Theatre
Caroline Crampton
There is no point during Bloodshot where you can be entirely sure just what you are watching. At times it seems like a straightforward one-man show, with sole cast member Simon Slater charging around wildly in his efforts to bring the multiple characters to life. At others, it's a cabaret, as Slater whips out a saxophone and coaxes forth a few achingly good riffs. Then, there's an impromptu magic show, complete with razor blades to be swallowed and cigarettes that appear behind audience members' ears. Finally, encompassing all these seemingly disparate elements is a gripping whodunnit twined Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The fledgling career of Michael Codron, who has been knighted in the New Year's Honours list at the age of 75, might have ended almost as soon as it began. He embarked on a career as a solo impresario in 1956 and had staged three shows, none of which prospered. Then he went to Cambridge and saw a promising undergraduate revue, written by Bamber Gascoigne. He decided to bring the improbably titled Share My Lettuce to London, recasting it with Kenneth Williams and the then unknown Maggie Smith.The only problem was that he hadn't any money. He went to a music publisher, who agreed to back the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Playgoers could be forgiven for thinking that they were seeing double during much of 2013. No sooner had you sat through Ian Rickson's dazzling revival of Old Times once before you returned again to watch its peerless pair of actresses, Kristin Scott Thomas and Lia Williams, swap roles. Similarly, Ben Whishaw had barely shed his Peter Pan-related persona as the male half of John Logan's Peter and Alice before lending his whiplash authority to the revival of Jez Butterworth's Mojo. There were multiple Ghosts, Midsummer Night's Dreams and Macbeths, slices of O'Neill esoterica and Read more ...
Mark Kidel
“The Little Mermaid”, along with many other classic tales, suffers from having been Disneyfied: Hollywood made sure that the shadows darkening Hans Christian Andersen’s original were softened for family viewing and his ambiguous end replaced by American-style positive closure firmly set in the mainstream comfort zone. Simon Godwin’s production pays homage to panto without being tied to the clichés and steers a sensible path between the pain and suffering evoked by the Danish master and the need for a joyful end in which the young lovers live happily ever after.The show takes a long while to Read more ...
theartsdesk
We at The Arts Desk are as fond as the next person of swans-a-swimming, partridges and pear-trees, not to mention gold rings, but be honest: 'tis already the season to be jolly sick and tired of all those knee-jerk compilations of Slade, sleighbells and Celine Dion's "O Holy Night". Without wishing to audition for the role of Ebenezer Scrooge, it’s time to admit that not everything made in the name of Christmas is of the highest artistic merit. But, it turns out, there’s gold in them there hills – snow-capp'd, natch.Tireless champions of excellence that we are, we’ve raided our memory banks Read more ...
Steve Clarkson
The best bit is the Wagon Wheels. Frisbeed, they are, towards the audience's outstretched arms and expectant faces, with the precision of a man who's been doing it for the past 35 years, with the assurance of a cult hero whose presence continues to dominate the York pantomime tradition.They love Berwick Kaler here (seriously, how many local celebrities have ice sculptures of themselves admired in their city centre?) and the affection is mutual. "This isn't a pantomime, it's a family reunion!" declared the writer, co-director and indisputable star of Aladdin and the Twankeys, which is, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Unlikely subjects can make for great musicals. (Assassins, anyone?). Just as great subjects can make for terrible ones (the Broadway Breakfast at Tiffany’s comes to mind). Sadly Andrew Lloyd Webber’s latest project can’t redeem itself on either count. An awkward story allied with a treatment that veers from unexciting to embarrassingly bad, the only marvel here is how it ever made it past the workshop stage. I would have hated Stephen Ward if I hadn’t been so numbed by boredom that I couldn’t muster emotion even approaching that intensity.The internet has been rife with chatter over the Read more ...
Heather Neill
Rhys Ifans enters as a rough sleeper who has wandered in off the street, his sleeping bag over his shoulders, beany hat pulled low over unwashed hair, muttering to himself. For a moment he's hardly noticed by the audience, ignored as such people often are, but then he launches into Tim Price's monologue. He is Danny, an alcoholic. He had been sleeping on the steps of St Paul's for seven years when his routine was disrupted in 2011 by the Occupy Movement's arrival, the establishment of the tent city and their subsequent stand-off with cathedral authorities. It's a neat reversal of the old Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In his later life Shakespeare, who never ducked ways to define a hero, offered the public a challenge: Coriolanus is a professional warrior, deaf to reason, patrician hater of people power. To beat all, this man’s man’s a mother’s boy. In a world trying to be newborn in democracy and a big society, Coriolanus sticks out like a sore thumb.The play’s action is hectic, wracked by war and famine, and the shining simplicities of the sword contrast with the writhing difficulties of words to fashion slow consensus and agreements between people of sharply different motives. Josie Rourke’s production Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s cruel comedy and human drama aplenty in Fortune’s Fool, so much so that it’s hard sometimes to know whether we’re watching farce or tragedy. But it’s a mixture that works well in Lucy Bailey’s production of Ivan Turgenev’s early play in this version by Mike Poulton, making its London debut at the Old Vic.Fortune’s Fool has a rather special history behind it. Poulton’s adaptation of Turgenev’s 1848 work was first seen in Chichester in 1996, to mixed critical reception. Thanks to Alan Bates, who had played the central role of the tragic Russian country estate hanger-on, Vasily Kuzovkin Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Nelson Mandela had a nose for the dramatic gesture. The evidence is there in his speech at the Rivonia Trial in 1964, in his symbolic walk to freedom as he emerged on foot from captivity in 1990, his astute performance at the Rugby World Cup in 1995 and then finally in death, announced just as an epic new film of his life was being premiered in London, the seat of the old colonial power.Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, which opens in early January, is by no means the first film to feature Mandela. Hollywood has co-opted him, as has television in South Africa, Britain, America and, first of all Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Richard II arrives in London after a highly successful Stratford run and while the glow of David Tennant’s Hamlet resides still in the memory. Surprisingly, the pleasure of the production lies not so much in dazzle as solidity. This doesn’t give a bold new reading but a robust interpretation; it is not a star vehicle (so often with the star surrounded by mediocre support) but one of the strongest company performances of Shakespeare that I’ve seen for many a year.Though Richard II can easily be seen as a stand-alone play, it’s actually the first of a tetralogy that includes the Henry IVs and Read more ...