Theatre
Tom Birchenough
There’s a clear territorial divide in the small space of the Jermyn Street Theatre at the opening of Ashley G Holloway’s new drama Lesere. At the centre of Ellan Parry’s persuasive design there’s a bright decked area in which the seemingly sunny lives of its characters play out – the setting is the peaceful French countryside, 1921. Around the stage edges, however, is a very different environment, a dark space of silent, agonising memories.Lesere moves between such light and dark, the latter coming to dominate the action. An English couple, Jane and John, have settled in rural France to put Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Musicals are cheesy by nature, aren’t they? If not cheesy, then picturesque. The cast of Les Mis may be grimy and poor, but they’re picture-postcard poor. Even modern musicals play by the rules.But Aemonn O’Dwyer and Rob Gilbert break most of them in their new musical, The House of Mirrors & Hearts. Forget exotic settings: this type of family terrace house can be found by the thousand off the Kingsland Road. And forget happy families: this one’s falling apart. What’s more, the climax of the first act is a grisly accident involving a character we haven’t even met. And two of the key Read more ...
aleks.sierz
In the age of austerity, it’s getting harder and harder to avoid cliché. Especially well-meaning cliché. For example, all cuts to welfare are bad; we must defend government support of the needy at all costs. But clichéd ideas rarely make good drama so when I first heard about Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s new play, whose theme is the cuts in the legal aid budget, I must confess that my spirits dropped. Was this going to be another case of theatrical journalism?Things didn’t really improve when I read the programme note: in this, Andrew Caplen, President of the Law Society, attacks the Legal Aid, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The reason that Caryl Churchill is Britain’s best living playwright is that her work is endlessly enquiring and peerlessly intelligent. When she wrote this play about the subject of human cloning – which had its premiere at the Royal Court 2002 with Michael Gambon and Daniel Craig as its cast – she avoided the obvious option of writing about how bad the idea of cloning is, and instead opted to explore its individual consequences. By doing so she came up with an unforgettable image of humanity in all its pain and anger.The story is a family drama of a bizarre kind. Set in the near future, A Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Frank Sinatra is back in London in the centenary of his birth. His disembodied voice is returning in a show called Sinatra: The Man & His Music. At the London Palladium, where he made his British debut 65 years ago, there’s to be a 24-piece orchestra, 20 dancers and video effects galore in a multi-media concert featuring many of his best-loved songs. At the heart of it will be footage supplied by the Sinatra Estate. For those who never saw Sinatra live, the idea is that this will be the next best thing, at least since the last time he was exhumed.In 2005 Sinatra at the London Palladium Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The latest transatlantic transfer is curiously esoteric, concerning as it does an obscure period in the lives of two great men: Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles. The centenary of the latter’s birth makes this an apt moment for the European premiere of Austin Pendleton’s Chicago-originating 2000 play, but its appeal may not extend beyond dedicated students of theatre history.It’s 1960, and critic Kenneth Tynan (Edward Bennett) is determined to unite his beleaguered heroes, persuading the declining Welles (John Hodgkinson) to direct out-of-step Olivier (Adrian Lukis, pictured below) in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Is there more than one Michael Longhurst? As sometimes happens in theatre, a rising young director seems to be everywhere at once. His calling card is the modestly universal Constellations. Directed with clarity and simplicity, Nick Payne’s romantic two-hander with multiple narratives has travelled from the Royal Court via the West End to New York, before touring the UK and heading back to London this week. Longhurst may need to clone himself in order to be in two places at once: his production of Caryl Churchill’s A Number is also opening at the Young Vic.And if that’s not enough Longhurst Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If Simon McBurney’s Measure for Measure for the National Theatre and Declan Donnellan’s recent Cheek By Jowl production mined deep for darkness, Dominic Dromgoole’s for the Globe is content to skim the play’s sunny surface – the comedy manqué that Shakespeare didn’t quite write. It’s a decision that makes sense of a difficult work on the Globe’s own terms, playing to a summer crowd, but one that also generates its own confusions and inconsistencies.The heat on press night only added to the Breugel-like spirit of Dromgoole’s opening – a smoky, sweaty, bawdy portrait of Vienna lost in lechery Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Geoffrey Rush has done it, Gyles Brandreth has done it, Stephen Fry came close to doing it, and now David Suchet is giving it a go – donning drag and a perpetually disgusted expression to play everyone’s favourite drawing-room gorgon, Lady Bracknell. Having completed its tour around England, Adrian Noble’s affectionate production of The Importance of Being Earnest now sets up home in London’s Vaudeville Theatre, cucumber sandwiches at the ready, hoping to charm summer audiences with an English classic that’ll tick boxes for any tourists not quick enough to get tickets for Wimbledon.There’s a Read more ...
Dylan Moore
The brackets around {150} are ambiguous, almost apologetic. The 150th anniversary of Y Wladfa (The Colony), the semi-legendary "oasis of Welshness" in the Patagonian wilderness has given occasion in Wales for the celebration of a most unlikely story. One hundred and fifty men, women and children left their homes all over Wales and created a new life for themselves, against all the odds, at the other end of the world. Sixty-six came from the villages around Aberdare and Mountain Ash in a valley 15 miles north of Cardiff.The Royal Opera Stores, a hangar-sized warehouse on an industrial park Read more ...
theartsdesk
Of all the art forms, theatre has been most attentive to the story of HIV/AIDS. Leading the way in America there was Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985) and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1991). In the UK the most resonant exploration of the virus’s devastating impact was Kevin Elyot’s My Night with Reg (1994). While all have been revisited - Kramer's play was filmed for HBO last year, when the Donmar Warehouse revived Elyot's masterpiece - as a subject for new drama HIV/AIDS has somewhat dropped off the theatrical radar, which is why a play by Shaun Kitchener is an intriguing Read more ...
David Nice
Kafka and Jones, the names above this little shop of horrors, would be a marriage made in off-kilter theatreland had the Czech genius written any plays. He didn’t, so Nick Gill has made a well-shaped drama out of the assembled fragments of which The Trial consists. It offers an exhaustive role for Rory Kinnear, never offstage for the unbroken two-hour duration, and lets director Richard Jones revert from the warm humanity he’s most recently been unable to resist in Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg and Puccini’s The Girl of the Golden West back to his favoured world of discomfort and Read more ...