Theatre
Naima Khan
Here's a fun fact: this year the Merriam-Webster dictionary added a new definition for the noun "catfish". As well as the amphibian, a catfish now also refers to "a person who sets up a false personal profile on a social networking site for fraudulent or deceptive purposes." Having been popularised by the 2010 American film documentary of the same name, the term is also used casually as a verb, meaning to fool someone online. And so we now have emerging American playwright Kathy Rucker's Crystal Springs (***), which puts the catfishing of a 16-year-old centre-stage without fully coming to Read more ...
Matt Wolf
This has been a busy season for Off Broadway musicals crossing the pond to London, from Dessa Rose and Dogfight to Forbidden Broadway and See Rock City. But for simplicity of approach coupled with swiftness of emotional attack, Benjamin Scheuer's solo musical The Lion stands apart. That's not just because the Anglo-American Scheuer, 32, possesses an apparent sweetness that makes his sungthrough embrace of anger, rage, and grief - all in the service, it should be added, of forgiveness and acceptance - that much more surprising.More to the point is that the 70-minute trajectory telling of the Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Shared yearning for a place to belong is not a revelatory concept, nor is it given new dimension in this gently saccharine piece, yet although the whistle-stop tour only covers familiar landmarks, the journey is a convivial one. Adam Mathias and Brad Alexander’s pop/rock-cum-contemporary Broadway show meanders through six vignettes – with a loose thematic thread – that take place at American tourist attractions; some are all too brief, others outstay their welcome. Graham Hubbard’s economical staging is mostly effective, bar some cumbersome box moving and the strange decision to keep one Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It is no mean feat to turn an audience against idealistic, painfully young marines heading for the nightmarish hell of Vietnam, but Dogfight comes perilously close to achieving that undesirable goal in the manner of their introduction. The band of brothers have just one night of freedom in San Francisco before deployment, and how do they wish to spend it? Competing to see which of them can recruit the least attractive date in a so-called "dogfight", with the winner – if there can really be a winner in such a contest – pocketing a wad of cash. On the Town it is not.In fairness to Peter Duchan Read more ...
Marianka Swain
If comedy is tragedy plus time, either too much has elapsed since the fictional events of Jezebel, or not quite enough. Newcomer Mark Cantan's uneven screwball comedy pitting a methodical couple against a scatter-brained opposite with wacky misunderstandings aplenty, lacks the emotional heft to be more than genially inconsequential. And it's too enamoured of the old-fashioned TV sitcoms it references to subvert rather than merely replicate their well-worn tropes. Add a classic living-room set, direct address to camera - sorry, audience - and audible pauses for laugh track, and you get Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Cuckooed, Traverse Theatre *****Mark Thomas's new show is in the theatre section of the Fringe brochure, but this hour, full of laughs and witty lines as it is, could easily be under the heading of comedy. Indeed, Thomas once made his living as a stand-up, even if his career has long defied any pigeonholing; professional irritant, activist and satirist are just a few job titles that could apply.Cuckooed is a masterful piece of storytelling and in an engrossing hour in which Thomas tells of how he – a master prankster – was duped by "Martin", a former comrade in Campaign Against Arms Trade. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Lauren Bacall, who has died at the age of 89, was an iconic figure on screen. She spoke one of the immortal lines in film history when all but exhaling the remark, “You just put your lips together and blow” in Howard Hawks’s To Have and Have Not. But away from the screen and from such husbands as Humphrey Bogart and Jason Robards, Bacall shone just as brightly on stage, a medium that made plain a quality hinted at by her work in movies. She may not have been the greatest actress ever – far from it: you wouldn’t peruse her CV for reappraisals of Shakespeare and Chekhov. But in her element, she Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Rona Munro's history cycle may take some liberties with the facts, as the writer admits in the programme notes, but its broad narrative sweep has been talked about as a state-of-the-Scottish-nation trilogy. It's the first joint production of the National Theatre of Scotland and the National Theatre and the timing of its premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival couldn't be more pertinent – just a few weeks before Scotland votes on 18 September in the independence referendum. The plays, which cover a turbulent period of Scottish history in the 15th century during the reigns of three Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” declares Lord Darlington in Act II of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan. He’s the classic Wildean cad - unprincipled, facetiously witty and in this production, possessed of the vilest pencil moustache, and yet the playwright gives him the most memorable line of the whole play. Why? To demonstrate that nobody is too completely good or bad not to be redeemed by beauty.irst performed in 1892, Lady Windermere’s Fan was Wilde’s first society comedy and its success set him on the way to becoming one of the most popular Read more ...
Marianka Swain
For those who have spent the past few months nodding along to World War I conversations while desperately trying to remember who killed that archduke and why, Rolf Hochhuth has kindly supplied a solution in the form of a dramatised European history lesson, making its English-language premiere at the Finborough.But beware: this beneficence requires payment in kind. Controversial German playwright Hochhuth is feverishly devoted to his distorted viewpoint, and he won’t be satisfied until he has ground you into submission. Thus his “documentary theatre” is spiced up with a liberal helping of bias Read more ...
fisun.guner
Imagine an industrial disaster that manages to kill, maim or make homeless a significant percentage of the population of a densely populated city. Then imagine the effects of that disaster for years to come: the catastrophic physical and psychological effects on the city’s surviving inhabitants; the complete destruction of the region’s infrastructure; and the utterly devastating impact on its already struggling local economy. (If it helps, imagine this city is Bhopal, 1984, and the company is United Carbide.)Now imagine that this powerful multinational company – culpable through Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
In her book How To Be a Woman, Times columnist Caitlin Moran explains the difference between strip clubs and burlesque shows, and why the latter are perfectly acceptable to feminism. “In burlesque, the power rests with the person taking their clothes off, as it always should do in polite society.” My Stories, Your Emails, which opened last night in the Purcell Room at the Southbank Centre, is cabaret artist Ursula Martinez’s way of making exactly the same point. Martinez was subjected to an unwanted level of exposure (sorry...) some years ago, when a video of her clever little striptease Read more ...