Theatre
Adam Sweeting
The bittersweet career of The Kinks is portrayed to surprisingly potent effect in this fast, funny and sometimes poignant musical, now transferring to the West End from the Hampstead Theatre. No mere "jukebox musical" – though it's crammed with songs – it finds space for some kitchen-sink drama, a bit of psychotherapy and a few smart insights into the Sixties pop business.Ray Davies wrote all the music as well as the original story, from which playwright Joe Penhall has spun a pacey and eminently performable script. The stage-show format has to skate briskly over issues like dubious Read more ...
Tom Littler
About a year ago, Alan Brodie, who is the agent for the estate of Terence Rattigan, sent me a handful of his more obscure plays. I had worked with Alan before on a revival of Graham Greene’s first play, The Living Room, so he knew I had a penchant for what are now termed "rediscoveries". The play that jumped out at me was Rattigan’s theatrical debut: a comedy called First Episode. Written while he was still an undergraduate at Oxford in 1933 (co-authored with his friend Philip Heimann), it seemed to me a fresh, funny, and painfully honest account of his experiences there. A little research Read more ...
David Nice
Ibsen cast a cruel eye on the characters of his most relentlessly symbolic play – wild ducks wounded or domesticated by fate or character. They speak or behave unsympathetically, for the most part, yet the actors must make us care for them. Simon Stone and Chris Ryan sidestep the problem by not only updating the action but writing their own script on the subject, reinventing some of the motivations while keeping the essence. True to some of Ibsen’s main points it may not be, but this is heartbreaking drama, so truthfully acted it would make a stone weep.Most of the key situations remain. Read more ...
Marianka Swain
When gifting the unheard a voice, the temptation is often to make it a solemn one. Thankfully, Paddy Campbell has, for the most part, sidestepped puritanical preaching in his debut play based on experiences working at a ‘wet house’, a homeless hostel where incurable alcoholics can drink in a secure environment. Though tonally uneven, at its best Campbell’s piece delivers unpalatable truths with a bitingly funny sweetener.Wet House, developed with Newcastle’s Live Theatre, introduces naïve new recruit Andy (Riley Jones, pictured right with Chris Connel) to the bleak environs of Crabtree House Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It's throwback week on the West End, with two very different shows recalling the darkest days of America's racial disharmony. But whereas The Scottsboro Boys shocks and satirises and has us choke on our own laughter, Memphis is content to be the feel-good flipside. Throw a few home truths and some grit into the mix – disturbing but not too real – keep it predictable and sentimental, even a little patronising, and you ensure that everybody is dancing in the aisles and feeling good about themselves at the close.This 2010 Broadway Tony-winner is a bit like Hairspray but without the wit and self- Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Installed in the main exhibition space, this could have been a blockbuster show introducing a large audience to an important moment in Russian Theatre; but tucked away in the Department of Theatre and Performance, where spaces are narrow and galleries small, there is little room to show off these superb exhibits to their best advantage. Only the initiated will, I fear, brave these claustrophobic corridors and persevere long enough to appreciate the goodies on offer.Faced with walls painted bright red, labels hung too low and hard to read, copious detail about each production but little Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Hell is other people. It’s not the wilderness that poses the greatest threat to the stranded corporate bonding quartet in this docile Lord of the Flies-meets-The Office pastiche, but the endless stream of well-meaning incompetence. Yet while Tim Firth’s 1992 play is Schadenfreude Central – if you haven’t had your fill of disaster-by-proxy following the trail of Hurricane Gonzalo – it, too, suffers from benign ineptitude in not committing to a genre. At two and a half hours, Angus Jackson’s production offers exceedingly flabby comedy, but its foray into serious drama leaves it up the Read more ...
edward.seckerson
You come away from The Scottsboro Boys sure of two things: that the next cakewalk you hear will induce queasiness and that the show's director/choreographer Susan Stroman is some kind of genius. This kick-ass West End premiere, now happily transferred from the Young Vic, has a simplicity, a precision, a visceral energy, a choreographic razzle-dazzle that make an art of catching you off-guard. The story of the Scottsboro nine shamefully symbolises the sickness that once resided (and maybe still does) deep in the heart of American society. The nine innocent black youths were exonerated only Read more ...
Sarah Kent
On Saturday at Shakespeare’s Globe, the Alternative Miss World was staged for the 13th time. Having launched this gloriously tacky event in his Hackney studio in 1972, artist Andrew Logan promises to carry on the tradition until the day he dies; but it’s last showing – at the Roundhouse five years ago – nearly bankrupted him. This time round, crowd funding has helped solve the problem.Not surprisingly the theme was numbers, though Logan insists: “not the dull, monochrome numbers of finance, but oversaturated, excessive neon numbers, brimming with energy and potential, just like the Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Bigger is better in the Tricycle’s latest piece of reclaimed black history. African-American writer Marcus Gardley’s stimulating play, which transports Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba to 1836 New Orleans and a significant shift in the evolving racial hierarchy, begins slowly and timidly, reliant on exposition and sitcom laughs. Yet once he and Indhu Rubasingham embrace its operatic qualities, this memorably evocative work takes flight.Beartrice (Martina Laird), a free woman of colour, is set to inherit the fortune of her recently deceased lover Lazare (Paul Shelley) under the former French Read more ...
edward.seckerson
There’s a moment of stunned silence in Imelda Staunton’s storming Mama Rose at the Chichester Festival Theatre, a long, long, moment where neither speaking nor singing she conclusively demonstrates what a difference a great actress makes in this most iconic of musical theatre roles.Just like her mother and husband before, her daughter June has run off with the act’s hoofer Tulsa (excellent Dan Burton) and she (Rose) sits with the letter taking in all its implications. Suddenly everything else happening on stage dissolves into a kind of background blur as we read first the shock, the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A template of the American theatre gets dusted off to quietly devastating effect in Our Town, the 1938 Thornton Wilder play that has never been especially beloved in Britain even as it gets performed in every high school across the States. With luck, local regard for the work will move up a notch courtesy the UK directorial debut of American actor-director David Cromer, repeating an assignment that brought him extensive plaudits (and a long run) Off Broadway in 2009. Cromer's trump card lies in rendering bruisingly matter-of-fact a piece often dismissed as homespun and folksy. And his British Read more ...