Theatre
aleks.sierz
Be careful what you wish for. I’ve often moaned about the fact that British theatre is too naturalistic, and that its stagings are too banal, full of quotidian detail and a specific sense of place, but strangers to the wildness of the imagination. So I have found myself wishing for more exciting settings, and bolder directing. And here at last comes one solution to the miseries of naturalism – a boldly staged revival of master penman Simon Stephens’s 2001 play, Herons, directed by this venue’s artistic director Sean Holmes.When I saw the first production at the Royal Court’s studio space, I Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
I’m still pondering the title of Chris Urch’s new play. On the surface it’s clear enough: The Rolling Stone is a weekly newspaper in Uganda that has been notorious for pursuing that country’s anti-gay agenda. In particular, at the beginning of the decade, it started a campaign of publishing the photographs and addresses of those it believed to be homosexual.That precipitated a witch-hunt, forcing those accused to flee their families and homes. They suffered violence: so great was the sense of public anger inspired by made-up equations of homosexuality with paedophilia that a number of people Read more ...
David Kettle
Since its unveiling at London’s Royal Court in 1997, Conor McPherson’s The Weir has become something of a modern classic, notching up dozens of productions worldwide and even winning inclusion in the National Theatre’s list of the 100 most significant plays of the 20th century. It’s also a deceptively simple, unassuming offering – on the face of it, not much even seems to happen. There are no theatrical pyrotechnics, just a few spooky stories told by locals to an intriguing newcomer in a rural Irish pub. So there’s a weight of expectation on any new staging, and also a curiosity as to what Read more ...
aleks.sierz
It is a nightmare scenario: you have an accident that leaves you comatose. You are out of action in hospital for three weeks and then, when you wake up, you gradually realise that you don’t remember anything of the past 10 years. Not three weeks, but 10 years! So what has happened to your life? This is the basic premise of Olivier- and Tony-award-nominee Peter Quilter’s new drama, 4000 Days, whose title aptly describes the gap in the experience of its protagonist, played by the ever-watchable Alistair McGowan.Set entirely in a hospital room, the story explores the situation of Michael ( Read more ...
aleks.sierz
You have to admire Rob Hayes’s choice of titles. Although his latest doesn’t quite have the shock value of Awkward Conversations With Animals I’ve Fucked, his 2014 Edinburgh Festival hit, This Will End Badly is certainly full of enough foreboding to wipe any superficially optimistic grin off your face. First seen at Edinburgh last year, this one-man show is characterised by its vivid language, harsh humour and fury of delivery in Ben Whybrow’s exceptionally winning performance.Under the feeble glow of a single lightbulb, which is somewhat lost among the array of theatre lights, Whybrow plays Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Every incarnation of totalitarianism has its own specific mythology, which exists in different forms as it is believed at home and “translated” abroad (or not, in both cases). North Korea surely occupies a special place in any such hierarchy, possibly because we’ve entered the late phase of totalitarian statehood (which seems doubtful), or because the incarnations of third generation dynastic Communism have become so peculiar that they stand out even by the standards of the genre.Either way, it's a risky business when an outsider tries to take us inside such worlds: it can involve a step of Read more ...
theartsdesk
When sorrows come they come not in single spies. It is a bad week to be 69. Hard on the heels of David Bowie's death from cancer comes Alan Rickman's. He was an actor who radiated a sinful allure that first gave theatregoers the hot flushes back in 1985 when he played the Vicomte de Valmont in Christopher Hampton's Les Liaisons Dangereues. His co-star was Lindsay Duncan with whom he went on to share other highlights on stage: Private Lives in the West End and on Broadway, John Gabriel Borkman at the Abbey in Dublin.He had a late start as a star. His Hamlet came at the age of 47, followed by Read more ...
Matt Wolf
One of the more unusual Broadway offerings of recent times crosses the Atlantic with considerable style in an Off West End premiere of 2006 New York entry Grey Gardens that punches well above its weight. As luxuriantly cast as it is elaborately (and carefully) designed, Thom Southerland's loving production honours a peculiar slab of Americana that clearly won't be to all tastes, and some won't see beyond the second-act camp to locate the symbiotic portrait of love and loss that underpins the material.But step back from designer Tom Rogers' cunning scrap heap of a set, and you'll find that Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The seemingly eternal British love affair with Guys and Dolls continues apace with the (somewhat recast) transfer to London of the Chichester production from two summers ago, and a more buoyant way to inaugurate the new theatrical year is hard to imagine.Though built for touring, as is evident from the utilitarian feel of Peter McKintosh's fan-shaped design, Gordon Greenberg's staging in an instant brings necessary brio and dash to the West End, supplanting the psychologically anguished "musical fable" that was Gypsy at this same playhouse for most of last year with Frank Loesser and co' Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Say what you will about London theatre during 2015, and by my reckoning it was a pretty fine year, there certainly was a lot of it. I can't recall a year that brought with it a comparable volume of openings, not least during September and December, this year's pre-Christmas slate of major press nights roughly double the same time period in 2014. And as proof that people were actually attending the stuff on offer, empirical evidence as ever was the best guide. One late-November Saturday on my way to an evening show, I counted six House Full signs while weaving through the West End, and for a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
You'll feel guilty for having bothered with a programme after seeing The Lorax, the Dr Seuss adaptation that puts saving the environment centre-stage at the Old Vic just as the recent climate change gathering in Paris has done on the world stage. Full of unimpeachably good intentions, the production is fun and frolicsome up to a point, and sometimes simply bewildering.A second Matilda it most certainly is not, even though the Vic is now in the care of that great musical's director, Matthew Warchus. But Max Webster's production offers sufficient invention to more than sustain a six-week run, Read more ...
Dylan Moore
While Christmas is the season when traditional theatres trot out the tired clichés of panto, the ever-innovative National Theatre Wales have decided, in their wisdom, to stage a surreal, psychedelic theatre-gig at the Sophia Gardens cricket ground in Cardiff. Based on an idea originally conceived by Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys, artist Pete Fowler and graphic designer Mark James that has already spawned Rhys’s 2007 solo album Candylion, the "insatiable, inflatable" and very much larger-than-life version sees the musical polymath reteam with writer Tim Price and director Wils Wilson Read more ...