Theatre
Demetrios Matheou
I first saw Mojo as a film, adapted from the stage and directed by its writer Jez Butterworth in 1997. And it really didn’t work. Set in 1950s Soho and involving club owners, gangsters and a wannabe rock & roll star, it tried too hard, felt flashy and stilted; the period proved a graveyard in much the same way as it did for Absolute Beginners a decade before.How wonderful, then, to see Mojo where it belongs, on stage, with its original director again at the helm and a killer cast that relishes the material. For it truly is a fabulous play, which demonstrates that at 25 Butterworth already Read more ...
Heather Neill
Take a Victorian library and a play which had its premiere 100 years ago and - surprisingly - you have a new arts centre featuring a challenging, dystopian drama. Omnibus in Clapham has exchanged bookshelves for performance and is opening with a celebratory production of Georg Büchner's Woyzeck.Written when Büchner was only 23, and left unfinished when the playwright died of typhus in 1837, Woyzeck has had an extraordinary influence on dramatists from Brecht to Sarah Kane. It also inspired Alban Berg's intense, atonal opera, Wozzeck, completed in 1925. This year marks both the centenary of Read more ...
Heather Neill
This near-legendary short play, devised by Athol Fugard with the actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona (who gave their names to its characters), was first shown in Cape Town in 1973, during the apartheid era. Its effect then must have been electric, and some of that visceral intensity still shone out in one of the pair's last performances of the piece at the Old Vic in 2002. They had performed it many times by then, here and in the United States as well as back home, and their real-life friendship, together with their shared experience of apartheid, had become part of the event, making it a Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
In several of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories, reference is made to something called "a knockabout cross-talk act". It's a two-handed sketch, usually performed at a village hall smoking concert or similar, in which the protagonists put on fake beards and terrible Irish accents to become "Pat" and "Mike". They then proceed to trade nonsensical insults and bust each other "over the bean" with umbrellas. This farce continues until they are removed from the stage, most often by one of Wooster's ever-ready phalanx of outraged aunts, to wild applause from the audience.It might not be Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
A single movement is all it takes. A wounded man is held at gunpoint, and instead of cringing away from the inevitable bullet, he lifts his head and looks his would-be executioner in eye. This simple gesture does not just save his life – it sets in motion a drama that will ultimately consume the lives of everyone caught up in it.This pivotal confrontation takes place in the rubble of a village, between black freedom fighter George Jozana and white South African soldiers Papa Louw and Josh Gilmore, during the civil war in Angola. Having decided to keep Jozana alive, the Afrikaans officer Read more ...
David Goodale
“She paused and heaved a sigh of relief that seemed to come straight from the cami-knickers.” Recounted our brother Andy, many years ago……. "A silence ensued." This was not his own observation, but a quote from P.G. Wodehouse, whom neither Bobby nor I had ever read. “I call her a ghastly girl because she was a ghastly girl.” He continued. “A droopy, soupy, sentimental exhibit, with melting eyes and a cooing voice and the most extraordinary views on such things as stars and rabbits.” We were hooked.As an actor, Bobby, Andy’s twin brother, was looking at the possibility of adapting a Read more ...
philip radcliffe
How many times can a director re-work the same show and still come up with something fresh, gripping and memorable? This is James Brining’s third version of Sondheim’s killer thriller musical Sweeney Todd. He produced an award-winning version in 2010 at Dundee Rep. He turned to it again last month for his first production since becoming artistic director at West Yorkshire Playhouse. Now, he has re-worked it for the in-the-round confines of the Royal Exchange, initiating a trans-Pennine collaboration between the two theatres. And he is scheduled to deliver a fourth version in 2015 in a co- Read more ...
aleks.sierz
One of the best kept secrets about contemporary theatre is that audiences rather like short plays. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with epic classics, but sometimes it makes a change to witness a playwright who has something to say and manages to say it with economy in 90 minutes or less. New writing’s master of this trend is Debbie Tucker Green, whose plays don’t linger too long on stage, nor do they burden you with an interval. Her latest, Nut, is typically short, just 70 minutes — but is it any good?Elayne, a young black woman, is depressed. When the plays starts she is discussing Read more ...
Heather Neill
David Pinner's 1973 play showcases a string quartet working out their own problematic relationships while world leaders decide the shape of post-war politics. Between bouts of playing Haydn, Bartok and - at Stalin's request - Borodin in the conference chamber, they bicker in the anteroom next door.That anteroom setting seems to offer opportunities for juxtaposing the values of art and politics, but in the end merely provides a backdrop. The four-string players would be bickering in just this way if they were entertaining guests at a posh wedding in the Home Counties. They even reassure the Read more ...
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 ...