Theatre
Nick Hasted
Margaret Atwood’s Forties childhood was spent knocking around the Canadian backwoods with her forest entomologist, proto-ecologist dad, and it shows. Interviewed alongside her husband Graeme Gibson on the Brighton Festival’s closing night, the international literary prizes, like the gushing reverence with which she’s introduced by Festival director Ali Smith and received by the sell-out crowd, seems to have made little impression. This is a modest, earthy, dryly witty and straight-talking couple, with the self-sufficient air of those familiar with isolated, country living.Atwood’s novels, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Jonathan Miller’s new King Lear is rustic to its core, spoken in broad Northern accents, and the whole production could be packed onto a travelling theatre’s wagon and taken around Britain pulled by a couple of shire horses.Yet rather than cost the play its gravitas, this approach proves to be an inspired way to enhance some vital truths about it. Much more than a tragedy about a king who betrays his responsibility, King Lear emerges as a painful revelation that the notions of responsible fatherhood and family love are not at all timeless givens, but rather recent inventions. Shakespeare’s Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“All children, except one, grow up.” So begins J. M. Barrie’s iconic tale of arrested development, given new power and poignancy in this high-flying production. A century after one of Barrie’s youthful collaborators, George Llewelyn Davies, was killed at Ypres, it tells their familiar story through the prism of the brutalising First World War, in which context Peter’s neverending youth becomes an escapist beacon.Timothy Sheader and Liam Steel’s rich reimagining opens with wounded soldiers, far from home, tended by reassuringly maternal nurses – there are enough mother issues in Barrie’s Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"You make clothes that make the darkness in me matter": If such an accolade strikes you as profound, make a beeline for McQueen, the James Phillips play about the tortured, all-too-brief life of the maverick talent Alexander McQueen that constitutes the longest 100 minutes I have spent in a theatre in many a month. A shaven-headed Stephen Wight cuts an impressive figure as the designer who is infinitely more compellingly represented at the moment at the V&A, but this play feels like a grubby attempt to trade off his name. Let's just say one can't imagine the real McQueen making it through Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The Forest of Arden takes many forms, but in Blanche McIntyre’s meticulously purist production, it’s strictly a state of mind – no leafy bowers in sight. Here, the unspoken can be voiced, the bounds of gender and class broken, and courtly conventions stripped away to reveal folksy values. McIntyre’s is a typically astute interpretation, but – other than a couple of well-deployed props – lacks the playfulness and invention that might help a languidly earthbound three hours take flight.Shakespeare’s comic take on pastoral romance begins with a flurry of banishments. Usurpring Duke Frederick Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Those expecting an evening at the circus tonight, such as L’Oublié(e)’s advertising hinted at, were in for a shock. I saw a few children in the foyer and would be intrigued to know what they made of it. There were moments of pure nightmare amidst its parade of striking imagery. The debut show of French dancer and contortionist Raphaëlle Boitel is an imagistic, allegorical hour, heavily dipped in circus techniques, yet mostly deserting that medium’s levity and comedy in favour of an abject hallucinatory quality. I was gobsmacked by its audacious visuals but occasionally turned off by its Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Frank Loesser seems to be known in Britain for one show and one show only, which seems a shame given that the composer-lyricist of Guys and Dolls has a CV that includes the ravishing The Most Happy Fella and his 1962 Pulitzer prize-winning How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which was last seen locally a decade ago at Chichester but remains unproduced in London since, well, whenever. And by way of partial recompense, along came a one-off concert version of the show and what a glory it remains, its defining mixture of satire and sweetness pretty well unmatched by any musical Read more ...
Marianka Swain
At just 26, Pippa Bennett-Warner has already achieved many actors’ goals, from treading the boards at the National and having a part written specially for her to sharing scenes with luminaries like Derek Jacobi and Eddie Redmayne. She debuted aged 11 as one of the young Nalas in The Lion King, but since graduating from RADA, she has focussed on “straight acting”. Her projects are nevertheless diverse, from classical (Grandage’s King Lear and Richard II) and contemporary (The Witness at the Royal Court, D C Moore’s The Swan) stage plays to popular screen dramas, including The Smoke, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Free events at celebratory citywide occasions such as the Brighton Festival are a mixed blessing. Unfortunately, the fact they’re free means we’re supposed to be thankful even when they’re actually a bit ramshackle and rubbish. We are British, after all, and “putting up with” is a national characteristic. It’s great, then, to be able to report that the hour-long adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s famous dystopian 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, by local open air theatre crew Periplum, was a truly enjoyable success.Preston Barracks was originally set up to counter possible Napoleonic invasion then, Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It took approximately 30 years for High Society to first make its laborious transition from screen to stage and there are good reasons for that. The indelible impression left by the movie and its star, Grace Kelly, was undoubtedly the biggest, and before that, of course, was the source play (The Philadelphia Story) and the equally indelible movie made of that. Along the way, the stage version, with a new book by Arthur Kopit, added a host of unrelated Cole Porter songs to the half-dozen or so in the movie, drawing from other Porter musicals (Can-Can, Jubilee), which is a bit like Rodgers and Read more ...
Heather Neill
The premise might seem familiar: a famous photograph, taken by a Western journalist in fraught military and political circumstances, has repercussions many years later. The subject of the picture, a representative of an entirely different culture from that of the photographer, is anonymous, but the image is familiar all over the world. Attempting to bridge the gulf between subject and journalist leads only to further bitter misunderstanding.Two years ago Lucy Kirkwood's award-winning Chimerica took the photograph of the "tank man" of Tiananmen Square, the brave, lone protester of the 1989 Read more ...
fisun.guner
We’ve not been short of memorable London productions of Arthur Miller’s best known works. Ivo van Hove’s triple Olivier award-winning A View from the Bridge, which transferred to the Wyndham’s Theatre from the Young Vic earlier this year, and the Old Vic’s The Crucible, directed last year by Yaël Farber, were two exceptional productions. And now we have the seminal play of the 20th century. The RSC’s Death of a Salesman arrives from its short run at Stratford garlanded with plaudits, but it’s even better in this West End transfer.The smaller stage and more intimate auditorium of the Noël Read more ...