Theatre
David Nice
Showboys will be boys – gym-bunny sailors, in this instance – as well as sisters, cousins, aunts, captain’s daughters and bumboat women. We know the ropes by now for Sasha Regan’s all-male Gilbert and Sullivan: a loving attempt to recreate, she says, the innocence of musical theatre in same-sex schools (mine, for which I played Sir Joseph Porter with a supporting army or navy of recorders, two cellos and piano, was mixed).This time, the naval high jinks allow Regan to evoke a kind of Privates on Parade scenario, the show-without-the-show set below deck on a World War Two battleship – or so we Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The trend of celebrating anniversaries by digging out old classics might suggest that no good new plays are being written, but at least it gives us the chance to re-assess their worth. Theatre Royal Stratford East, the legendary Joan Littlewood’s old venue, presents a new production of Oh What a Lovely War in its 60th anniversary year to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the First World War. This classic, first staged in 1963, is a powerful anti-war tract — but is there any more to it than a flamboyantly theatrical humanity?The idea for the musical originally came from BBC producer Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
Would you be able to tell if the world had ended? For Beth and Franklin, the wannabe intellectuals at the heart of Stephen Sewell's play, it proves quite difficult to ascertain whether life as they know it has come to an end from their privileged life high in a luxury Melbourne apartment. Whether they are bickering about how the New Yorker has gone downhill or despairing about terrorism, they remain insulated from the world by their own self-absorption.The stoppage of the title directly refers to the electricity, water, telephone line, mobile network and internet. The baser side of these Read more ...
David Nice
An insider once told me that you get a grant for including puppets in a production. Which may account for the amount of crap puppetry haphazardly applied in the theatre. That certainly can't be said about the work of husband-and-husband team Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones of Handspring as they collaborate again with War Horse director Tom Morris, this time on Shakespearean texturing of organic discipline. The problem is that such focused visual imagination needs to be matched by verbal beauty, word magic, of the highest order, and it isn’t.I can't agree with Mark Kidel, who in his Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Plunging into the lonely vortex of the long distance web wanker isn’t obviously gripping theatre, but Chris Goode’s seventy-minute descent into tawdry solitude and digital fantasy doesn’t do too badly.Nothing much happens on stage, as John, a wannabe erotic science-fiction writer, communes with the audience as well as with Carlos, a Los Angeles- based model who plies his trade on a porn site and chat room. As he talks to us spectators, we become implicated in uneasy voyeurism, alleviated by wry and sometimes intentionally facile banter, as if John were desperately trying to make us Read more ...
aleks.sierz
What exactly is unconventional about an unconventional couple? In Abi Morgan’s new two-hander, an adaptation of last year’s book of the same name by She and He (a West Coast American couple now aged 90ish), the situation is simple. Boy meets girl at college, they lose touch, then meet again 20 years later, when both are married with kids. When they start an affair things go wobbly, but then she asks him to sign an agreement: in return for a house and income, she will provide him with “mistress services”.The best thing about this show is its titleOkay, it’s not your usual prenuptual agreement Read more ...
Deborah McAndrew
Shall I let you into a secret? Barrie Rutter isn’t always right. I’ve enjoyed a creative and rewarding professional relationship and personal friendship with Barrie for almost 20 years now, and I think I can say that without fear of him falling out with me. He isn’t always right – but he often is, and one of the things he’s right about is that a tragedy isn’t a tragedy until it’s a tragedy.What does he mean? Well - notwithstanding the fact that outside the theatre in the mid-1590s Romeo and Juliet was advertised as a "Tragedy" and the Prologue tells us that the play will end with the deaths Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Two lanky, totemic marionettes with stern carved faces – one male, one female – coast haltingly around a rehearsal room in Bristol. They are being operated from inside metal framing by actors who coax tentative movement into arms and necks. “Use stillness as one of the things in your arsenal,” suggests a South African voice from the wings. “How are you doing for fatigue?” enquires a patrician English voice.The South African accent belongs to Adrian Kohler of the Handspring Puppet Company. The English director is Tom Morris. The last time they worked together they came up with War Horse. Read more ...
William Drew
Canadian playwright Matthew Edison's award-winning 2003 play The Domino Heart receives its European premiere in rather reduced circumstances. As a Sunday to Tuesday production at the Finborough (directed by Jane Jeffery), it takes place on the set of another play (Chris Thompson's Carthage). Luckily the play itself is essentially a shared act of storytelling. Three characters deliver monologues to the audience while the others read, write, doodle and generally act as if they're not hearing one another. In the world of the play, they're in different geographical locations and different moments Read more ...
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 ...