Theatre
Mark Kidel
Tom Morris has a strong feel for drama that explores the personal implications of fanaticism: his production of John Adams’s powerful opera The Death of Klinghoffer for New York's Met and the ENO, used a language of great simplicity that allowed the work’s most disturbing complexities to come through with formidable power. Once again with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, an equally rich text, there is a stripped-down quality to his overall vision, supported by a generally superlative cast and finely tuned pacing. This works wonders with a play that explores the dark ways in which human frailties Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Molière’s 1664 comedy Tartuffe transplanted to present-day Atlanta, Georgia: it sounds like an inspired idea. The hypocritical religious devotee becomes a charlatan preacher fleecing his flock, offering salvation in exchange for hard cash and a distinctly unpriestly grope. But Marcus Gardley’s attempt to put a contemporary spin on a once incendiary play comes with a trying side order of cartoonish caricatures and creaky sex farce.The tone is set by the opening sequence, in which randy Apostle Toof (Lucian Msamati) lays his healing hands upon a half-dressed ditzy blonde congregant (Michelle Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Over the past quarter century the reputation of toff playwright Terence Rattigan has been restored, mainly by strong stagings of his classic dramas, such as Deep Blue Sea. But his first smash hit, French Without Tears, has been the unicorn of his output – often talked about, often mentioned, often remembered, but never actually seen. Now Paul Miller, the ever-enterprising artistic director of the Orange Tree, has brought this unicorn into public view, allowing audiences to enjoy a joyful sighting of a rare beast.Originally put on in 1936 in the West End, where it ran for more than 1,000 Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Rents are going up, local businesses priced out, and the rich folk and hipsters are invading. That’s in Washington Heights, New York’s largely Dominican-American quarter, but it could as easily describe King’s Cross, one of multiple London areas undergoing gentrification. This Tony Award-winning musical from pioneering composer Lin-Manuel Miranda (currently ruling Broadway with Hamilton), which features an irresistible hip-hop, rap, pop and Latin fusion score, is propulsive entertainment with a resonant social conscience.Our guide to the Heights is Usnavi (Sam Mackay), whose bodega – Read more ...
Marianka Swain
There’s nothing like a death to bring a family together. In Simon’s case, that death is his own – impending execution by firing squad in an unnamed Asian country, unless he can win a reprieve from the Prime Minister, President or Pope, “one of the Ps”. Confined space, buried secrets, and a race against the clock: in his stage debut, filmmaker Paul Andrew Williams is determined to make his audience sweat.That you certainly will (and not just because of Trafalgar Studio 2’s appropriately cramped and furnace-like environs), although Williams’ methods of applying pressure tend towards the large, Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
If one definition of Shakespeare’s problem plays is that they can’t easily be categorised in the canon, being neither tragedy nor comedy, then that issue is swept aside by this radical Young Vic production. In the hands of director Joe Hill-Gibbins, Measure for Measure is incontrovertibly a comedy, careering between satire and feverish farce.After the Globe’s, this is the second rowdy presentation of the play this year; there’s clearly something in the air. But Hill-Gibbins’ modern-dress version doesn’t entirely eschew meaning for frivolity. The famous inconsistencies in the characters’ Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
His style is probably too subtle to be described as causing anything as noisily obtrusive as a splash, but Barney Norris’s debut play Visitors certainly created significant ripples last year. This follow-up drama is also, on the surface at least, low-key: a gentle, melancholy rumination on love and loss, in which the more drastic events happen offstage and time ticks by, ungraspable, inexorable.Set in a Hampshire village, it’s in part an elegy for a rural way of life, fading away in the face of consumerist modernity; it’s also a lament for the lonely, and a hymn to the redemptive power of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Paul, Jan and Louis, three young men living in a gritty part of south London, are bored and broke and, for them, there are two kinds of Britain – one with money and power, and the one they live in, with no money and little to look forward to. No, it's not a play set in 2015, but Barrie Keeffe's Barbarians, set in the mid-1970s when youth unemployment was at an all-time high and the pound was at an all-time low.The parallels to today, with a burgeoning underclass and a widening gulf between the haves and have-nots in the UK, are obvious – which perhaps explains why this co-production Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Dementia is an increasingly common theme in theatre, television and film. But although there are plenty of stories about old people suffering from Alzheimer’s, what does it feel like to experience this condition? French playwright and novelist Florian Zeller’s Molière Award-winning play – transferring to the West End after highly praised runs at the Tricycle Theatre in north London and the Theatre Royal Bath – attempts an answer by using a sophisticated structure and a deliberately ambiguous method of storytelling.Eighty-year-old André lives in a posh flat in Paris. He is suffering from loss Read more ...
Heather Neill
At the press night curtain call for Richard III, about eleven-and-a half hours after the beginning of this anniversary three-play production, Trevor Nunn stepped in front of his impressively large cast. Not usually a man of few words, this time he uttered only five: "Peter Hall and John Barton".The duo's adaptation of Henry VI parts One, Two and Three and Richard III into a trilogy was a landmark in the development of the new Royal Shakespeare Company in 1963 and had a profound effect on theatregoers, including a young Trevor Nunn. Hall, the RSC's 33-year-old artistic director, and academic Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Titles don’t come much more evocative than this: Valhalla, the gigantic hall in Odin’s Asgard where those slain in battle come to feast, is the Norse mythological version of the Islamist fantasy of eternal life for jihadist martyrs. Valhalla brings to mind the sound of Wagnerian horns and the sights of vast mountain peaks. It’s all very Nordic, very Aryan and very Tolkien. And it’s the setting for playwright Paul Murphy’s excellent new play about scientific ethics, an 80-minute two-hander which is co-winner, with Bea Roberts’s similary great And Then Come the Nightjars, of this new-writing Read more ...
David Nice
With her strong, often fierce features and her convincing simulations of rage, Kate Fleetwood might have been born to play Medea. Unfortunately this isn’t Euripides’ Medea but Rachel Cusk’s free variations on the myth rather than the play. Many of her observations on marriage, motherhood and divorce are as penetrating and harsh as much of what we find in Greek tragedy, but they don’t join up to form the great dramatic arc you get in the original. Even director Rupert Goold, going way beyond the safe boundaries of so much British theatre as ever, can’t transcend the obstacles.In this last Read more ...