Theatre
Gary Raymond
If you’re one of those who always felt the opening credits of True Blood held more substance and delicious dark corners than the comic-book titillation of the programme that followed, then The Bloody Ballad could be exactly what you’re looking for. Written by and starring the extremely impressive Lucy Rivers, The Bloody Ballad rolls around in all of those glimmering rusty disgusting snapshots that make up the opening sequence of the vampire soap opera and comes up grinning, stinking and energetic and sweaty and meaty. And it is all the better for it.The Bloody Ballad is the joyously grim Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The best horror stories take place in mundane surroundings. The envelope of the ordinary gives a context of credibility to the practically incredible. In Janice Okoh’s new play, which won the 2011 Bruntwood prize at the Royal Exchange theatre in Manchester, and was seen there earlier this year, everyday life at first seems, well, entirely everyday, but soon things get worse. Much worse. In fact, almost unbelievably bad. Horror indeed.But first the ordinary: we are in Lewisham, south-east London, and the set is a groundfloor council flat. It’s tidy, and home to three siblings: 16-year-old Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
It’s one of the most anticipated theatrical openings of the year, with tickets allegedly changing hands for astronomical sums and some pundits rushing to issue dire warnings of the depths of its lewdness and its shattering shock factor well before its official first night. So can this musical by Robert Lopez and the incorrigible South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker possibly live up the hype? The answer – rather like the existence (or not) of some supreme guiding deity – depends on your point of view. Is it fun (or, as those clean-cut Mormon boys with their ultra-white shirts, Read more ...
fisun.guner
What’s this? Harold and Albert turfed out of their old stamping ground of Shepherd’s Bush and turned into West Country natives? Any change to a cherished sitcom comes at the theatre director’s peril, but a change of accent? Somehow, this sounds a jarring note more dissonant than any changes to script or action, though, in fact, Emma Rice’s adaptation has remained remarkably faithful to Galton and Simpson’s original 1962 pilot, as well as to three later episodes. These four episodes form the basis of Kneehigh’s production which premiered in Cornwall last year, where the company is based. It’s Read more ...
Heather Neill
Mathematicians are a breed apart, bandying numbers about in a way that few outside their magic circle can fully understand. David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize-winning play uses this exclusiveness to investigate the complex relationship between a father and daughter.Robert, a brilliant academic whose ground-breaking research inspired a generation of devoted students before he became mentally ill, has recently died. His daughter Catherine (Mariah Gale, pictured below right with Matthew Marsh as Robert), now 25, has spent years caring for him in their dilapidated Chicago home, curtailing her own Read more ...
Laura Silverman
Terence Rattigan's beautifully spoken characters are a passionate lot in this gripping story of a father's fight to prove his son's innocence. Lindsay Posner's production of the 1946 play succors and seduces its audience with an unstoppable determination to prove that right will be done. Its methods may not be subtle, but its effects are no less stirring.How often the audience is reminded that a boy stealing a five-shilling postal order is such “a little case”: no matter for the Government, nor the media nor a family to fret over. And yet, how evident it becomes that the principles at stake Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There has always been a keen air of propulsion to the career of James McAvoy. He made his name on television in State of Play and Shameless, while early film roles in Starter for 10 and Inside I’m Dancing swiftly promoted him up the leading man’s ladder to appear in The Last King of Scotland, Atonement, The Last Station, X-Men: First Class and, as of this month, Welcome to the Punch.Equally comfortable playing romantic leads and action heroes, he has never been quite a force in theatre. This is partly a matter of choice. He has prioritised screen roles over stage opportunities. The last time Read more ...
Laura Silverman
Staged in 1931, The Man Who Pays the Piper appealed to women who had gone to work (and become the master of the house) while men were fighting in the First World War, but were subjugated once they returned. The protagonist, Daryll, starts work during this time and gets hooked on the money, the independence and the buzz of her job at a fashion house. She enjoys being able to keep her siblings and kindly but inept mother in luxury. But when her father is killed, she realises she could be funding her family indefinitely. This is not what she wants.The strength of GB Stern's rarely seen play lies Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Legendary English playwright Edward Bond doesn’t often come to Malta, but when he does, he doesn’t suffer fools gladly. After the first performance of his Olly’s Prison — a stage version of the 1993 BBC television series — Bond takes the stage for a Q&A. Dr Paul Xuereb, who is the Mediterranean island’s premiere theatre critic, asks him: “Why are your plays so violent?” “They’re not violent,” replies Bond quietly. “Read the play.”Bond goes on to explain that Olly’s Prison, now enjoying a short run at Valletta’s St James Cavalier Theatre in a co-production between St James Cavalier Read more ...
mark.kidel
The thing about puppets, as those who have handled them know all too well, is that they take over. They have a life of their own. This is all fine and good as long as the puppet-masters don’t get swamped by the magical power of supposedly inanimate objects.Much of the fun and originality of Tom Morris’s restlessly inventive take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, made in collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company - his co-directors for War Horse - derives from the playfulness that toys encourage in us all. But the astounding array of mechanical inventions, from the simple miniature Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Is Steptoe and Son the platonic ideal of the British sitcom? Two men trapped in eternal stasis, imprisoned by class and bound together by family ties as if by hoops of steel, never to escape: it’s what half-hour comedy should be. Posterity would seem to agree, because since the sitcom ended in 1974 the two rag and bone men have never been out of work, appearing in the cinema, on stage and radio. For 30 years they made and reran the show on Swedish television, underpinning the widely held theory that Steptoe is but a step from Strindberg.Half a century after its creation, last summer Steptoe Read more ...
David Benedict
Without wishing to get all Kirstie and Phil about this, theatre, more often than you’d imagine, is about location, location, location. One of the reasons why the National Theatre’s knockout The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was so potent was because director Marianne Elliott welded the audience to all four sides of the action. Transferred to a West End stage, the tension between stage and audience is undeniably different. Is the show still a triumph? Oh yes.A murder mystery with added maths – and a huge emotional kick in the telling – this is a stage version of Mark Read more ...