Theatre
philip radcliffe
By picking his way through Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Virgil’s Aeneid - written 600 years later - Simon Armitage has it all, including the horse and Helen, each of whom in their way enable the hordes to breach Troy’s gates. What with that and the mingling of mortals and gods, not to mention the 100,000 troops that Agamemnon leads across the Aegean to rescue Helen, there’s a lot to attempt to pack into this theatre’s intimate space in three hours. Rather too much as it turns out.In order to accommodate the action, director Nick Bagnall has moved slightly away from the usual in-the-round Read more ...
edward.seckerson
On the Richter scale of catchiness Richard Adler and Jerry Ross’s songs for The Pajama Game are right up there. Quite who did what in their brief but shining songwriting partnership was never entirely clear, though Adler claimed supremacy in the music department. But one thing is clear: the man who brought them on and pushed them forward - the great Frank Loesser - is all over their work like a rash. It is said he wrote two of the Pajama Game songs uncredited but he could easily have written at least one other. Had Ross not died prematurely after their second consecutive smash, Damn Yankees ( Read more ...
bella.todd
There are echoes of Lost in the crashed B-25 bomber that fills this often brilliant production with its rusting corpse. And they’re probably intended. Joseph Heller’s cult World War Two satire is, after all, about a kind of purgatory: US Army bombardier Captain John Yossarian is trapped by the absurdities of bureaucracy within a cynically perpetuated war where the ubiquitous Catch-22 states that anyone asking to be declared insane and discharged from duty must be well enough to continue to fly - fear of death being a rational human response.He is caught, too, by suppressed grief and guilt Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Waiting For Godot is one of those plays which even those who have never seen know something about. “A tragicomedy in two acts,” as Beckett's subtitle described it, in which two tramps in bowler hats blether on about boots and a bloke who never appears, and where, in Irish critic Vivian Mercer's immortal words, “nothing happens twice”. And if they know nothing else about it, they surely can quote the play's most famous line: "We give birth astride of a grave."Now comes Simon Dormandy's “reimagined” version aimed at a younger audience. Out go the bowler hats and in come baseball caps, one of Read more ...
Heather Neill
Yellow Face comes into the Shed a year after it was first greeted enthusiastically at the newly-opened Park Theatre. Its category was generally agreed to be "mockumentary". Fair enough as the author David Henry Hwang appears as a character in his own play, a mixture of autobiography and fiction. Hwang was inspired to tackle the subject - the lack of opportunity for East Asians in American theatre - when Jonathan Pryce was cast as the Engineer, complete with taped up eyes, in Miss Saigon, adopting "yellow face" in the tradition of "black face" minstrels. Hwang led the protests against Pryce's Read more ...
David Nice
If you’re tempted to see Fiona Shaw’s impressive solo performance as Mary the mother of a son she can’t bring herself to name – and see it you probably should – then bear two things in mind.First, anything you may have heard or read about this being the narrative of everywoman mourning an everyman who just happens to have been crucified is nonsense; despite the contemporary props, it’s unequivocally the New Testament story told from a perspective which Biblical literalists will dislike (and they hated it very vocally when the show opened in New York).Second, don’t expect the kind of nuanced Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When absorbing any artistic experience we can be confounded by our own expectations. Such was the case for me with Bonanza. Rather confusingly, Berlin are a Belgian outfit majoring in cinematic, multimedia theatre so, perhaps, I was expecting an element of performance to the evening, of direct human delivery. This was not to be, although the presence of a shadowy figure stage-side, sitting at a laptop behind a rustic wooden sign saying “Bonanza Fire House”, kept me wondering if something of this nature was about to occur. It wasn’t, and once I’d settled to that fact, the evening was engaging Read more ...
Elin Williams
Dylan Thomas’ iconic play Under Milk Wood boasts a host of colourful characters. From the blind sea Captain Cat to the loveable Polly Garter washing the steps of the welfare hall, the play is a play for voices; a play for characters. Thomas, born in Swansea, thirst like a dredger, moved to Laugharne with his wife Caitlin in 1938. It was here he most likely got the inspiration for those characters, although the setting was allegedly inspired by New Quay in Ceredigion. This year for the poet’s 100th birthday, Dylan is everywhere and National Theatre Wales’s Raw Material: Llareggub Revisited is Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The UK premiere of Dmitry Krymov’s Opus No.7 begins at 5pm. When it finishes two and half hours later, a sun-dappled evening is bustling with the opening weekend of the Brighton Festival. At a nearby pub friends ask, “What was it like? What was it about?” For once I am lost for words. Describing Opus No.7 is akin to conveying an emotionally moving dream which, laid out prosaically, becomes gibberish. The production is as much performance art happening as theatre, zapping the brain with a concatenation of imagery, like a Quay Brothers animation brought to life.Krymov is the toast of Moscow’s Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Lucy Bailey’s Titus Andronicus doesn’t pull any punches (or stabbings, smotherings and throat-slittings, for that matter). Bursting into a Globe smoky with incense, with shouts and drums, forcing itself at us and on us, this is a production whose physicality is its true language. But while anyone going for the gore will get their money’s worth – the opening night added a few more to the tally of fainting audience members – they’ll also get something better: a show that’s shocking, certainly, but whose provocations are never empty.Much is made of Titus as an early play. Criticism has Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Kinks’ music deserves more than another jukebox musical. Joe Penhall has instead collaborated with Ray Davies on a show about the pain and compromise musicians go through to fill those jukeboxes. Most of The Kinks’ biggest hits are here somewhere. But, in the Hampstead Theatre’s first musical, they’re used in a way reminiscent of the site of two previous Davies productions, Theatre Royal Stratford East. The songs joyously reach out to the audience, even as they are shown to be rooted in a wider, difficult and daft world of class, family, professional struggle and private agony.The basic Read more ...
Matthew Sharp
Shakespeare's ubiquitous “planetary influence” is well-documented. As Stephen Marche points out in How Shakespeare Changed Everything, not much from our sex lives to the assassination of Lincoln remains untouched. And, of course, there's the language. You may think that what you are reading has more rhyme than reason, be madness (though there is method in it) or amount to nothing more than a wild goose chase. It may be Greek to you, make your hair stand on end or set your teeth on edge. It goes without saying that brevity is the soul of wit and that comparisons are odious, so why does he lay Read more ...