Theatre
Jasper Rees
There is no formula for creating a hit musical. If there were, the history of the West End and Broadway would not be haunted by the many ghosts of bygone disasters. Let us not list them here. The lack of a roadmap notwithstanding, the long-awaited version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is ticking all the right boxes.For a start, there’s the belt-and-braces title itself, much loved as a book but perhaps as widely known via two film versions from 1971 and 2005. It has a big-shot director in the form of Sam Mendes, and in David Greig a book-writer who knows how to entertain childen, having Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What to do with an old warhorse like The School for Scandal, a fantastic play written by Richard Brinsley Sheridan in 1777 full of smart lines and great parts, beloved not just of professional actors but amateur troupes too - and therefore performed with sometimes monotonous regularity? Well, if you're director Jessica Swale you cut a bit, add a bit and give it some musical numbers while remaining mostly faithful to the original.It's an approach that she used on another of Sheridan's comic masterpieces, The Rivals. Here, the actors, in period garb but making some pointed modern references, Read more ...
carole.woddis
Oh, how the mighty are fallen. Margaret Alexander (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is a storefront pastor in Harlem who leads her flock with absolutist conviction. No drinking, no smoking - the way to the Lord is through abstinence and clean living, and she herself embodies these righteous goals. So woe betide Sister Margaret when her far from clean-living ex-husband, a musician called Luke (Lucian Msamati), arrives at her door after many years.His appearance proves the catalyst for Sister Margaret's downfall in James Baldwin's influential debut play: a fall from grace which, in Rufus Norris's Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
A town called St Cloud, a girl named Heavenly and a faded star who feels she’s living on the Moon: the imagery of Tennessee Williams’s drama is celestial, yet he puts his characters through hell. Amid the clamour of church bells and self-righteous moral hypocrisy, this torrid play invokes castration, venereal disease and prostitution, with love and sexual passion colliding violently with repressive social strictures. It’s about as juicy and lurid a slice of Southern Gothic as anyone could have an appetite for – and this superlative production by Marianne Elliott savours every pungent mouthful Read more ...
aleks.sierz
One of the promises of artistic director Nicholas Hytner when he took the helm of this flagship 10 years ago was to stage new and innovative musicals. His problem, of course, is that these don’t grow on trees. So after the triumph of Jerry Springer: The Opera in 2003, we had to wait eight years for London Road, the venue’s next British hit. In the meantime, the United States has occasionally plugged the gap — and now provides this current musical, in the shape of a critique of American capitalism by New York’s the TEAM.First seen here in 2011, at Edinburgh, Mission Drift is about the pioneer Read more ...
carole.woddis
What kind of legacy will the Blair years lave on ordinary people? Some predictable answers but also some unexpected, haunting personal accounts emerge in a drama inspired by the spectacularly successful 1974 play Kennedy's Children from American actor-playwright Robert Patrick. Written for five characters in fragmented but interlinking monologues, Kennedy's Children caught all the thrill, madness, and contingent loss of innocence of the 1960s when the world seemed to turn on its axis. (The cast of its maiden London outing at the King's Head included Pat Starr and Deborah Norton.) And a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The last two years have seen the Tiger Lillies hit a prolific peak of activity, to be found as often on the theatrical as the concert stage, drawing on plenty of influences from outside the UK to boot. Mike Pickering came on board last year in place of drummer Adrian Huge, who’d been part of the trio’s line-up from its founding back in 1989, but there was no let-up in levels of intensity last night from lead performer Martyn Jacques, who gave his all to a 90-minute set drawn from numbers from their last four albums, from 2011’s Woyzeck & the Tiger Lillies through to this year’s Either Or. Read more ...
David Nice
There are two dances to unheard music in Howard Brenton’s pithy Strindberg reduction. One spells trouble for the interloper between the vampire couple who suck the blood of others to sustain their 30-year hell of a marriage; the other, in the rarely-performed Second Part, is a prelude to both liberation and death. The symmetries and the differences are cleanly underlined in Tom Littler’s production and the degrees of light admitted in to Jerwood Young Designer James Perkins’s sets. And in a performing space even smaller than Strindberg’s Intimate Theatre of the early 1900s, Michael Pennington Read more ...
Heather Neill
There was a sense of nervous anticipation in the Maria, the Young Vic's studio space. Ninety minutes of torture was on the menu, and I'll admit to feeling some trepidation. But this show - and "show" is the right word - turns out to be a revelation. Writers Nicolai Khalezin and Natalia Kaliada, co-founders of Belarus Free Theatre, have pulled off an astonishing coup: their feast for the senses, directed by Khalezin, tells horrific stories without melodrama, without overstatement or buckets of blood - and it is all the stronger for its brilliant mix of matter-of-factness and lyricism.Acclaimed Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Githa Sowerby's play, written in 1912 and a huge hit at the Royal Court and then in America, has been described as having qualities of Ibsen or Chekhov, and its themes certainly echo those writers' examinations of emotional claustrophobia and thwarted ambition.How much of this is in the original, edited and translated by Blake Morrison and directed by neuropsychologist Jonathan Miller I confess I don't know, but if this is wholly her work then she was remarkably prescient; obsession with class and worker-owner strife, as well as a horribly dysfunctional family, are here. It could almost be Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
“My three men,” declares the deeply compromised heroine of this 1928 experimental drama by Eugene O’Neill. “I am whole.” Nina Leeds – hungry for love, ruthless with her own heart and those of others – burns like the sun at the play’s centre. She is given a portrayal by Anne-Marie Duff, in this fine production by Simon Godwin, so scorching that she all but self-immolates, while her men circle her like planets, helpless to alter their course. It is an impressive achievement – even if the work itself remains unwieldy and unsatisfying.Designs by Soutra Gilmour, intricate yet breathtaking in their Read more ...
aleks.sierz
I love poetic play titles, but even I would admit that sometimes they are difficult to remember. In this case, the name of Brad Birch’s new play has taught me a lesson that I’m happy to pass on. It’s this: if you go and see this show please spend a few minutes practising the words Even Stillness Breathes Softly Against a Brick Wall before arriving at the box office. It will help you save face. It will prepare you for the evening ahead.This is one of those plays that are best viewed after a boring day at work. It is a two-hander about a smart young couple, simply Him and Her, who have a work Read more ...