Theatre
David Nice
This is the real Greek, bloody-fantastical thing. After the fascinating but flawed attempt to bring Aeschylus’s Oresteia into the 21st century, the Almeida has turned to a more tradition-conscious kind of experiment with Euripides’ last and greatest masterpiece. James Macdonald’s production daringly fuses operatic settings of the essential Bacchic choruses by Orlando Gough, stunningly executed by 10 women, a mostly faithful translation rather than a “new version” by Anne Carson blending irony with pure poetry, and a central performance by Ben Whishaw surpassing expectations as an ideally Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Satire may famously be what on Broadway closes Saturday night, but last night's concert performance of the Gershwin brothers' Of Thee I Sing found many patrons fleeing the Festival Hall at the interval. The culprit lay in sound issues that took the aural equivalent of a pneumatic drill to a featherweight piece that needs tender treatment if it is to flourish as the original did against the odds. Rarely performed today (New York did a concert version of its own in 2006), this was in fact the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize.Last night's concert staging improved marginally Read more ...
Michael Simkins
When I got the call enquiring whether I’d like to adapt The Sunday Times Humour Book of the Year Dear Lupin for the stage, the first thing I did was to thank my lucky stars. Dear Lupin: Letters to a Wayward Son is a collection of real letters, written over 40 years, by racing correspondent Roger Mortimer to his wayward son Charlie (christened “Lupin” after Mr Pooter’s disreputable son in Diary of a Nobody). While I’ve been an actor for 40 years, and a writer for 15, I’d never take the plunge of attempting to write a proper play. Sometime the quickest way to do something is to be asked.I Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The trouble with the classics is that they are long, complex and difficult. But today’s sensibility favours the quick, simple and easy. So it is no surprise that the National Theatre have opened its doors to Patrick Marber, who has taken Ivan Turgenev’s 1850s play, A Month in the Country, and given it a makeover. After all, in its uncut original version it runs for four hours. The result is what the Amazon website calls an “unfaithful version”, which is shorter and simpler than the original. Turgenev’s month of rural love, lust and despair has been distilled down to some 72 hours. But does Read more ...
David Nice
Stop miking Bryn Terfel. Stop over-miking musicals; the show voices in a hybrid cast don’t need much. Too much ruined English National Opera’s recent Sweeney Todd, and in this Proms adaptation of Grange Park Opera’s summer crowd-pleaser it sent the voices ricocheting around the Albert Hall, making mush of the words and stridency of the few belt-it-out moments. It also made it hard to assess what seemed like a resourceful staging of a baggy-monster musical with four or five great songs, no masterpiece of musical theatre (unlike My Fair Lady, Fiddler on the Roof’s near-contemporary).The idea of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The earthy contact with groundlings that Shakespeare’s Globe offers in its stagings makes a comical but telling context for Richard II, a play largely about political point-scoring between kings. The people whose interests lie so remote, in reality, from the moral tussle between King Richard and his cousin who will wrest the crown from him and become Henry IV, are, in reality, everywhere underfoot. Literally underfoot, since a cross-shaped thrust stage has been created in the Yard that makes cracks and corridors for the £5 promenaders to pack, looking right up the actors’ jerkins, their hands Read more ...
Aleks Sierz and Lia Ghilardi
Theatre is one of the glories of British culture, a melting pot of creativity and innovation. Beginning with the coronation of Elizabeth I and ending with the televised crowning of the current Queen Elizabeth, our The Time Traveller’s Guide to British Theatre tells the compelling story of the movers and shakers, the buildings, the playwrights, the plays and the audiences that make British theatre what it is today. The book covers all the great names – from Shakespeare to Terence Rattigan, by way of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw – and the classic plays, many of which are still revived Read more ...
theartsdesk
Once upon a time... Storytelling is an integral part of all human cultures, and a central pillar of an enlightened education. Some children get the hang of it quickly – they are, as the phrase has it, natural storytellers. This week the Royal Court introduces several youthful writers with Primetime, a series of short plays written by primary school children between the ages of eight and 11.The new Royal Court playwrights join a sizeable pantheon of young authors, whom we celebrate in this edition of Listed. We have set the rule that, to qualify, the writer had to be under 18 when they picked Read more ...
Heather Neill
Families. Whether it's the House of Atreus, the court at Elsinore or the Archers, they tend to be of compelling interest. For most of us, loyalties, guilty secrets, truths that will out, petty jealousies and sentimentality tend to be the order of the day more often than towering passion and murder. And that is what Andrew Keatley focuses on in this gentle, poignant, often funny play about a family reunion in the run-up to the "things can only get better" election in 1997.It is in many ways a sweetly old-fashioned piece, recalling not so much Ayckbourn as Dear Octopus, Dodie Smith's pre-war Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Burt Bacharach, existentialist? That's among the surprising thoughts prompted by the searchingly titled What's It All About?, the altogether delightful but also touching musical revue that trawls Bacharach's back catalogue – and that on opening night found the 87-year-old tunesmith tinkling the ivories for a moment or two during the curtain call.First seen Off Broadway 18 months ago, director Steven Hoggett's jukebox musical-with-a-twist proves even more winning on a second viewiing. The material may well be a bit too sincere – that's to say, in-your-face earnest – for more Read more ...
stephen.walsh
We’re so used these days to theatre music as aural torture – blasts of pop music on the tannoy, assorted electronics or, if you’re (moderately) lucky, a snatch of too-loud Chopin or Grieg before the lights come up on the Ibsen drawing-room – that it’s easy to forget a time when plays were introduced, interrupted and even accompanied by a pit orchestra playing music specially composed by the greatest composers of the day. We now hear this music as concert overtures and suites: Egmont, Peer Gynt, L’Arlésienne, and the like.But there’s a good case for occasionally putting it back where it Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Life, the universe and everything… in 70 minutes. You certainly can’t fault Nick Payne’s ambition, nor help but admire the dazzling inventiveness of his theoretical physics romcom with a side helping of artisanal beekeeping.This 2012 Royal Court hit, which has since travelled across the pond, lends dramatic form to quantum multiverse theory: every event and every decision has numerous outcomes, coexisting in parallel universes. The human dimension for the science comes through the romance of cosmologist Marianne (Louise Brealey, pictured below with Joe Armstrong) and apiarist Roland ( Read more ...