Theatre
Jonathan Lewis
A Level Playing Field is the first play in my trilogy Education Education Education. The trilogy is my response to the black cloud of exams which has arrived in our household every spring for the last nine years – just as the sun was beginning to shine.It is my response to the maniacal devotion to testing and prescriptive teaching in our schools, in which exams are not just a diagnostic part of learning but the sine qua non of an education based on conformity and compliance.The first of the plays is an attempt to present the A-level experience from the students’ point of view. The second is Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The Young Vic’s victory parade came as no surprise after a bumper year, but, in an impressive night for studio and publicly funded theatre, the egalitarian 2015 Oliviers also showered affection upon the Hampstead, Donmar, RSC, Chichester, Royal Court and Almeida. Many of their pioneering productions have already made it into the West End, proving – once and for all – that creative risk and profitmaking need not be mutually exclusive.Belgian director Ivo van Hove was rewarded for his revolutionary take on A View From the Bridge, as was visibly stunned leading actor Mark Strong, and the Young Read more ...
Marianka Swain
From Singin’ in the Rain and Anything Goes to Hello, Dolly! and Mary Poppins, Olivier Award winner Stephen Mear has done more than any other British choreographer to usher classic musicals into the modern era. But adept as he is at razzle-dazzling ’em, there’s more to Mear, as recent excursions like City of Angels at Donmar Warehouse and Die Fledermaus for the Metropolitan Opera prove. His contribution to the lauded Gypsy revival, opening next week at the Savoy Theatre following a triumphant Chichester run, demonstrates the combination of emotional engagement and quick-witted Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Some dramas begin with a brilliant idea. April De Angelis’s new black comedy, After Electra, is one of these. It starts with an audacious premise: the octogenarian artist Virgie is celebrating her birthday in her abode on the Essex coast, and invites family and close friends to join her. So far so normal. Then, as they assemble, she drops a bombshell. She tells them that she has decided to commit suicide. She’s had enough of life, and, dreading the numerous indignities of old age, wants to end it all.How do Virgie’s guests react? Her fiftysomething daughter, Hadyn, ironically a bereavement Read more ...
Marianka Swain
While seven-way debate rages, broadcaster and debuting playwright Jonathan Maitland takes us back 25 years to a radically different political landscape: a time of regents, and of regicide. It’s 1990 – Thatcher the leader claiming divine right to rule, Geoffrey Howe her unexpected assassin. How did the mild-mannered Welshman, whose rhetorical powers Denis Healey compared with those of a dead sheep, become a wolf in sheep’s clothing?It’s an intriguing question, answered with wit and insider wisdom, but too simplistic a reading in Maitland’s sketch satire-meets-modern Macbeth. Second-half Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Andrew Comben, CEO of the Brighton Festival, chooses ten locations that have resonance with the annual event. He talks about their past and future but, most particularly, what will be happening this May“Brighton Festival is all about the spaces and people of the city,” he explains, “Some of these spaces are especially evocative. They make artists think about doing things in different ways and make audiences respond accordingly. We have to strategise, sometimes taking over places that are used for other things most of the time. It’s always an adventure.”Comben, 40, became the Festival's Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Despite the age of austerity, London theatre is booming. Not just the West End, but Off-West End and the fringe as well. One sign of its health is its openness to Continental imports, especially to plays that have been transposed into English by their own authors. If the market leader of this trend is Croatian-born Tena Štivičić’s 3 Winters, then the latest example is Maria Milisavljevic’s often equally compelling Abyss.This play originally opened as Brandung at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin in 2013, and is still running in that venue’s repertory. It won the prestigious Kleist Award for Read more ...
David Nice
Still they keep coming, 35 years on from the London premiere of Sondheim's "musical thriller": Sweeneys above pubs, in pie shops, concert halls and theatres of all sizes, on the big screen, Sweeneys with symphony orchestras, two pianos or a handful of instruments wielded by the singers, Sweeneys as musicals and as operas, the dumpy and the tall. Which type was this one? Not a vintage English National Opera production, that much seems clear.A year after this more than semi-staging's Lincoln Centre unveiling with the New York Philharmonic, the ENO Orchestra is very much centre stage, a huge Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” J Robert Oppenheimer’s quotation from Hindu scripture is often used to signify the scientist’s rueful realisation, when it was too late, of what he had created in delivering an atomic bomb to the US military.If his later, anti-nuke position has seemed a bit rich to some – what did he think was going to happen? – Tom Morton-Smith’s exceptional new play gives an inkling of how Oppenheimer could have been so hell-bent on his original course, and of the personal sacrifices, betrayals and moral justifications that got him there. It’s an Read more ...
Jasper Rees
One night in Cape Town, I was caught in a power cut. Like an untenanted theatre, the city went utterly dark, darker than perhaps it had been since settlers first arrived three centuries earlier. Street lamps, restaurants, car showrooms, offices were all plunged into Stygian gloom. Without traffic lights to impose order, we drove tentatively over the shoulder of Table Mountain and suddenly, sprawled out on the Cape Flats and shining as brightly as the stars overhead, were Guguletu and Khayelitsha. The lights were on in the townships.In purely theatrical terms, the symbolism of this image is Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The devil gets the best lines, as usual. That may depend, of course, on whether we’re prepared to qualify David Cameron in that role, but in William Gaminara's rapid-firing farce The Three Lions, the PM (played with real brio by Dugald Bruce-Lockhart) certainly gets to show off his nefarious side, and then goes on to riff demonically as everything descends, gloriously, into chaos.Gaminara tells his own acerbic version of what happened when Cameron, supported by David Beckham and Prince William, went to Switzerland in December 2010 to try and clinch Britain’s 2018 World Cup bid with FIFA. Read more ...
David Nice
All Savoyards, whether conservative or liberal towards productions, have been grievously practised upon. They told us to expect the first professional London grappling with Gilbert and Sullivan’s eighth and, subject-wise, most problematic operetta in 20 years (23, if the reference is to Ken Russell’s unmitigated mess, one of English National Opera’s biggest disasters). Yet this is not Princess Ida as the pair would recognize it.In what turns out to be director Phil Wilmott’s “performing version”, the dramatis personae is essentially reduced by at least six characters of note, numbers are Read more ...