Theatre
Demetrios Matheou
North London has a splendid new theatre, The Park, whose £2.5 million existence – without a penny of government subsidy – is something of a miracle given our cash-strapped times. The building itself is also a bit of a marvel, tucked into a Tardis-like space (originally a blacksmith’s) in the heart of Finsbury Park. With two stages – a 200-seat main theatre and a 90-seat studio – and a strong community ethos, The Park has heaps of promise. Hats off to artistic director Jez Bond and his team.The opening play, however, doesn’t quite offer the dramatic fireworks one might have Read more ...
David Nice
Everything seems so free and easy, so do-as-you-darn-well-pleasey, in the Stockmanns’ fjord-view model home. Cheery friends in bright 1970s clothes drop in to chew the social cud as well as Mrs S’s cooking; only her medical-officer husband’s mayoral brother jars, and surely he’s too daft to be taken seriously. So when the good doctor finds irrefutable proof that the waters of the town’s new spa are poisoned, the weight of liberal opinion will surely back him up and all must be well, right?Wrong. This is the unsettling world not only of Henrik Ibsen but also of director-genius Richard Jones, Read more ...
carole.woddis
What must it be like to lose a child to random violence? The great Irish dramatist Frank McGuinness, who has tackled mythic violence on a number of occasions in previous work, has now delivered a devastating portrait of modern-day loss and revenge in a production from the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse. Yet, as directed by the actress Lia Williams and performed remarkably by Leanne Best, nothing is quite as it seems. On a crepuscular set that looks like an overhang from Martin McDonagh or J M Synge (well, the setting is the west coast of Ireland), this young woman, Sal, carries a Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Throughout Harold Pinter’s The Hothouse, the characters of an ill-defined institution split hairs over the service it provides. Is it a rest home, a nursing home, a sanatorium? They may be kidding themselves, but not us; not when their chief asserts that “the key word is order”, or when these patients “recommended by the ministry” are known not by their names, but numbers, and not when we glimpse the diabolical misdeeds behind the door of Room 1A.Pinter wrote the play in 1958, immediately shelved it, only dusting it off for use in 1980; the intervening years turned prescience into stone-cold Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
What’s the price of betrayal? In Peter Nichols’s 1981 play it’s a painful splintering of the psyche. The betrayer mentally compartmentalises in order to be both affectionate husband and ardent lover; the betrayed loses her confidence, her purpose, even her identity until she is – in ways that Nichols makes theatrically explicit – beside herself.There are moments when this ghastly anti-romantic gavotte creaks faintly, carrying with it the sour whiff of the hangover from the sexual-liberation party games of the Sixties. But the drama, often compared to Stoppard's The Real Thing and Pinter's Read more ...
philip radcliffe
What price a woman’s liberation? And what price a man’s self-defined honour? By pitching one against the other and against the backdrop of wedlock (the emphasis being on the “lock”), Ibsen forges his classic love-hate drama which still grips as, spellbound, we watch the balance of the relationship between Nora and her husband Torvald shift.Director Greg Hersov has chosen to team up again with Cush Jumbo, following successes together here with Pygmalion (she played Eliza) and As You Like It (Rosalind). Hardly ever off-stage, she meets the challenge of Nora in style. She is no buttoned-up, Read more ...
Johnny Tudor
Very few young people know her name today, but Dorothy Squires was the singing sensation of the Fifties and Sixties, and even 30 years ago this talented but difficult star was a regular feature of the headlines thanks to offstage dramas and scandals. But who was the real Dorothy Squires? I first remember meeting Dorothy Squires, as she renamed herself, when I was only three years old. My father, Bert Cecil, a pianist, had befriended her when, aged 15, she had gone to London armed with nothing more than hope and a train ticket.Edna May (her real name) was born in Llanelli in 1915 into a poor Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Rikki Beadle-Blair is a high-energy polymath. He’s a real phenomenon. Raised by his lesbian mum in sarf London, he wrote his first play at the age of seven and was, he claims, already directing four years later. Nowadays he creates challenging entertainment in film, education and theatre (18 new plays in six years). He also writes self-help books. His heart’s clearly in the right place. There’s only one problem — he’s not a very good playwright.Gutted, his latest trip down to the council estates of South-East London, is a family drama. It’s a grim tale of an Irish cockney matriarch, Bridie, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A thunder sheet booms, a didgeridoo hums distantly, a model ship rears and pitches its way forward through the waves of groundlings and suddenly we find ourselves washed up on the shores of the Globe for another season. All eyes may be on the newly launched Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, but just when we were all at risk of getting too distracted by its novelty, Jeremy Herrin and his new production of The Tempest are here to remind us what the original Globe Theatre does best.We’ve not been short on Tempests in London of late, but if there is any space and company that should be able to make sense Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Most theatre directors produce work which is visually the same as everyone else’s. Katie Mitchell doesn’t. Her plays are always brilliantly acted, highly atmospheric and often use film media in an amazing way. But she almost never works in this country any more. Scorned by the National Theatre, by the myopic critics (although loved by audiences), she now works mainly abroad. This production, first staged at the Schaubühne theatre in Berlin, is a perfect example of her genius.In August Strindberg’s Fröken Julie, written in 1888, the set is the kitchen of a country mansion, where on Midsummer’s Read more ...