Theatre
Marianka Swain
Following a dangerously selective reading of a religious text, 15-year-old Benjamin has adopted a fundamentalist doctrine that espouses misogynist, homophobic and puritanical views and, at its extreme, violence. Neither his mum nor his teachers know how to handle him. The clever twist in Marius von Mayenburg’s 2012 play: that text isn’t the Qu’ran, but the Bible.This change in faith revitalises the oft-repeated concerns dominating headlines and opens up the debate to extremism in all forms, with militant atheism taken to task alongside Benjamin’s (Daniel O’Keefe) hardline Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The actor and historian Ian Kelly is fascinated by the way that performers use the theatre to understand not only themselves, but also the world. In this new play, he looks at the life and career of Samuel Foote, one of the larger-than-life figures in the age of Garrick who has, alas, been forgotten by time. Kelly, who has also written a book about Foote, has certainly been blessed by a warm-hearted production, which stars national treasure Simon Russell Beale – as well as the author himself.Foote’s life was pretty amazing. Born in 1720 in Cornwall, he made a name for himself as a mimic in Read more ...
Jessica Swale
I never thought I’d be a writer. Writers are people with something to say, big ideas, agendas. I was a director, through and through. I love working with actors, playing with music and text, thinking in three dimensions. The solitary confinement of a writer’s life filled me with dread. And so I spent a very happy eight years directing before I wrote my first play, Blue Stockings (pictured below by Manuel Harlan), and needless to say, the writing of it took me completely by surprise.I’d been working as Max Stafford-Clark’s Associate Director at Out of Joint. We were rehearsing Sebastian Barry’ Read more ...
mark.kidel
Complicite have, for several decades, been Britain’s most consistently adventurous theatre company. The term "physical theatre" sells them short, for the intelligence of their shows, from The Street of Crocodiles to The Elephant Vanishes, The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol to Mnemonic goes far beyond a spectacular use of the human body and the endlessly inventive use of props and space.The Encounter, a wholly extraordinary one-man show by the company’s co-founder Simon McBurney, is all of these things, but a good deal more. This is a show that re-invents theatre with a brilliance and sense Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The “femmepersonators” of Harvey Fierstein’s 1962-set drama would be flabbergasted by today’s level of trans visibility, from Grayson Perry and Caitlyn Jenner to Transparent and Eddie Redmayne’s new film The Danish Girl. Yet it’s the still pertinent issue of private experience versus public profile that sparks a schism in this idyllic community of closeted cross-dressers, along with thorny questions of how gender fluidity might correlate with a more flexible approach to identity and sexuality.Open-minded Rita (Tamsin Carroll, pictured below with Matthew Rixon) runs an escapist Catskills Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Welcome back Martin McDonagh. It’s been more than 10 years since you’ve had a play on in London, and I was beginning to think that we had lost you to Broadway, and Hollywood, for ever. As you know, I loved it when your Leenane Trilogy burst onto our stages in the late 1990s, and although I wasn’t that keen on some of the follow-ups, your The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001) and The Pillowman (2003) are among my favourite plays. I wasn’t madly impressed by your films, no, not even the highly hyped In Bruges, but your return to the stage has raised my expectations. Especially with Reece Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s a pleasing serendipity that while Martin McDonagh’s clamorously anticipated Hangmen opened at the Royal Court last night, just a little further west T.S Eliot’s The Cocktail Party should also be having its opening night. Back in 1956 another Royal Court premiere – John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger – called time on Eliot and his dramatic ilk, ushering him into a neglect from which he has never really recovered. But now, sitting once again alongside a younger, more daring breed of theatre, Eliot’s drama proves that – given a chance – it can hold its own.Prescribed by its author as a comedy Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Last February, director Sally Cookson shrunk Charlotte Brontë’s 400-page novel Jane Eyre down to a four-and-a-half-hour play spread across two nights at the Bristol Old Vic. Now, as this co-production finally arrives at the National Theatre, it has slimmed still further – shedding one hour and one night to become a (comparatively) brisk Hamlet-length evening of physically and sensorily-charged theatre.Time was when books stayed on the bedside table, stories to come home to after a night in the theatre. Now, post-David Edgar’s Nicholas Nickleby for the RSC, the NT’s own His Dark Materials, and Read more ...
David Nice
Whose Don Juan – progenitor Tirso de Molina’s, Molière’s or Pushkin’s? None of the above. Unless you have some knowledge of Ukrainian culture, you won’t have heard of Lesya Ukrainka, born Larysa Petrivna Kosach-Kvitka in 1871 to a proudly nationalist (if half-Byelorusian) father and a mother whose pioneering work in women’s rights she continued.Her Don Juan of 1912, written a year before her untimely death from tuberculosis, was the seminal play which director Konstantin Khoklov staged in 1938 to bring true Ukrainian drama to the leading Kiev theatre. Its name changed as a result, from Kiev Read more ...
edward.seckerson
If the shoe fits, they say, wear it. But in truth there's always been a bit of a size differential between Kinky Boots, the modest urban Brit-flick set in a struggling shoe factory, and the Cyndi Lauper/Harvey Fierstein musical that it spawned, first on Broadway and now here. Lauper's score resides principally in the funk and spunk of cross-dressing catwalk glamour while the somewhat dowdy spirit of Northamptonshire - the vernacular of the piece - is barely hinted at in the "Price & Son Theme" of the opening number.But at least the show has, in one sense, "come home" and is no longer lost Read more ...
Heather Neill
The Trojan War has been going on for nine years when Homer's account begins in The Iliad. Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes have been developing their version of the story, using Christopher Logue's War Music, for nearly half as long. True, when they staged The Persians by Aeschylus for National Theatre Wales in 2010, The Iliad was not yet on the agenda, but now they say that a through-line is clear from that production to their present National Theatre Wales project."We couldn't have done Coriolan/us in 2012 without The Persians or this one without Coriolan/us," says Pearson. The link is their Read more ...
aleks.sierz
With the election of lefty outsider Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership, are we entering a new era when upsets and surprises have become a new way of life? Is it really true that anything is now possible? As if to engage with these pressing questions, Tanya Ronder’s new play is all about how a perfect family is suddenly visited by some totally unexpected events. What starts with a dodgy doorknob escalates over 90 minutes into a full-scale domestic breakdown.The perfect family is composed of Gordon, his second wife Serena, and their young daughter Rachel. While the confident, if emotionally Read more ...