Theatre
Gary Raymond
There are moments in this collaboration between performer and theatre impresario Christopher Green and best-selling novelist Sarah Waters, where, rather like with a Stewart Lee stand-up routine, the audience has to make a conscious decision whether they are going to go all the way not so much with the idea presented, but with the mode of presentation. There are times in The Frozen Scream when it feels like the punchline is getting further away rather than closer.Part pastiche, part prank, part homage, part Kiss Me, Kate for the post-9/11 social scientist, The Frozen Scream is an adaptation of Read more ...
David Nice
All that glisters is not gold in the casino and television game-show world of Rupert Goold’s American Shakespeare, first staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2011. Not all the accents are gold either, though working on them only seems to have made a splendid ensemble underline the meaning of every word all the better – and having come straight from the often slapdash verse-speaking of the RSC’s Henry IV, that comes as all the more of an invigorating surprise.Goold leads his team inexorably from the swank to the skull beneath the skin, a Shakespearean “problem-play” trope well suited to Read more ...
David Nice
Heritage Shakespeare for the home counties and the tourists is just about alive but not very well at the Royal Shakespeare Company. If that sounds condescending, both audiences deserve better, and get it at Shakespeare’s Globe, where the verse-speaking actually means something and the communication is much more urgent. Maybe it didn’t help that I saw RSC artistic director Gregory Doran’s diligent trawl through both parts of Henry IV less than a month after Phyllida Lloyd’s dazzling, visceral portmanteau version at the Donmar, welding most of Part One to selective scenes from its successor. Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
British theatre company 1927 celebrate their 10th birthday next year. Over this nearly-decade they have produced just three shows (plus a reimagining of The Magic Flute for Berlin’s Komische Oper). If that seems a little like slacking then you’ve obviously never seen one of their creations. To say they are meticulous is true, but also fails to reflect the sense of imaginative excess, of abundance, that pulses through everything they make. Animation, live action, music, song, dance and mime all have a place in their world. Theatre for 1927 is a four-dimensional affair, and Golem scores on Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The musical that defined an era is back on the West End, allowing a new generation to see what all the fuss was about 33 years ago when a non-narrative extravaganza as heavy on dance and scenic effects as it was light on plot launched itself in London and, soon after, the world. The terpsichorean ambition of Cats is holding up pretty well now, it must be said, thanks in large part to a new breed of triple-threat performer whose movement skills were harder to come by three decades ago.And if the second half of the TS Eliot-inspired Andrew Lloyd Webber/Trevor Nunn collaboration trails off into Read more ...
kate.bassett
This isn't just a piratical treasure hunt. The NT is also on a rescue mission. The master plan here is, surely, to retrieve Robert Louis Stevenson's vintage adventure story about buccaneers and buried gold from the clutches of shamelessly C-rate panto producers. Opening last night – and recommended for anyone over 10 years old – the National's new upmarket staging visually enchants, while exuding playfulness.A velvety night sky curves around director Polly Findlay's production. The Olivier auditorium is spangled with softly incandescent bulbs. These burn brighter, picking out Read more ...
David Nice
Strange world, isn’t it? Yesterday morning, buoyed up by the Royal Opera’s impressive Tristan und Isolde, I was listening on CD to Linda Esther Gray, a Wagnerian soprano for the ages, singing the best Liebstod I know. In the evening, I was watching Linda “Sue Ellen” Gray declaiming the traditional couplets of Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother, very musically – she always was a good actress, I reckon – if not as yet with immaculate timing (crikey, though, I've just found out she's 74).This was pantoland as only Wimbledon does it, and if my first return visit to the genre there since as a cub I Read more ...
philip radcliffe
With a bloodthirsty, corpse-devouring plant called Audrey at the centre of events, we can only be in the Little Shop of Horrors. It’s a far cry from Jack and the Beanstalk, but the Royal Exchange is known for providing alternative and, usually, zany seasonal entertainment. And they don’t come any zanier than this, especially under Derek Bond’s zippy direction.One of the longest-running off-Broadway shows, the grisly tale has been hanging around for more than 50 years in one form or another. Written by Howard Ashman, with music by Alan Menken, and based on the Roger Corman film with Charles Read more ...
David Nice
Not so much a national hero, more a national disgrace. That seems to be the current consensus on Peer Gynt as Norway moves forward from having canonized the wild-card wanderer of Ibsen's early epic. It’s now 200 years since Norway gained a constitution, and 114 since Peer first shone in the country's National Theatre, that elegant emblem of the Norwegian language. Where does this uniquely prosperous country stand today, spiritually speaking, and can Ibsen’s myth, creating as potent a figure as Oedipus, Hamlet, Don Juan or Faust, offer any answers?Alexander Mørk-Eidem took the question as the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When writers research, it’s not all about digging for facts. Feelings also count. When Nina Raine spent three months visiting hospitals for a play about the medical profession, she found a strange feeling spontaneously erupting inside herself. “The funny thing is I was getting up early for me, 6.30, to get on a bus to be at the place by a quarter to eight and I just started within a week to feel like a put-upon doctor saving people’s lives. Don’t these people realise I’m going to hospital? You do start to get this God complex.”For a play which, rarely for theatre, aims to show the way doctors Read more ...
Miriam Gillinson
A chalky-faced man stands in the shadows and his limbs jolt about, as if battling for position beneath his skin. This is the ghost of Hamlet's father and he is a fearful sight in ACS Random's Victorian and spectral take on Shakespeare's tragedy. When Hamlet senior's spirit croaks "Remember me!", it seems superfluous. This is a creature impossible to forget, even if this production's real-life characters aren't as vibrant as its figures from beyond the grave.Andrew Shepherd's production kicks off with a ferocious seance, involving Horatio (wearing a Victorian-era bowler hat) and some lace-clad Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The single spacious room that is the central location of Tena Štivičić’s 3 Winters has seen plenty of ghosts. It’s part of an old Zagreb mansion, and through the course of the play witnesses the diverse events of Croatian history of the last 70-odd years played out in miniature. Three overlapping time-schemes chart the full rotations of surrounding society: from the war-end move towards Communism in 1945, through 1990 eve-of-break-up Yugoslavia, and on to 2011, not long before EU accession. We may not literally see anything on either side of these three eras, but the action is implicitly Read more ...