Theatre
Marianka Swain
Events have overtaken this Macbeth, dramatically heightening its queasy topicality. Not just brutal beheadings and torture, but the cost and collateral damage of conflict without end, and the scourge of a tyrant slaughtering his own people, strike one anew in the wake of recent debate. Carrie Cracknell’s interpretative, modern-dress production traps us in a military underground bunker, drained of light and colour – a Hell as acutely psychological as it is physical. Not for nothing does the doomed Macbeth fear the “diseased mind”.Cracknell is not in thrall to the text, briskly stripping it Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
One of the joys about this stage adaptation of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days is the contrast between its phlegmatic hero Phileas Fogg, who deals with everything in terms of precision and logic, and the picaresque confusion of his journey. Fogg (Robert Portal) has the habit of laying down portentous truths in an attempt to mediate the scampering mix-ups that he encounters at every stage. One such aperçu, “A well-used minimum suffices for anything,” serves nicely as a verdict on Lucy Bailey’s energetic, engaging production.Bailey and her designer Anna Fleischle – whose hand drives Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It's hard not to invoke the B word - Barbra, that is, not Brice - and I speak as one who bunked off school to catch her at a midweek matinee when Funny Girl first played London almost 50 years ago. It was standing room only at the Prince of Wales Theatre but by then she was pretty much phoning in her performance, and only the thrill of that voice (smaller than one expected but laser-intense) carried her through. It's quite the reverse with the very talented Sheridan Smith, who is a funny girl and probably closer in spirit to the real Fanny Brice than Streisand could ever be. And with Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Two plays for the price of one. What’s not to like? Particularly when they resonate so strongly with each other on a hard, uncompromising theme. Broadly, that theme is love and war, sex and death, but more specifically, both plays home in on the truth games played by a man and a woman at critical moments of intimacy.Howard Barker is a hard, uncompromising playwright, and that may partly explain why his plays (some 60 published since 1970) aren’t more often revived. Rising director Robyn Winfield-Smith is on a mission to put that right, and it was apparently her idea to pair these discreet one Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Don’t you just love celebrity hype? Kim Cattrall’s name alone sold out this show, which runs over the notoriously difficult Christmas period. But sometimes star-casting backfires, and when she had to withdraw from the production for medical reasons, the theatre had to find a replacement. Step forward Noma Dumezweni, an Olivier-award-winning performer who’s due to make her directing debut at this venue next February. But that’s enough, for the moment, about celebrity – what about the writer and the play?The story, written by playwright Penelope Skinner, starts off with Linda Wilde in action. Read more ...
David Kettle
Christmas has kicked off early in the Scottish capital’s theatreland, with traditional panto Snow White over at the King’s Theatre, and the Lyceum’s high-class offering – as befits the theatre’s 50th anniversary year – in the form of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Don’t count on any "he’s behind you" audience participation here, though – this is a far more traditional theatrical experience, a faithful adaptation of CS Lewis’s beloved children’s fable by Theresa Heskins, lovingly delivered in director Andrew Panton’s enthusiastic, energetic production – and warmly family-friendly, of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The great Caryl Churchill careers down a blind alley in Here We Go, and the results aren't pretty, especially within the cavernous confines of the National Theatre's Lyttelton – this writer's second play this year at that address. A 45-minute triptych about death that gets worse as it goes on, the play put me in mind of the American critic Walter Kerr's famous remark about Neil Simon not having an idea for a play but writing one anyway. On this occasion, it would occur that Churchill had an idea or two and then forgot to write the accompanying play. That, in turn, comes as Read more ...
David Nice
Greek family smashups at the Almeida now yield to northern agony sagas, less bloody but potentially just as harrowing. In Little Eyolf the 66-year-old Ibsen dissected a failed marriage as ruthlessly as Euripides, Strindberg or Bergman, who was in turn influenced by both of the great Scandinavian playwrights. Something of that pitilessness does emerge in Richard Eyre’s return to the Almeida, chiefly through an unsparing performance by Lydia Leonard and a blend of cold intimacy with powerful nature in Tim Hatley’s designs. The lower depths of pity and terror, though, remain unsounded. Read more ...
Laura Eason
I adapted Around the World in Eighty Days very specifically for my own theatre company, Lookingglass Theatre of Chicago, where I am one of 24 multi-skilled ensemble members who are writers, directors, actors, and/or designers. Although Lookingglass’ work varies, we most often do adaptations of classic stories, frequently epic in scale, told in a highly theatrical, strongly visual and/or physical way. Some of the novels/stories/myths that Lookingglass members have adapted include Dickens’s Hard Times, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Lewis Carroll's two Alice books under the title Lookingglass Alice. Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Pericles is a play of voyages. Lands and landscapes crowd in, one after the other – Tyre, Tarsus, Ephesus, Antioch, Mitylene – until our dramatic sea-legs are decidedly unsteady. The demands are great for any theatre, but for the Globe’s tiny, candle-lit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse they are impossible, freeing director Dominic Dromgoole to ignore spectacle and visual dislocation in favour of an emotionally-driven, chamber take on this late romance.Designer Jonathan Fensom’s visuals may be coherent, and unity underlined in careful cast doublings, but tonally Dromgoole tosses us from mood to Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A lot of people are going to be enraged, frustrated, or confused by Evening at The Talk House, and in the authorial world of Wallace Shawn, wasn't it ever thus? This is the playwright who gave pride of place to a softly-spoken fascist in Aunt Dan and Lemon and challenged his audience's complacency directly with The Fever, so if I say that his latest play is of a piece with his earlier ones, that is intended as high praise, indeed. From its opening monologue onwards, Talk House could only be the work of this particular writer, Shawn's singularity of vision as undimmed by time (he's now 72) Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Hollywood took 365 speaking parts, 50,000 extras and 2,500 horses to tell this epic tale in 1959; here at the Tricycle, it’s a cast of four and some enterprising puppet work. Playwright Patrick Barlow, following up global hit The 39 Steps, has chosen a comic contrast that could hardly be equalled: redux maximus.In fact, Ben Hur is closer in spirit to another Barlow phenomenon, the National Theatre of Brent. There’s more than a touch of pompous impresario Desmond Dingle in actor/manager Daniel Vale, of the Daniel Vale Theatre Company. Of course, the misplaced self-importance of Read more ...