Theatre
carole.woddis
At the end of The Riots, the Tricycle Theatre’s verbatim response to last year’s upheavals edited by Gillian Slovo and Cressida Brown, a local Muslim whose home was burnt down in Tottenham was asked to give his view on why it had happened. He summed it up with three words: “Just – angry – people.”Richmond’s excellent Orange Tree has now come up with another, even more urgent analysis adding further flesh to those three words, if little consolation. From their young writers group comes 23-year-old Archie W Maddocks’ Mottled Lines, taken from observation, his own life experiences and, as he Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The front door of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House may first have slammed shut in 1879, but it’s a sound whose echoes and re-echoes continue to resonate. The crash of feminist selfhood, bursting through the catatonic tranquility of domestic order, originally scandalised 19th-century Norwegian society, but with scandal now rather harder to come by, Ibsen’s play has acquired a quieter, but infinitely more pervasive impact. In Carrie Cracknell’s faithfully realist rendering it speaks with harrowing directness, cutting to the contemporary heart of the matter as few updated stagings have so cleanly done. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The Taming of the Shrew celebrates its own rumbustious, raucous (mis)behaviour, so why shouldn't Shakespeare's comedy be granted a production that follows suit? From an opening gambit involving bodily fluids sprayed in the direction of the groundlings to a food fight later that would put the bad boys of Posh to shame, Toby Frow's directorial debut at Shakespeare's Globe turns up the volume to consistently giddy effect.That the staging also finds uncommon delicacy in a play that can seem as "cursed" as its eponymous heroine speaks to the dream team of Samantha Spiro (pictured below, mid- Read more ...
bella.todd
"I can’t live without horse flesh, if it’s only a piece of cat’s meat on a skewer.” So declares Patricia Hodge’s gung-ho racing fanatic Georgina in this straight-down-the-line revival of Pinero’s 125-year-old caper, which requires cast and audience to subsist on the theatrical equivalent of the latter.A rarely-seen drawing-room comedy about a put-upon vicar tempted into risking money and reputation on a horse, Dandy Dick was partly written in Brighton and possibly inspired by its racecourse. Hence its selection to launch Theatre Royal Brighton Productions which, under artistic director Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The Arab Spring has arguably been the most important international event after the credit crunch, yet it seems to be of little interest to British playwrights. Parochial, obsessed with writing only what they know, they have been put to shame by Hassan Abdulrazzak, an Iraqi playwright who was born in Czechoslovakia and now lives in London, working as a scientist. His 2007 debut, Baghdad Wedding, was a big hit, and his long-awaited second play is set in Cairo during the revolution that toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak.To be exact, the date is 28 January 2011. While the people gather in Tahrir Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Arts Desk has been voted Specialist Journalism Site of 2012 at the Online Media Awards. In a celebratory dinner at Arsenal's Emirates Stadium recognising "the best and boldest of online news-based creativity and also the most original", The Guardian were the major winners with five awards, but even their new Data Store section was outgunned in the Specialist Journalism category by The Arts Desk.In a category contested by 11 nominees, The Arts Desk's prize was the first of two given by the judges acclaiming two specialist sites "for very different reasons" - the other went to The Economist Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“Let slip the dogs of war.” Somewhere in the bowels of Kiev’s Olympic Stadium, a football coach will have said something along these lines around the half seven mark. Meanwhile, over on the clever-clever channel, an alternative meeting between England and Italy took place.Shakespeare set any number of plays in the Italy he encountered in his source material, but with the possible exception of Romeo and Juliet, none feels quite so much of a statement about the Italian state of mind as Julius Caesar. It’s no coincidence that this was the play given to an Italian company for the recent Globe to Read more ...
sheila.johnston
You might not think that a drama about German parliamentary politics in the 1970s would be of great urgency today. But when Democracy, Michael Frayn's play about Willy Brandt and the Günter Guillaume spy scandal, first opened in 2003, Brits swiftly discerned links with another charismatic politician, the first left-wing leader in decades, while across the Atlantic the womanising German Chancellor looked very much like Bill Clinton. Today a new spin appears and Democracy is described as "exploring the Machiavellian nature of coalition government."Brandt ended his first speech after being Read more ...
Carmel Doohan
You know that feeling when you start telling a story in the pub only to realise that no one is listening? You look up to see that that two people at the end have started a new conversation among themselves and the rest are laughing about something someone else said earlier? You falter a little, try to catch someone’s eye and wonder if you should just plough on or give up. This could be what Forced Entertainment's new show The Coming Storm is about, but it's hard to tell.It begins with a woman telling us that “A good story needs a strong beginning...” then signally fails to offer one. There is Read more ...
aleks.sierz
When does an urgent new trend become a theatre cliché? Over the past couple of years, the idea of generational conflict between the have-it-all baby boomers and the have-nothing-but-debts youngsters has appeared in plays such as James Graham’s The Whisky Taster and Mike Bartlett’s Love, Love, Love. Now the South Bank flagship, in a production starring national treasure Julie Walters, enters the fray with actor Stephen Beresford’s first play, which opened last night.This time, we are on the Devon coast. High-society dropout Judy (Walters looking like a cross between Mystic Meg and a white Read more ...