pétain led France into Nazi collaboration – but Yes Minister co-creator Lynn, who also directs, seems unsure whether it warrants winking satire or solemn historical re-enactment, settling for a fitfully engaging hybrid.The relationship began in 1913, with de Gaulle supporting Pétain's (Tom Conti) unpopular Read more ...