Theatre
Ismene Brown
Zaha Hadid, visionary architect of the London Olympics Aquatic Centre, becomes a Dame and three new knights of the arts are created in the Queen's Jubilee Birthday Honours announced this morning. Actor Kenneth Branagh, long touted as Sir Laurence Olivier's heir in the classical tradition, becomes a Sir, as do Michael Boyd, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and opera director David McVicar.Kate Winslet becomes CBE, as do Sadler's Wells chief Alistair Spalding and composer Michael Berkeley and Harry Christophers, founder of the baroque vocal ensemble The Sixteen.Among the new Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Mary Shelley and all her works have dogged the footsteps of contemporary theatre — in a way that’s a bit reminiscent of her most famous creation. Last year, there was Frankenstein at the National and this year a revival of Howard Brenton’s Bloody Poetry (about the Shelley/Byron ménage) on the fringe. Now, following the success of their Brontë, Shared Experience theatre company are back in London with a new Mrs Shelley docudrama.The good news is that Mary’s story is a perpetually interesting one. Born in 1797, she was the daughter of the radical philosopher William Godwin and Mary Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The RSC’s Twelfth Night dumps its audience unceremoniously onto the shores of Ilyria in the thump and beat of waves. While Viola struggles from the (very deep and very real) water, asking “What country friends is this?”, we by contrast find ourselves in familiar territory. Like this season’s opener, A Comedy of Errors, both Twelfth Night and The Tempest take their birth in the water. But as the triptych progresses and comedy turns to uncertainty and ethics, so Shakespeare’s drama itself suffers something of a sea-change.Jon Bausor’s designs are a miracle of twisted ingenuity, defeating Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Henry V is a play with so many layers, and such ambivalence, that it can suit a multitude of purposes. When Laurence Olivier made his film version in 1944, it was as a propagandist rallying cry, a reminder of what was at stake in a war that was far from won; 60 years later, Nicholas Hytner’s modern-dress production at the National Theatre was a bullish anti-war statement, lent potency by the country’s then current excursion into Iraq.Dominic Dromgoole’s new production at The Globe, which completes the theatre’s extraordinary Globe to Globe season, highlights another facet of the play, namely Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Visualise a large lost property office, such as that for Transport for London at Baker Street, which inspired this production, its racks stuffed with thousands of items, from false teeth to umbrellas, prosthetic limbs to mobile phones. You name it, it’s been lost – and found. Why, only the other day, some loved one’s ashes were left on the tram between Manchester and Bury.Now, think what tales each of those items could tell about their owners and the circumstances of their loss on a journey, especially the journey of life itself. That is the trigger for Jackie Kay’s new play, Manchester Lines Read more ...
bella.todd
You wouldn’t be surprised, in the programme for Elevator Repair Service’s adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s jazz age masterpiece The Great Gatsby, to find instructions for gentle exercises to stave off deep-vein thrombosis. With a run-time of eight hours, during which every single word of the novel is spoken on stage, in one sense Gatz is no adaptation at all. It’s a marathon of textual faithfulness, a triumph of great literature over the much fabled waning modern attention span, and something of an endurance test during which "tender is the tailbone" starts to seem like a good subtitle.But Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If it's possible for a piece of writing to remain significant, even important, without necessarily being great, that would describe the status of the epoch-defining Torch Song Trilogy 29 years after the triptych won Tony Awards for Harvey Fierstein as both author of the best play and best leading man. Notably different from the inimitably growly, outsized Fierstein, not least in terms of girth, David Bedella reinvents the demanding principal role in his own slimmer, always empathetic image. But neither he nor Douglas Hodge's affectionate production can quite erase one's sense that the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
A powerful trend in contemporary theatre is the family play. But the families usually depicted tend to be of the standard two-point-five variety, while other more complex forms — families as they actually are — tend to be ignored. So initially the good thing about Vivienne Franzmann’s new play is that it focuses on a family where the child is adopted. More controversially, it is about a white man who adopts a black girl from Africa.The story takes place in today’s Hampstead but has roots in the past. Joseph is a news photographer whose images of war and atrocity are world famous. Since the Read more ...
Tim Crouch
It has been nearly 10 years since I started writing for theatre. The second thing I wrote was a commission for the Brighton Festival who offered me the opportunity to make and perform a piece for young audiences inspired by a Shakespeare play. That was I, Caliban – a separate production of which is currently touring with Bristol Old Vic/Company of Angels alongside their version of I, Peaseblossom, the second of my Brighton commissions. After Peaseblossom came I, Banquo in 2005. And then I, Malvolio five years later – a show that is filling most of my touring commitments until the middle of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
James Corden (One Man, Two Guvnors) made it past the finish line, Tracie Bennett (End of the Rainbow) did not, and the art-house musical Once trumped Disney’s latest Broadway entry, Newsies, at the 66th annual Tony Awards in New York last night. The ceremony, honoring the best of the Broadway season just gone, was available in real time to nocturnally minded London theatre folk, who could watch the CBS gala streamed live on the web.So it was round 3.30 am in Britain when this country’s best hope for a 2012 Tony emerged victorious, Corden nabbing the top prize that had eluded him at the UK’s Read more ...