Theatre
Katie Colombus
With the current nostalgia for all things Dr Seuss, now is surely a good time to treat your little ones to the zany nonsense-rhyme stories as they are bought to life on stage. Kirk Jameson’s production has arrived, courtesy of Sell a Door Theatre Company, at the small West End venue of the Arts Theatre, a quaint, quirky place befitting of a uniquely looney show.The plot is primarily a telling of Horton Hears A Who, narrated by the Cat in the Hat, with other story elements woven in. Horton the elephant races to save a speck of dust upon which lives a whole microscopic community, and thanks to Read more ...
Matt Wolf
For increasing numbers of people, food is theatre, so what better time to combine the two into the slight, sweet, determinedly socially conscious evening that is Gastronauts? The Royal Court "happening" of sorts is catering to audiences of 60 per show during its sellout run. A devised piece that turns playgoers into diners while also asking them to question the ethics and ethos of food, the show in its questioning impulse seems the perfect antidote to festive-season excess. That said, some may be too busy pigging out on the crispy kale - please sir, may I have some more? - to give the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
You can see why sport makes for good drama: it has competition, conflict and clashes of ego. It delivers a result, and it has a touch of glory. At its best, it can send you out of the theatre singing with joy. Or it can be a bit bathetic. Tom Wells, whose award-winning The Kitchen Sink was at this venue in 2011, returns with another small slice of life, this time about amateur Sunday footballers in Hull. Will this be a metaphor we can all relate to, or just a tale of cranky losers?And, believe me, they are losers. Even their name is a giveaway: Barely Athletic. The chief motivating spirit is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
I guess the BBC can't afford researchers or fact-checkers these days. If they could, perhaps something of substance might have arisen from their vacuous Culture Show profile of Vicky Featherstone, the gifted new artistic director of the Royal Court. Oh, and they have might have got the theatre's actual postcode right (SW1W 8AS, as per the Court website), rather than insisting twice on air that it's in (neighbouring) SW3. I mean, if you're going to be so careless with the details, what hope is there for the bigger picture? Precious little, on the evidence of this half-hour summation of a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When Mary J O'Malley's play had its premiere in 1977, it must have seemed quite shocking – vivid descriptions of sex and the male anatomy (albeit only in the minds of boy-obsessed 15-year-old schoolgirls at a convent school), spiteful nuns and the occasional fruity language. Nearly four decades on, though, audiences at Kathy Burke's businesslike production – the first major revival of a play that has become a touring warhorse - wouldn't bat an eyelid at any of this. And, post-Catholic Church sex scandals, even a joke about nuns and rape has lost its power to shock (although it remains Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The Anatomy of Melancholy (or to give it its full title - The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up) is not a succinct sort of work. Running at over 1,500 pages in some editions, this 17th-century answer to self-help is as long-winded as some of the medical sufferers it depicts. Fortunately it’s also slyly witty and wonderfully wide-ranging (covering kissing, crocodiles and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s difficult to give Simon Russell Beale a brief introduction, so encyclopedic is his list of stage and screen acting credits. He has cruised masterfully through Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, the Restoration playwrights, Shaw and Pinter, and recently camped it up madly in a revival of Peter Nichols’s Privates on Parade. He has been such a mainstay of the National Theatre that the building may have subsided into the Thames without him.On screen, he has appeared in such diverse fare as adaptations of Persuasion, An Ideal Husband and Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, and his portrayal of Falstaff Read more ...
Heather Neill
Award-winning Toronto-born playwright Claudia Dey is also an advice columnist and here she presents us with three wildly off-the-wall case studies. The twin Ducharme sisters, who share an isolated house in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, are famous for having a shared life marked by tragedy: their triplet died in the birth canal, their mother succumbed to a fever on their twentieth birthday and their father was split in two by lightning on the same day. Grace, who works in a garbage dump, is outgoing and enjoys posing for the local catalogues and billboards, while Sugar is mousier, hasn't Read more ...
fisun.guner
Lizzie Siddal, Pre-Raphaelite muse and model for John Everett Millais’ 1852 sensation Ophelia, died a tragic death aged 32 from a laudanum overdose, the Victorian’s opiate of choice to which she had become addicted in her final years. Jeremy Green’s new play explores her relationship with Gabriel Dante Rossetti, who, with Millais and William Holman Hunt, formed the original PRB triumvirate. Artist and model eventually married, but only after the heat of Rossetti’s ardour had considerably cooled, leaving her devastated by his emotional rejection and thwarting her own ambitions to become an Read more ...
edward.seckerson
In the season of goodwill a new musical based on Bret Easton Ellis’ notorious novel American Psycho might earn itself the subtitle “NOT the Christmas Show” - but when the composer is Duncan Sheik, he of the sensational Spring Awakening, and the director Rupert Goold, fresh into his artistic stewardship of the Almeida Theatre, all bets are off. There’s even a number entitled “Mistletoe Alert” - so the season of rampant consumerism might well prove just the time to launch one of the most anticipated musicals of this or any season.In this audio podcast Sheik and Goold tell how the bloodiest show Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is there a danger that a show can be oversold? Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room sounds innocuous enough — until you read its subtitle: The Vibrator Play. Marketed as the most provocative drama of the year, its theme is female sexuality in the Victorian era, and yes, it’s all about the discovery of the joys of orgasm. Now premiering in London, after a Broadway production that garnered Tony nominations, does this production, which is directed by Laurence Boswell, live up to the hype?Set in a wealthy spa town just outside New York at the end of the 19th century, the story dwells in the home of one Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Whether you’re partial to Highsmith or Hitchcock, or both, there’s something deliciously exciting about the prospect of Strangers on a Train. Much of that anticipation lies in the intriguing question of which side of the material this adaptation will fall – with book or film, two very different animals – and curiosity as to the staging. "Hitch" has rather spoiled us for visuals. Or has he?The opening premise of Patricia Highsmith’s debut novel, in 1950, is a cracker. Two strangers meet on a train and fall into conversation. One of them, alcoholic playboy Charles Bruno, talks of the perfect Read more ...