Theatre
Tom Birchenough
There’s something off stage, something loud and threatening, pulsating in dark red, at the beginning of Julien Cottereau’s solo mime piece Imagine Toi. This is a show of fears and sweetnesses, and there’s no holding back on the former as we progress between rumbling giants and large dogs. The show is billed as suitable for ages four and up, and what a youngster might feel with real apprehension, adults enjoy as a stage show (though I’m not sure how well teenage attentions would be held).Cottereau was for years a lead clown at Cirque du Soleil, before bringing this solo mime act together (co- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In 1972 John Kander and Fred Ebb were invited by Bob Fosse to a private screening of his film version of their hit stage musical, Cabaret. The movie starred their protégée, Liza Minnelli, who at only 19 had won her first Tony in Kander and Ebb’s first show, Flora the Red Menace, and for whom they would go on to write “New York, New York”. “Liza was our girl, and we cared very deeply about her. We sat there afterwards and didn’t know what to say to these people whom we liked so much. Because we just hated it.”It’s not impossible to see why. When it eventually came in 2002, the movie adaptation Read more ...
Heather Neill
’Tis the season to be jolly. ’Tis also the season to dust off the stories of the Grimms and Perrault and present them as drama, sometimes transmogrified into panto. There are sometimes attempts to go back to source and eschew the tawdry delights of transvestite dames, sparkly leotards and lame rhyming couplets. The source, of course, is often really quite frightening.At the National Theatre, Katie Mitchell directs a sort of half-way house by Lucy Kirkwood “developed at the NT studio”. In this Hansel and Gretel There is no cartoonish dame with a suffocating bosom, but – the cast being small - Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Viva Forever! isn’t the clunker it’s been labelled. It’s also not the thin gruel of the standard West End jukebox musical. The real problem is that it can never be Mamma Mia!, the globe-conquering, ABBA-derived franchise previously devised by its producer Judy Craymer.To be fair, Craymer isn’t strictly the originator of Viva Forever! That honour falls to Spice Girls’ kingpin Simon Fuller and the combo themselves. They approached Craymer who, in turn, brought in Absolutely Fabulous writer and actor Jennifer Saunders to weave a narrative and script around the “Wannabe” gals’ back catalogue.Much Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Christmas plays are a seasonal curse of British theatre. But there are alternatives to pantos and Dickens monologues. At the Royal Court Theatre, there is a tradition of more edgy Christmas fare, with plays by outstanding writers such as Joe Penhall, whose Haunted Child was here at the end of last year. This time, the seasonal production — written by the ever-inventive Martin Crimp and directed by the outgoing artistic director Dominic Cooke — can only be described as an anti-Christmas play.The drama has three sections, each of which has an overtly political name: the first is called “The Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
It’s brash, jolly, stuffed with wildly politically incorrect language, double entendres and spoof-laden song and dance. But beneath its brightly painted face, its stockings, suspenders and corsets, its uniforms and bravado, Peter Nichols’ 1977 musical drama is revealed, in a production by Michael Grandage that is as sensitive as it is exuberant, to be both acerbically astute and compassionate. Well, as the leading lady, Acting Captain Terri Dennis puts it, “you can’t always judge a sausage by its foreskin”.That show-stealing role is inhabited to the hilt by Simon Russell Beale as the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Martin Crimp defies labels. He has been called obscure and oblique, too difficult and, worst of all, too Continental. But although he is feted on the European mainland — George Benjamin’s opera Written on Skin, with text by Crimp, comes to the Royal Opera House next spring but it began its much-lauded European tour in Aix-en-Provence — he is also a quintessentially British playwright: his style is colloquial, socially aware and politically acute.When I meet him at the Royal Court, where his latest play opens this week, he seems almost part of the furniture. His work is the great Read more ...
graeme.thomson
What is truth? Is it fixed or fluid, personal or universal? Does it require hard evidence or merely faith? These are the areas of interest poked and prodded in this co-production between the Traverse and Peepolykus, the company which previously brought The Hound of the Baskervilles to the stage. The result is an eccentric romp through the life of Arthur Conan Doyle, a famously ridiculed figurehead for the spirit world in his later years, which ponders – none too deeply, but with immense good humour – the conflict between fideism and rationalism.Doyle’s story is presented here as an Read more ...
Heather Neill
Woking and Mars both provide subject matter for cartographers. John, who reckons he’s an achiever, is updating the local A to Z, while Behrooz, once a colleague of John’s, is exhibiting his paintings of the red planet. There’s a neat overlap in their occupations: the Martian invasion in H G Wells’ The War of the Worlds took place on Horsell Common, Woking.Tom Morton-Smith, one of the winners of the Papatango New Writing Competition, is not afraid of metaphor. In an age when religion and family structure no longer provide a moral life-map, it may be difficult to tell the difference between Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
We never glimpse the source of the old money in Sarah Wooley’s new play, for it’s his funeral that opens proceedings. We will get no sense of the man, or the extent of his wealth, or the way he spent it. The eventual irrelevance of such a specific title typifies a muddled and terribly trite evening.Maureen Lipman plays the dead man’s widow, Joyce, who appears at the funeral as a rabbit trapped in the headlights, a sexagenarian naïf, who seems to be completely ignorant of the world and its ways. We’re asked to believe that Joyce has been, if not literally locked up, then cloistered by her Read more ...
kate.bassett
When I first mentioned to a colleague that I was embarking on a biography of the doctor/director Jonathan Miller, he instantly yelped, “My God, your work’s cut out! The man must have met half the famous names in the twentieth century!"My subsequent conversations with Miller provided a cornucopia of highly entertaining anecdotes. These included his brushes with Princess Margaret (who was very taken with his comic turns in the 1950s); Bobby Kennedy (who told him to shut up, shortly before being shot); Bridget Riley (who nearly sued); and Kevin Spacey (who got his big break by stalking Miller Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's Academy Award season within the showbiz-centric world of The Bodyguard, but even the greatest of Oscar obsessives - count me among them - would be hard-pressed to toss many a trophy in the direction of the 1992 film or toward the largely stillborn stage musical that it has now spawned. Widely panned at the time of release (the film received more Golden Raspberry nods for the year's worst than it did golden statuettes), its pulpy narrative looks even more threadbare on the West End stage, notwithstanding the news value of the return to the musical theatre after a dozen years of Broadway Read more ...