Theatre
Sam Marlowe
The Russians are coming next week, when the Moscow company Vakhtangov bring their production of Anton Chekhov’s tragi-comic drama of dissipated lives and squandered love to the West End. But first, London has Linsday Posner’s staging, with a mouthwatering cast and a poised, ruefully witty translation by Christopher Hampton.There’s nothing here to startle, and in some ways that’s rather to the endeavour’s detriment. Christopher Oram’s set, of a timbered dacha that vaguely resembles a giant Swiss cuckoo clock, is so hefty and literal that in the opening scene it seems on the verge of crushing Read more ...
theartsdesk
The National Theatre’s highlights for the winter up until Easter 2013 include Antony Sher in The Captain of Köpenick, Marianne Elliott's revival of Simon Stephens’ Port, the transfer for This House to the Olivier and of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time to the West End, while One Man, Two Guvnors continues its UK tour and three plays are shown as part of NT Live.NEW PRODUCTIONSThe Magistrate, Olivier Theatre. Timothy Sheader’s production of Pinero’s law-breaking farce set in Victorian London stars John Lithgow and Nancy Carroll and is designed by Katrina Lindsay. NT Live Read more ...
aleks.sierz
London theatre loves plays about the media. Is this because we spend so much time flicking through magazines, visiting websites or watching television? Or is it because this venue’s trendy metropolitan audience is as cynical and world-weary as a media ad buyer? Either way, Lucy Kirkwood’s lively new play is both a hilarious account of lads’ and girls’ mags, and an indictment of their effect on all who come too close to them. But is her argument so obvious that anyone would agree with it?First, the title: NSFW stands for Not Safe For Work, which means online material that you might not want to Read more ...
judith.flanders
The famous count could not have a more theatrical pedigree if he tried. The great actor-manager Henry Irving – tall, preternaturally thin, with a fixed glare (due, apparently, to extreme myopia) and a grand manner which gave way, said Bernard Shaw, to "glimpses of a latent bestial dangerousness" – was, said everyone at the time, the obvious source of the Transylvanian Undead aristo as he was created on the page in Dracula by Irving’s business-manager Bram Stoker.TR Warszawa, too, has a theatrical pedigree. In London the company appeared two years ago to acclaim in Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Oh, how it’s raining. Streaming down the windows of the dry goods store, Torrance Mercantile, in the Deep South, where Lady Torrance is marooned in a stiflingly small town and a loveless marriage with an awful secret. Depressing. “We’re under a lifelong sentence to solitary confinement in our own lonely skins,” says 30-year-old drifter Val Xavier in his snakeskin jacket, holding onto his only companion in his wanderings, his precious, celebrity-signed guitar.Life is bleak, but we know there’s escapism – and disaster – waiting to burst out. There’s Lady’s repressed sexuality, smothered by 15 Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Finding the mythic echoes of the ancient Greeks in stories about the modern world is not just confined to past greats such as TS Eliot, but is also used by contemporary adapters of old tragedies. Yet Colin Teevan’s new play, which shadows the lives of Irish navvies working in England with echoes from Greek tragedy, goes one better. Asked by the director Lucy Pitman Wallace to rewrite the Oedipus myth through the lens of Krapp’s Last Tape, the playwright has come up with The Kingdom.Teevan’s ambitious idea is to marry stories from the great migrations of Irish workers to England, from the 19th Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Henry Goodman, Imelda Staunton and Aidan McArdle won the big acting prizes while Akram Khan and Opera North carried off the dance and opera gongs at the annual Theatrical Management Association awards - now called Theatre Awards UK. Held yesterday at the medieval Guildhall in the City of London, the awards highlight the best of theatre, dance and opera in Britain's touring theatres selected by panels of critics. They attracted a small red carpet of press photographers as eminences such as Howard Brenton, Michael Ball, Janie Dee, Culture Minister Ed Vaizey, Timothy West and Prunella Scales Read more ...
Laura Silverman
Set at the start of the US and UK invasion of Iraq in 2003, Clare Bayley's Blue Sky follows an old-school journalist pursuing justice at the cost of neighbours and friends. Jane, played with careerist resolve by Sarah Malin, is convinced she has uncovered a case of extraordinary rendition. She believes the CIA are involved in the kidnap of a man seen being bundled on to a private jet in Islamabad so that they can question him under torture. “People,” she says, “don't just disappear.” Now she needs proof.Jane contacts an old flame, Ray (Jacob Krichefski) to help her trace the plane, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Still waters run deep, but that truism barely hints at the quiet power of The River, the eagerly awaited new play from Jez Butterworth (writer) and Ian Rickson (director) whose collaboration yet again gives cause for cheer. The converse in almost every way from their immediate Royal Court predecessor, Jerusalem (2009), this latest work is as small-scale, intimate, and compressed as that epoch-defining transfer to the West End and Broadway was rangy, anarchic, and feral.Don't let the fuss about how to get tickets - there is no advance purchase possible, only day seats - put you Read more ...
aleks.sierz
In the past few years, without any fanfare, the veteran playwright and Spooks script-writer Howard Brenton has not only made a comeback, but also become the chief chronicler of the nation’s past. One year he is telling the story of Harold Macmillan in Never So Good, then he’s doing a version of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. He might make a detour to pray with St Paul or to converse with Abelard and Heloise, but then he comes back to English history with the award-winning Anne Boleyn. His latest, which opened last night, is about the trial of Charles I. And it’s got Douglas Henshall Read more ...
Helen Meany
Irish theatre generates high expectations. So much so, that if there isn’t a premiere of a play by one of Ireland’s leading playwrights – Sebastian Barry, Enda Walsh, Marina Carr, Frank McGuinness, Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson or Mark O’Rowe – the annual Dublin Theatre Festival tends to be viewed by regular Dublin theatregoers as somehow deficient. But while this year’s festival didn’t offer a singularly brilliant piece of new Irish playwriting, in its range and diversity it posed a series of very provocative questions.Now in its 55th year, Dublin Theatre Festival 2012 ran for over two- Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If all of Loserville were as arresting and witty as its design, the West End would finally have what it hasn't offered playgoers in years: a buoyant British musical not reliant on a celebrated back catalogue or penned by Andrew Lloyd Webber and his various writing partners over time. As it is, the Elliot Davis/James Bourne collaboration, first seen over the summer at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, is cute and bouncy but also slightly dim; a tad of originality wouldn't go amiss in a show so busy referencing multiple sources that it sacrifices its own identity along the way. The Read more ...