Theatre
Heather Neill
In 2011 Tim Pigott-Smith gave us an impressive, humane King Lear at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. Here he is again, a patriarch learning how "sharper than a serpent's tooth" it is to have thankless children, but this time his character decides to do something about it and to acknowledge his own failings. The result is good-natured comedy rather than tragedy.Lester (Pigott-Smith), a Long Island television repairman, has had a stroke and is bedridden in a care home. His wife has recently died and his fractious family - two sons and a daughter - has been drawn together by circumstance almost Read more ...
Matt Wolf
On screen, Philip Seymour Hoffman will be forever immortalised as the Oscar-winning star of Capote who was both a darling of the indie film world (think Todd Solondz and the Coen Brothers) and an invaluable supporting player in such mainstream fare as Moneyball, Charlie Wilson's War, and the Hunger Games franchise. But the shock waves currently being felt at the news of his death are likely to be intensified in New York, the city where he was found dead and where Hoffman first came to attention as the formidable theatre talent that he remained through to his last Broadway stage role - as Read more ...
philip radcliffe
There’s no place like home – and home for writer Simon Stephens is Stockport. He doesn’t live there any more, but he was born there in 1971 and still finds the place, particularly its seedier side, a rich source of emotionally charged material. So, having started life less than 10 miles from the Royal Exchange, he keeps coming back. This is the fourth play he has written for the theatre, starting with Port in 2002.That play dealt with Rachael, a girl growing up there in potentially crushing circumstances, but somehow finding within herself the spirit to escape, at least for a while. His Read more ...
Christopher Beanland
Sydney has a nervous tic. People think Australians are brash and bolshy but that's not true. There's a deep sense of ingrained anxiety here. That anxiety comes from being at the edge of the world, a long way from Europe and in an unfamiliar and unrelenting land. It has been expressed through the art of Australia for 200 years. Today the country and its biggest city are both more confident, so the anxiety expresses itself in subtler ways.Yet Sydney still cares what people think. Jorn Utzon's Sydney Opera House presides over the Harbour and in its 40th year it is still an absolute bobby dazzler Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
Barely a month of 2014 has passed, and yet already the opportunities to remember the First World War seem to be presenting themselves at every turn. In this trio of short plays, we get a more unusual treatment of the anniversary – as the overall title suggests, the purpose is to hear the voices that don't sound so loudly across the intervening hundred years. We are here to understand what the women did in the war.The first of the three plays, Luck of War by Gwen John, presents a scenario that must have occurred far more frequently than official histories record. Ann Hemingway, played Read more ...
james.woodall
Sam Mendes thinks King Lear is a bigger play than it is. In a new staging he directs at the National Theatre, he wants it to be about a convulsion of nations, a reordering of borders, bombing populations. When Lear arrives to carve his kingdom into three - entirely in his own self-interest, not his daughters’ (in the play) - over 30 soldiers are stood to attention rear stage. The illusion suggests 300 and proposes that this is a ruler whose every command is enforced by the mere shouldering of hundreds of guns. Shakespeare’s Lear is in charge, or his “authority” (as Kent states), is. No one Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Feminism suddenly seems to be all the rage in London theatre. Yesterday, I reviewed Nick Payne’s Blurred Lines, and tonight I saw this show by American provocateur Gina Gionfriddo, whose Becky Shaw was at the Almeida three years ago. This current show is a light comedy, with some good bright lines, an entertainment that takes several pauses in which ideas are expounded and discussed. It’s a bit like being back in college: a mix of laughs and study.The set-up has an admirable clarity: two former college room-mates meet up again after some two decades apart. Catherine is now a hot academic who Read more ...
aleks.sierz
You can’t accuse Nick Payne of being fainthearted. His new play explores what it means to be a woman and it features a wonderful all-woman cast. But wait a minute: isn’t he a man? And what do men really know about being a woman? You see what I mean about needing courage for this project? The good news is that this is a experimental evening based on a good idea. But what’s it like as theatre?The play conveys no sense of lived female experienceInspired by his reading of books such as Kat Banyard’s The Equality Illusion and bell hooks’s Feminism Is for Everybody, Payne has created a piece of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The transfer this week to the West End of The Weir has reminded theatre-goers of Conor McPherson’s hypnotic powers as a dramatist. In the Donmar's revival of the play you can palpably feel the playwright’s storytelling magic casting its spell all over again as, on a windy evening in a rural Irish pub, character after character unburdens himself - and finally herself - of a supernatural tale.In a way, The Weir - written when he was only 26 - is itself a ghost haunting the playwright’s entire career. It was first performed by the Royal Court in 1997, and was soon being staged all over the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
You don't have to know the difference between Dennis Wise (who is referenced during it) and Ernie Wise (who is not) to be immensely gripped by The Pass, the scorching new Royal Court play that traffics ostensibly in the world of football only to widen out into as corrosive a study in psychic implosion and self-destruction as the London theatre has seen in an age. Factor in a star performance from onetime History Boys student Russell Tovey that this actor's career to this point has in no way suggested, and one finds an early candidate for both the most surprising production of the year and Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Unlike television, with its series of Spooks and Homeland, theatre has more or less ignored the secret services. For reasons of snobbery (thrillers are somehow beneath the interest of young playwrights) or because of playwriting clichés (write what you know is difficult in the secret world, where no one really knows what’s going on), this is a relatively unexplored area. But in the era of Wiki-leaks and Edward Snowden, surely few subjects could be more timely?The story of Ciphers begins with a dead body. Justine, employed by the secret services, is found lifeless, having apparently committed Read more ...
David Benedict
“God,” wrote Stephen Sondheim, “is in the details.” Of course, he didn’t actually coin the phrase but throughout his published collections of lyrics he cites it as one of his three guiding principles. But to witness detail you need to be up close. Last seen on Broadway in the 1,058-seat Barrymore Theatre, Putting It Together felt overblown and strained. In the 312-seat St James Theatre, its strengths – the delights of a deftly interwoven selection of 32 Sondheim songs – leap into focus thanks to a quintet of deliciously detailed performances.Unlike Side By Side by Sondheim, the much copied Read more ...