Theatre
Steve Clarkson
A spiralling stage, horned with two raised prongs. A circular display, mounted on the back wall, which presents the buildings and coastline of a seaside town from a bird’s eye view. Subtle blues, yellows and reds that light up the stage to reflect the time of day. Spirited actors buzzing around like heated molecules in an educational science video as they each take on several roles.If Under Milk Wood was exclusively “a play for voices”, as its author Dylan Thomas suggested, then such visual aspects of the classic Welsh tale would never have come into being. But here they are at York Theatre Read more ...
fisun.guner
Adapted by Linnie Reedman and with music by Joe Evans, Oscar Wilde’s only novel – the more scandalous original version serialised in 1890, which Wilde himself later expurgated – finds a new lease of life narrated by one of its minor characters: theatre impresario and Sibyl Vane’s manager Mr Isaacs. In this production he may not be “fat” but, scraping and bowing at every turn with “pompous humility”, he is certainly played, uncomfortably at times, as stereotypically Jewish, albeit in not quite so heightened a manner as most Victorian portrayals. Yet the anti-Semitism clearly signposted Read more ...
Steven Berkoff
I hardly knew anything about Shakespeare as a schoolboy and it was only when attending my first acting classes, when we sallow and uncouth students were required to do a speech each week to be tested on, that I had my first awakenings. At the very first I found the dense text too complex and remote for my taste, but persevered, swallowed the language in great chunks and then heaved it out. But from the outset I felt that something had bit. The text, so sinuous, so entwined in metaphors, slowly but surely affected me. I was breathing a stronger air and a profoundly disturbing air. I was being Read more ...
aleks.sierz
How careless are we about the details of our private life? Well, unsurprisingly the answer is “very”. To make this point, playwright James Graham explores the subject not only by means of verbatim testimonies from public figures, but also by involving the audience, taking a look at how members of the public leave a digital footprint on Facebook and Twitter, as well as the personal details we all share when we buy anything online — like theatre tickets. Oh, and yes, there’s also some dialogue.When you buy a ticket for Privacy you get an automated email from Graham in which he says that “I’ll Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
Usually, to describe a play as "of its time" is a criticism. It is suggestive of drama that hasn't aged well, that doesn't work quite as well for today's audience as it did for the original crowd. First performed in 1847, Dion Boucicault's The School for Scheming seems at first glance to fall into this category, with its mannered language, twisting plot and moral overtones.But, as this revival demonstrates, pre-emptive assumptions of staleness can be confounded by a production that is all witty observations, sly mimicry and sarcastic asides. As the title would suggest, the action Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What is it with the London theatre and this particular Arthur Miller play? In 1987, Michael Gambon reached a career-best peak playing the Italian-American longshoreman, Eddie Carbone, in a defining National Theatre revival of A View From the Bridge directed by Alan Ayckbourn, and Ken Stott was arguably even more scorching in the same role on the West End five years ago. Now along comes the Flemish director Ivo van Hove to rattle the cages of received theatrical practice with a stripped-back approach to Miller's high-octane text that places the focus directly on leading man Mark Strong and an Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Plotted on the Nunn Curve of Fatal Attraction to Flare Path, Sir Trevor’s latest West End outing – Noël Coward’s post-war comedy Relative Values – lands solidly in the upper-middle reaches. Why not the unqualified upper? The stock answer here would be that Coward’s play is fatally flawed, blighting even a director at his best. Any alternative risks straying into the stickiest of ideological mires, braving the final social and theatrical taboo: class.“Comedies of manners swiftly become obsolete when there are no longer any manners,” proclaims Wodehouse-esque butler Crestwell in Act II. Coward Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Dmitry Krymov (b 1954) is one of Russia’s most groundbreaking and celebrated contemporary theatre directors and set designers. Performances by his “Theatre Laboratory” are renowned for combining multimedia with art installation techniques to surprise and thrill audiences across Europe and as far afield as New York.The son of writer Natalia Krymova and theatre director Anatoly Efros, Krymov worked in set design during the Eighties but turned to art the following decade, forging a successful career as a painter and exhibiting all over the world. He returned to theatre in 2002 and two Read more ...
Naima Khan
Written and directed by the ever-varied Amir Nizar Zuabi, Oh My Sweet Land tells the story of a German-Syrian woman living in Paris and struggling with her connection to the raging civil war abroad. Zuabi, the Palestinian theatre-maker who gave us 2012's divisive treatment of the story of Abraham in The Beloved and the RSC's Middle East-inspired take on The Comedy of Errors, now looks at similar themes of love, loss and reunion, albeit with a very different tone. Performed by Corinne Jaber who, like her character, is German-Syrian but based in France, Oh My Sweet Land couples Read more ...
Anya Reiss
About a week after my modern adaptation of The Seagull closed in 2012 at Southwark Playhouse the director Russell Bolam texted me, "Same again?" So it’s now in 2014 that at (the new) Southwark Playhouse we’ve got our modern take on Chekhov’s Three Sisters, which has just opened.I made it modern because I can’t see any other reason for me to do it. There are loads of eloquent, clever versions of the original knocking around and I don’t feel any need to throw another one in unless I’m doing something different. The reason to make it modern though is more than that, and I have more than a Read more ...
Jeremy Eccles
"Everyone is beautiful when they dance,” oozes the ballroom MC in the midst of a competition that reveals just how un-beautiful terpsichorean people can be when seriously challenged by other dancers, or by anyone radical enough to try to dance to a different tune. Yes, Strictly Ballroom the 1992 film has become Strictly Ballroom the Musical – premiered in Sydney last weekend with Kylie Minogue in attendance – as it was always destined to be.It is less well known that the work actually began as a 20-minute student exercise at Australian's National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) way back Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Gavin Creel licked his trophy in delight, Zrinka Cvitešić spoke of making Croatian history, and Sharon D Clarke let out an exultant "wow" from the podium that was surely heard well beyond the walls of the Royal Opera House. And so it was Sunday night at the 38th annual Laurence Olivier Awards, which coupled the occasional surprise (the win for Once leading lady Cvitešić very much among them) with the unusually meritocratic sense that for once - and not before time - the right people were receiving the right awards.That was nowhere more true than of the actress prize for Lesley Manville, one Read more ...