Theatre
aleks.sierz
Is there such a thing as a gay play? As opposed to a play by a gay writer, or one which has some gay content or is about gay characters. The programme to this atmospheric and moving revival of Alexi Kaye Campbell’s 2008 play contains Edward Albee’s complaint that the gay play is “such an imprecise term”. You can see his point. Whether The Pride is gay or not matters less than the fact that it is an excellent account of self-knowledge, emotional truth and personal honesty.Set in two time zones — the 1950s and the present — the play tells the stories of two love situations, both involving two Read more ...
David Nice
Sicilian location, Irish populace, Balkan Roma music: Richard Eyre’s production of a Pirandello bagatelle could easily have turned into the kind of Europudding more common in cinema. That it fairly dances over the pitfalls is due partly to a well-calibrated ensemble, but above all to the fact that the great Italian playwright made an exception to social commentary and searching examination of the human condition, coming up instead with a piece of fluff about babymaking village-style.Happy-go-lucky local stud Liolà (Rory Keenan) – the name translates as “here or there” – breeds too many Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The Events, Traverse Theatre **** Writer David Greig has been at pains to make clear that The Events is not about Anders Breivik’s slaughter of 77 people in Oslo and Utoya in July 2011, even though he and director Ramin Gray researched extensively in Norway Sadly, it could have been about Dunblane, Hungerford, Columbine - or any number of mass killings in the United States - and they have produced a powerful examination of why disaffected men on the edge of society (but seemingly part of it) commit such atrocities.It’s essentially a two-hander in which Neve McIntosh is Claire Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Britain today: while the total of car crashes is falling the number of whiplash claims is rising by 25 per cent. Yes, the compensation culture is speeding ahead. In Nick Payne’s follow up to his immensely successful West End transfer, Constellations, a firm of personal injury claims lawyers is the setting for a scam in which a money-spinning lie goes wrong. It’s the stuff of many a Newsnight report, but can he make a social issue interesting as a drama?We arrive at the offices of Scorpion Claims, based in Luton and run by Barry, or Bazza, a fiftysomething plodder who has little light on his Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Over in Southwark you can currently find Rodgers and Hammerstein exploring the seamier side of life among the prostitutes and drop-outs of Pipe Dream, but in the woody amphitheatre of the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre it’s all raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. Nuns, Nazis and singing children are an unlikely recipe for the most wholesome of all family musicals, but against all odds this 1950s classic is still an irrepressible hit – get out of the way or prepare to be reduced to a giddy, ecstatic wreck by a production that will send you home singing.Director Rachel Kavanaugh has no Read more ...
David Nice
Rodgers and Steinbeck: sound unlikely? Well, self-proclaimed “family show” man Hammerstein may have baulked at words like "whorehouse" when he created a play for music out of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. But by 1955 the R&H duo had already dealt with issues like miscegenation and ageism (South Pacific), domestic violence (Carousel) and slavery (The King and I), so Steinbeck’s north Californian coastal community of amiable social dropouts, drunks and whores might not have been totally unexpected territory. Tough Pipe Dream isn’t: "It’s a beautiful show," declared Steinbeck Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
If the past week or so has proven anything, it’s that feminism in 2013 has lost none of its power to inspire, anger and enthrall. Given the nature of the abuse meted out to those who raise their voices above the chorus, for Alan Bissett to turn his own feminist awakening into an hour-long show is brave, foolish or some combination of the two. But it’s not as if the author and playwright wasn’t prepared: long before Ban This Filth! was ready for an audience its central thread faced the toughest audience of all - Twitter.Part autobiography, part women’s studies class, Ban This Filth! is an Read more ...
fisun.guner
“Monet is only an eye, but my God, what an eye,” Cézanne once said of the Impressionist painter. Unlike Cézanne, British artist William Blake Richmond, named by his artist father after the elder Richmond’s visionary mentor William Blake, had no truck with Monet’s eye. Nor indeed Cézanne’s or the whole cabal of French avant-gardists. What are the French good for, rails Richmond in Rory Fellowes's A Victorian Eye, except for wine and cheese? Richmond, like all eminent Victorians before him, looks instead to Italy and to the classical ideal.Concepts such as truth, idealised beauty and spiritual Read more ...
David Nice
If there’s a more thinly written, loosely structured and hammily acted play than Samuel Adamson’s panorama of Purcell’s London, then I have yet to endure it. Baffling, because this is the writer who brought us Southwark Fair, a lively depiction of the local scene which never so much as hinted as the village-institute clichés and banalities piled high here in a production by Dominic Dromgoole which does little to finesse the sorry situation.Who could have resisted top-league trumpeter Alison Balsom’s proposal to put on a show at the Globe? It must have seemed like a good idea: Purcell: The Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
Cush Jumbo could very easily have put on a hit show about Josephine Baker. There would have been a chorus line of flappers, replete with spangles and feathers. She would have belted out some of the more enduringly popular hits from Baker’s glory days in Paris. Perhaps the infamous banana skirt would even have made an appearance in what could, essentially, have been a crowd-pleasing jukebox musical.Instead, Jumbo has written a one-woman show so layered and nuanced that occasionally you feel like asking her to pause her performance while you take it all in. Civil rights, domestic violence, Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
A decaying London outpost of the Hollywood movie-making machine, where dreams are spun on celluloid, and reality and fantasy intertwine in a nightmarish danse macabre of desperation and dark desire... that’s the concept behind this new immersive piece by the acclaimed site-specific innovators Punchdrunk. In execution, the experience is rather less mesmerising.Punchdrunk – for the uninitiated – have pioneered an interactive form of theatre that transforms unlikely found spaces with meticulously detailed, epic designs. Through these atmospheric, often sinister and unsettling hidden worlds, Read more ...