Theatre
philip radcliffe
Let’s Kick Racism Out of Football. Show Racism the Red Card. Say No to Racism. Such are today’s campaign messages. And then there’s the headline: “Colour Prejudice Problem” in a London newspaper. However, the latter is dated September 1909, perhaps the first time that racism in football (and other sports) was headline news. So, the issue has been around for more than a century in this country and the player who brought it to light was Walter Tull. This is his story.Tull, grandson of a Barbadian slave, was born in 1888 of mixed parentage, his father marrying a local white girl in Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The last time James McAvoy played the Scottish king, it was in a scintillating reworking of the play written in the modern idiom by Peter Moffat, for the BBC's ShakespeaRe-Told season in 2005. McAvoy was Joe Macbeth, a Glasgow chef passionate about his work, the restaurant kitchen where he worked a fitting place for the play's blood and gore.Jamie Lloyd's production is equally thrilling and radical, and is set 50 years hence in a (possibly) post-independence Scotland, brutalised by war and, we may assume from the programme notes, ravaged by the effects of climate change. Soutra Gilmour's Read more ...
Laura Silverman
This stylish, witty musical celebrates the 50-year love affair between the first openly gay film star, William Haines, and Jimmy Shields, a set decorator. It embraces the fashion of the Twenties, the design of the Thirties, the glamour of the big film studios, and the freedom of unconventional lifestyles. A compelling story, fine tunes and some rather attractive actors make for a highly enjoyable evening.It's a pacey one, too, and Claudio Macor, the writer of the original play (performed several years ago in London and New York) and the director, covers a lot of ground. But the story is clear Read more ...
mark.kidel
Performing Shakespeare in a former cigarette factory in South Bristol has become something of a ritual for Andrew Hilton and his close-knit company. Any act of ritual requires a dedicated space and the red-tiled floor on which the drama unfolds on this most intimate of stages has taken on a certain aura. With the minimum of sets and props, a deep probing of the text and the minimum of modish theatrical artifice, Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory proves year after year that less is more, at least when it comes to awakening the imagination.Hilton uses the space as an alchemical vessel, a place Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is this the most poetic title in London theatre today? Anders Lustgarten’s new play joins a ragged march of work, from David Hare’s The Power of Yes (2009) to Clare Duffy’s Money: The Gameshow (currently at the Bush Theatre), which attempts to tackle the global financial meltdown. Unlike these other shows, however, it’s USP lies in its claim to offer a solution to the pains and penalties of economic austerity.Set in a dystopic version of current times where, to the tune of David Cameron’s plummy praise of the market, all social services have become businesses, the play rapidly spray-paints a Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Even singular sensations grow older - yet A Chorus Line, which coined the phrase, seems ageless, so sure is it of its place in musical theatre history, so locked now into our theatrical consciousness. It is, no question, a wonderful show whose fabric of book (James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante), music (Marvin Hamlisch) and lyrics (Edward Kleban) is seamless and, more importantly, whose vision - as originated by choreographer/director Michael Bennett - has achieved a kind of immortality.Bob Avian, who assisted on the original staging back in 1975, is now the show's guardian and watching this Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A Chorus Line is one of the great American musicals. It opened off Broadway in 1975, rapidly barged a path to a larger Broadway house and proceeded to run for over 6,000 performances, breaking records along the way. Chicago, which opened in the same season, failed to seize the city's imagination in the same way, and had to wait till the 1990s to find an audience prepared to devour it. At the Tony Awards the musical about the foot soldiers of showbiz, the faceless dancers high-kicking in line, went on to win nine gongs, and then picked up a Pulitzer Prize. A Chorus Line soon transferred to the Read more ...
philip radcliffe
“Work, more work and six foot of earth in the end. That’s life,” says John Rutherford. That single-minded work ethic is what drives him on and drives his family to despair and desertion. As head of the century-old family glassworks business going through hard times (the banks won’t lend money), he bullies his way out of a changing world that threatens his control (“I’ve a right to be obeyed”). But he has a messianic mission to preserve a dynastic destiny at all costs.Githa Sowerby’s 101-year-old play seems an unlikely choice to bring Sir Jonathan Miller out of directorial “retirement” and to Read more ...
David Nice
I laughed quite a bit going round the exhibition to which the Barbican’s latest theatre events are tied, The Bride and the Bachelors. Pioneer Marcel Duchamp’s 1921 “Readymade” Why Not Sneeze, Rrose Sélavy? is funny in itself: a metal birdcage containing marble sugarcubes with a cuttle bone and a thermometer stuck through the bars. It’s even funnier when you learn that admirer Robert Rauschenberg, about to pinch a couple of cubes on a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the late 1950s, was told by the guard, “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to touch that crap?” I laughed a lot, too, Read more ...
David Nice
It's odd that Jerry Herman merits only a passing mention in Stephen Sondheim's two-volume autobiographical take on Broadway words and music, Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat. In a couple of subjects Herman chose no less daringly than the master. Yet while La Cage aux Folles is now so entrenched that we forget its original boldness in asserting a loving gay relationship, Dear World's eccentric mix of eco-plea and nostalgia has yet to be established as a bittersweet chamber piece.Where it only took Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along 11 years to progress from flop to classic, Dear Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Noël Coward's 1924 play must have been thought very daring at the time, dealing as it does with a young man's cocaine addiction - no wonder it has been called the jazz age's Shopping and Fucking. But young composer Nicky Lancaster's penchant for nose candy wasn't the social transgression being examined - his real addiction is not drugs, but men. Quite how the then 24-year-old Coward (who created the role of Nicky on stage) got the play past the Lord Chamberlain in anybody's guess, but thankfully he did, and its themes still resonate today.At the play's heart is Nicky's relationship with his Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
You don’t so much watch a Robert Lepage show as surrender to it, and his latest project sees Canada’s most innovative theatre-maker in full assault. It’s hard to think of another director whose response to the Iraq War would involve an Elvis impersonator, menopause as a major plot point and a visual cadenza for twelve perspex chairs, but that’s the love/hate thrill of Lepage. Spades is the first in a planned tetralogy of plays each themed around one of the suits of cards. Conceived in partnership with round arts venues across the world, the cycle proposes a 360 degree theatrical experience Read more ...