Theatre
Jasper Rees
These celebrations of our yesterdays can easily end up all camembert and wind. But while film people and television people will generally cock such things up, we do still have the odd cultural institution which can be relied upon to throw the right sort of party. For the National Theatre's golden jubilee, therefore, the stops were jolly well pulled out and the invitations damn well accepted from the actors who, striplings at the Old Vic in the Sixties, are now our own Oliviers and Ashcrofts and Scofields. And it was almost all impeccable.Of course the greatest frissons were reserved for those Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The National Theatre tonight hosts its 50th-birthday gala, 11 days after the English-speaking theatre's most important and influential address in fact reached the half-century mark. With celebration comes recollection, not least for those of us for whom the brutalist portals of Denys Lasdun's concrete structure have come over the years to seem nothing less than a second home. What follows is a highly personal list of 10 NT productions from the last 30 years (38 in one instance) that I carry with me to this day. These aren't necessarily the NT's biggest hits, though one or two of them Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
The best moment in this production of Pinter's The Dumb Waiter comes when one of the protagonists snatches up a piece of paper and bellows "Scampi!" at his bewildered partner in crime. The line is delivered with face-reddening passion and absolute seriousness, perfectly encapsulating this play's fascinating absurdity.The note bearing this instruction is the latest in a series that have been delivered to the room where two men are awaiting an order to commit murder. Through their mostly matey chatter, we quickly gather that for Gus (the scampi-bellower, played deftly here by Joe Armstrong Read more ...
kate.bassett
This is a strange one. Precious little happens and, in some ways, little is said in David Storey's muted chamber play from 1970. Two men named Harry and Jack – getting on in years, but keeping up appearances in jackets and ties – linger on a patio that's skirted by grass and strewn with autumn leaves. The sun is shining softly. Low-level birdsong is just audible in Amelia Sears's strongly cast production, staged in-the-round in the Arcola's intimate studio space.The men make disconnected small talk that is mildly comical and unsettling. Speaking of the passing clouds, the duo drift Read more ...
kate.bassett
Forever breaking into song and dance, musicals are fun, fun, fun. They are primarily what folks go to for uplifting entertainment, are they not? Actually, many of the best aren't anything like that simplistic. Opening at the Young Vic last night, The Scottsboro Boys is no mere barrel of vacuous laughs, though it is comical and buoyant along the way.With its score and lyrics by America’s John Kander and Fred Ebb, and its book by David Thompson, this is a barbed biomusical about racism and miscarriages of justice. Set in the Deep South of the 1930s, it plays – sometimes very sharply – with the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Adapt a Jane Austen novel for the stage and you have a generous handful of characters and a selection of drawing rooms in which to put them. Adapt a George Eliot novel and you’re faced with a whole town of people – figures from grand houses, workhouses and everything in between. It’s quite a task, but one that Geoffrey Beevers has made his speciality. He’s already tackled Silas Marner and Adam Bede but now, in a new triptych of plays for Richmond’s Orange Tree Theatre, he takes on the big one: Middlemarch.In the age of the TV series and the box set, theatre’s claim on literary adaptations is Read more ...
Claudia Pritchard
How irksome in some ways for the National Theatre that both the glamour and the accessibility of cinema have bookended its first 50 years, when the company and, latterly, its Southbank home, are essentially driven by and dedicated to live performance. But it was Laurence Olivier’s film career, making him a household name, which helped secure for him the job as first director of the National Theatre in 1963. And it is cinema relays that have taken NT productions to places and people who might never step into Denys Lasdun’s building, despite the company’s national ambitions.The Olivier years Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The comedy of manners is not dead. It’s alive and kicking, often literally, at this north London venue in actor Simon Paisley Day’s new play. Although the title suggests a group of teenagers dancing in a warehouse, the actual subject of the play is a handful of couples who have left their children behind in order to spend three days relaxing in a remote countryside location. Throw in one or two wild cards and this laughter machine is soon turning over.We are in a holiday cottage in deepest Wales. Keith and Briony are a teacher couple from London who have a three-year-old son, Fin. At first Read more ...
edward.seckerson
“Love and pain is like peace and war - you want one you have to have the other.” It’s a line that pretty much sums up From Here to Eternity. The title of James Jones’s novel and the classic movie which it spawned gets rather lost in the new musical from Tim Rice, Stuart Brayson, and Bill Oakes. It’s a moment that should stay with us long after leaving the theatre but having set up a promising double-duet between both sets of doomed lovers on this scary ride to the apocalypse of Pearl Harbour, 1941, Tim Rice and his composer Stuart Brayson signally fail to deliver the emotional climacteric Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The Royal Court is justly proud of being the home of British new writing, but it is also a venue which has a great tradition of staging work from abroad. From bringing Brecht and Beckett here in the 1950s to its more recent international summer schools, this is a place where you might make the acquaintance of Eastern European, Latin American or Russian playwrights. Now, following in the footsteps of Chennai-based Anupama Chandrasekhar, whose play Disconnect was here in 2010, comes another Indian talent.Abhishek Majumdar’s Royal Court debut is set in Kashmir. It is just before the Muslim Read more ...
Geoffrey Beevers
Adapting of 19th-century novels is sometimes looked down on as a kind of “heritage drama”. The assumption is that it is all about the externals, about the costumes and the coach wheels turning. It is certainly not what drew me to George Eliot. It is the quality of her mind: her wit, her intelligence and her compassionate insight. Middlemarch is a “classic” because it still has resonance today, and a classic should survive all kinds of different interpretations and still remains relevant.But only conscious interpretation here is in the translation from the novel form into the dramatic. Drama Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Southwark Playhouse's new production of The Love Girl and the Innocent is London’s first in over 30 years, and there’s a reason Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s play rarely reaches the stage: it’s a lumpy mammoth of a script, demanding a cast upwards of 50, with stage directions that would be monumental if interpreted literally.Matthew Dunster does the only thing possible, paring it all down to the roughest edges, and does so brilliantly. Visually we've got exposed graffitied walls, wooden pallets and planks and a heap of tyres that define the prison parade ground and construction sites, where metal Read more ...