Theatre
aleks.sierz
When, before the great miners’ strike of 1984-85, Britain still had a coal industry, the miner was at the centre of a never-ending class war: you saw him either as an honest proletarian, in the vanguard of the struggle for better pay and conditions, or as a uppity worker, whose union held the country to ransom. Since the dismantling of the coal industry, an element of sentiment has entered the equation. Now, we miss the horny-handed sons of toil — and shed discreet tears when we watch Brassed Off.So Beth Steel’s new play, Wonderland, which looks at both the personal and political lives of a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The National Theatre delayed the opening of this play about newspapers for two weeks as it waited for the results of the phone-hacking trial. Is this what a tabloid would call “legal health and safety gone mad” – or what a broadsheet would characterise as “a sensible precaution”? Either way, in the wake of last week’s verdict on former News of the Screws editor Andy Coulson, who was found guilty of phone hacking, Richard Bean’s new play is certainly timely. And it stars the charismatic Billie Piper, who can make a legal dictionary sound interesting.Piper plays Paige Britain (geddit?), Read more ...
Elin Williams
Mametz Wood was the objective of the 38th Welsh Division during the First Battle of the Somme in World War One. Numerous failed attempts to capture the wood were made, during which much Welsh blood was spilt. Mametz therefore holds a great deal of significance for the Welsh and their contribution to the First World War.Welsh writer Owen Sheers attempts to see the battle through the eyes of the soldiers in his poem on Mametz Wood, and now on a farm near Usk in Monmouthshire he has joined forces with National Theatre Wales to bring his poignant, powerful words to life. Drawing on the works of Read more ...
Marianka Swain
How do you solve a problem like a musical? Rodgers and Hammerstein's ambitious Carousel seems tailor-made for expansive venues like the National Theatre, where Nicholas Hytner memorably revived this show in 1992: diminutive spaces need not apply. But conventional wisdom gets a robust refutation from Morphic Graffiti's reimagining of the 1943 classic at east London's intimate Arcola, proving that, with creative thinking, small venues can pack a mighty punch. This emerging company's dynamic interpretation also goes some way toward resolving the tension between the show-stopping numbers and Read more ...
Robin Soans
A still Sunday morning in late October… the sky monotone grey… my friend and I are on a fact-finding mission in Jackson, Mississippi. We drive to the outskirts of the city, take a left onto Hanging Moss Road, and see ahead of us, in isolation among the pines, the Word and Worship church where Bishop Jeffrey Stallworth will be conducting morning service. For the next two hours I listen to the words and music which will, five years later, form the basis of my thinking for Perseverance Drive.The two most vivid memories of that service were the preaching, which struck me as being retrogressive Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
For a play that involves a lot of movement, it is the freeze-frame stillnesses in Athol Fugard’s Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act that linger before the eyes once it is over. Six times bright photographic flashes capture the two protagonists, trapping them, their illicit affair, and their shame, in our gaze for an endless moment. These images are both the climax and the starting point for the drama – it was real-life police photographs of this kind that initially inspired Fugard to tackle this subject.As in all the best drama, we are aware of the doom that awaits the lovers Read more ...
Naima Khan
Let's say Greek tragedies exist in a multiverse where the same stories play out simultaneously in thousands of ways. And let's say we're given free rein to argue over those stories, debate their morals and characters and disagree fundamentally over the story arc itself. This is what the German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig explores in his take on the Greek general Idomeneus, who led the Cretan armies to Troy and also inspired a Mozart opera (Idomeneo). His 70-minute play embraces the possibilities of story-telling rather more than the story itself. Translated by David Tushingham and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
As of next year, John McGrath will be the most senior artistic director of a national company in the land. Rufus Norris will be freshly installed at the National Theatre of Great Britain on the Southbank. Laurie Sansom started at the National Theatre of Scotland in 2013. McGrath launched National Theatre Wales in 2009. Since the first production, A Good Night Out in the Valleys, toured the old Miners’ Institutes of the South Wales coalfield in March 2010, McGrath has set about staking out new notions of what a national theatre can be. That first season offered 13 productions which Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“If we go to the theatre, it’s because we want to be surprised, even amazed.” Peter Brook’s programme note for The Valley of Astonishment stresses emotion and sensation above all things. How curious then that the play itself should be so cold, so cerebral a thing. In unpacking the mysterious valley of the human mind, Brook has become so engrossed in his subject matter and its scientific facts and phenomena that he forgets to add the drama that they need to move from lecture to theatre.Brook’s latest work – another collaboration with writer and director Marie-Hélène Estienne following The Suit Read more ...
David Schneider
When Dostoyevsky was asked why he wrote Crime and Punishment he famously replied, “To further my career and get shortlisted for book prizes.” He didn’t, of course. I made that up. But what artist/writer/actor creates a piece of art/writing/acting without at least a bit of shallow consideration for their career? (What?! Just me?) The opening of my play Making Stalin Laugh at JW3 in London has been a joyous reminder that there’s so much more to writing than getting good reviews and checking the number of Twitter followers you have once an hour. Not that I do that, of course. No. Definitely not. Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Theatre-maker Tim Crouch has a thing about art. One of his plays, ENGLAND, was performed in art galleries across the world; another was called An Oak Tree, after the 1973 conceptual art piece by Michael Craig-Martin. In fact, Crouch even looks like an arty type. Now, in his latest production, he tells a story about two fictional artists: Janet Adler and her lover Margaret Gibb. But, really, his main theme, as ever, is the relationship between art and reality.The audience arrives to see a bare set, on which two young kids are playing, with the bare-brick back wall of the theatre visible. There Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A totemic play from (nearly) 20 years ago surfaces afresh in Stephen Daldry's West End revival of Skylight, the power of David Hare's intimate epic fully intact if somewhat redistributed as is to be expected from the passage of time and a new cast. Make that a mostly new cast, given that the current leading man, Bill Nighy, followed on from Michael Gambon in the original Richard Eyre staging of a play that has plenty to say about how we live and love now as it did during the Thatcherite era in which the writing is steeped.If the evening as a whole feels less erotically charged than the first Read more ...