Theatre
Marianka Swain
If insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, repeatedly unfunny Harvey isn’t just a study of madness, but a punishing example of it. Mary Chase’s dusty 1944 farce about a man hallucinating a 6ft 3in rabbit has slapstick trappings, but, in Lindsay Posner’s flat revival, the pace and energy of a straggling funeral procession.Chase’s placid, overlong paean to escapism – which somehow beat The Glass Menagerie to a Pulitzer – soothed her anxious wartime audience, but it’s thin pickings for a modern crowd; little has been done to instill contemporary Read more ...
Gary Raymond
There can be few modern plays as testing for a female actor as Manfred Karge’s Man to Man. When Tilda Swinton took it on at the Royal Court in 1987 and brought to the many roles of this one woman show her androgynous intensity it was the performance that made her name. Here in Cardiff for the Wales Millennium Centre’s revival, Margaret Ann Bain gives one of the most tireless and faultless performances a Welsh stage has seen in some time; a breathless, kinetically poetic 70 minutes that is never anything less than entirely captivating.The story of Ella Gericke, a working-class woman in Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Stephen Sondheim's ever-elastic masterpiece is downsized to largely dazzling effect in its latest iteration, which has been transferred intact to a Shaftesbury Avenue pop-up after premiering last autumn within the surrounds of an actual pie-and-mash eatery called Harrington's in Tooting, south London.Granted a Soho upgrade courtesy the producer Cameron Mackintosh, Bill Buckhurst's production may not be the most nuanced Sweeney Todd you are ever likely to come across, and some may recoil from having Jeremy Secomb's singularly vengeance-prone carnivore so fully in your face. But as a contrast Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Hey, it’s the 1990s – yet again. After high-profile revivals of contemporary classics, such as Patrick Marber’s Closer and Kevin Elyot’s My Night with Reg, here comes, from that edgy decade, a fringe version of the iconic story of Leith heroin addicts, based on the cult book by Irvine Welsh which spawned a classic 1996 film by Danny Boyle, as well as this play, adapted by Harry Gibson in 1994. This version of the in-yer-face drama by the aptly named In Your Face Theatre Company was first seen at the Edinburgh Festival last year. How well has it traveled south?When you enter the venue, it’s Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
This 1887 domestic drama by August Strindberg is rarely seen in London, and Abbey Wright’s new production of Laurie Slade’s new version might have seized the opportunity to give this gristly chunk of pre-Freudian sexual polemic a thorough 21st-century shake-up. That chance is missed.Instead of bracing modernity (the play would have startled its first audiences with its naturalism), we’re presented with a historical hybrid of a world in which the characters wear approximations of fin-de-siècle dress, and the arrival of visitors is heralded by sleighbells, yet a husband may speak of his wife as Read more ...
Marianka Swain
This is, stresses our guide, a work of pure (read: non-libellous) fiction, except that its “preposterous” premise is rooted in even more preposterous truth. In 2010, diva extraordinaire Barbra Streisand produced wildly narcissistic coffee-table book My Passion for Design chronicling the creation of her gaudy Malibu dream estate, which – gloriously – includes a basement storing her extravagant collections in fully-fledged “shoppes”. What, pondered writer Jonathan Tolins, would it be like if someone had to work in this absurd consumerist utopia?The result is a screamingly funny one-man Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Jacobean playwright John Ford is flavour of the season at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. His better-known, and simply better, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, opened the venue’s new programme last autumn and is followed now by that work’s younger sibling, The Broken Heart, in a production that rather gloriously surprises.Director Caroline Steinbeis has talked of the elements of soap opera she found in the play, and overlays the traditional business of revenge tragedy with lashings of humour, moving the action on speedily and taking it briskly around the theatre’s auditorium to boot. It’s an Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Richard Nelson (b. 1950) is a leading figure in American theatre but also a consistent documentarian of his country’s liberal consciousness. His series of plays about the Apple Family, written between 2010 and 2013, have been critically acclaimed for their portrayal of the upstate New York clan’s gatherings on significant historical days. They are performed for the first time in the UK at the Brighton Festival in May.Nelson’s career, however, began in the mid-Seventies with his profile coming to wider attention the following decade as he worked alongside theatre directors such as Britain’s Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Nowadays, playwrights do their apprenticeships at university, studying drama. But, once upon a time, they had proper jobs before they started making theatre. Such is the case of the late Michael Hastings, who died in 2011 and whose most famous piece is Tom & Viv (about TS Eliot and his wife). Before becoming a playwright, he worked for three years as a tailor's apprentice. The Cutting of the Cloth, written in 1973 and accumulating dust in a bottom drawer ever since, is based on those early work experiences. But is it worth staging?This is a wintry play for a cold nightThe story is set in Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Writing about writers: exploring what you know, or the very definition of stifling egoism? Either way, it can be a terrible trap for the playwright, with craft becoming not just the subject of a work, but its defining feature. Hugh Whitemore narrowly avoids that fate in his unashamedly writerly 1977 piece about poet and novelist Stevie Smith, which is packed to the gills with erudite bon mots, yet, in Christopher Morahan’s leisurely revival, somewhat lacking in dramatic thrust.Whitemore’s play sticks with the most tried-and-tested version of biographical theatre – namely, the semi-narrated Read more ...
Heather Neill
Mustapha Matura's 1974 play is a celebration of liberation, both social and political, and a sly warning about the possible pitfalls of sudden freedom. Mas (or Masquerade) is the Trinidadian version of Carnival, an exotic mixture of Christian and African tradition played out just before Lent. It provides an opportunity to adopt a different persona, to drink to excess and to behave in ways unacceptable at any other time. But Matura's play is set on either side of colonial Trinidad's liberation from Britain in 1962; the acting out of roles and dressing up as policemen and generals takes on a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
As their career progresses, playwrights face a real problem: should they please their fans by writing the same play, over and over again, or should they risk trying out new things? Polymath Philip Ridley has built up a corpus of East End gothic plays, in-yer-face shockers and dystopic visions. But he has also written female monologues and imaginative two-handers about love. His latest one breaks more new ground: it is a comedy, and — unique for this playwright — it is overtly political.Radiant Vermin is about a young couple, Ollie and Jill. They are having their first baby and fantasise about Read more ...