Theatre
Matt Wolf
Clothes are shed, sensibilities skewered and political correctness defiantly ignored in this latest London revival of Joe Orton's wonderful play (the fourth, for what it's worth, in the capital during my time). But what most distinguishes Sean Foley's take on Orton's posthumously produced, gallopingly rude farce is the noise level of a show that is here played at a near frenzy throughout. The laughs remain, don't get me wrong, but they sometimes get lost in the mounting decibel level that, at this rate, may find one or two of the performers sidelined by laryngitis before too long.What's the Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Being in a comedy double act is like being in a marriage. Except, as half of a humorous twosome once told me, with less sex. There are ups and downs and the chances of splitting are high. The push-pull tensions of the double act are explored in Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys, first seen on Broadway in 1972, then famously on film in 1975 with Walter Matthau and George Burns. Thirty years on from its premiere, is the magic still there?Well, the star casting certainly is. Danny DeVito, making his West End debut, has the dominant role as cantankerous clown Willie Clark, while Richard Griffiths is Read more ...
Carmel Doohan
The two parts of Henry IV parts 1 and 2 are very macho plays. Men drink, tell rude jokes, strut and lie their way into power and influence. In Globe to Globe's Latin American takes on the Bard, some hijo de puta and de puta madre seem fitting additions. In these two productions, machismo, in the style of the gangster or the swagger of the outlaw, was never in short supply. There were also many opportunities for cultural stereotypes to be referenced: the idea that gossips and chantas rule the country was played with in the Argentinian production of Part 2, the arrogant grandeur of the powerful Read more ...
David Benedict
The competition for best dramatic use of a coffee table is won hands down by the wagon-wheel one that prompts a major argument in When Harry Met Sally. Runner-up is the one that appears in Detroit. So deliciously hideous that it gets its own laugh, the symbolic table from Ben and Mary’s nice suburban home is given to new neighbours Sharon and Kenny whose total lack of furniture stems from the fact that they only recently met during a spell in major substance-abuse rehab. Their back yards may abut one another but you don’t have to be Robert Frost to realise that since good fences make good Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There was always going to be one Borat moment in this festival. And it came courtesy of the Albanians, who, for comic effect, in the middle of their Henry VI, Part 2 indulged in the gratuitous harassment of a mentally handicapped person. It got the biggest laugh of the show from the expats, suggesting it's still quite a rib-tickler, disabled-bashing, in Albanian culture. It was an instructive reminder that you invite the globe to the Globe at your moral peril.The other parts of the warring Henry VI trilogy were being presented by two other Balkan countries: a Serbian Part 1 and Macedonian Read more ...
Dylan Moore
Ever since the Polish photographer Maciej Dakowicz documented the debauchery of South Wales nightlife in a series called Cardiff at Night, there has been a kind of perverse glamour in images of scantily clad girls and young women falling down drunk whilst roaming gangs of check-shirted “roiders” look on gormlessly. Being as Swansea’s nightlife is, as depicted here, even “scruttier” – to use the evocative local parlance (think “slut” meets “scrubber” and you’ve got it) – than that of the capital, an artistic documentation of Swansea at Night was inevitable at some point. The surprise is in the Read more ...
bella.todd
From theatre viewed through peepholes and camera obscuras to a dance piece you watch across a wasteland while wearing headphones, this year the Brighton Festival and Brighton Festival Fringe seem to be fixated with ways of seeing. Hot on the heels of the premiere of dreamthinkspeak’s fishbowl Hamlet came a revival of Vanishing Point’s gorgeous Interior, in which we watched a wintry dinner party unfold wordlessly through the windows of the house. Inside, they ate, drank and danced, felt irritation and fondness, loneliness and love. Outside, polar bears prowled and a melancholy moon slowly Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The concept sounds like something dreamed up towards the bottom of a bottle in a Harare shebeen: Two Gentlemen of Verona performed by two gentlemen in Shona. But if any of the plays can withstand the stripped-down treatment, it’s the likeable but formulaic early comedy featuring a couple of chums who compete for the same girl. In this account, two actors undertook to perform all the roles with only a few bits of cloth and considerable acting chops to see them through. On a drizzly spring afternoon at the Globe, it was utterly delightful.Unlike the many shows travelling to London for Globe to Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Street of dreams? The people who lived in the real-life inspiration and location for Coronation Street, Archie Street in Salford, hand-picked by the soap’s begetter Tony Warren, would be flummoxed and flabbergasted to hear it called that. I walked down Archie Street several times when the TV soap started. The two-up, two down, back-to-back terraced houses, separated by a three-foot alleyway, had no baths, no hot water, no inside lavatories and were dubbed “a disgrace to society”. But the people who lived in them when the TV version started on 9 December 1960 were genuine enough folk. One of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
David Cameron could hardly wish for a more apt musical to pep up the people’s spirits than Irving Berlin’s Top Hat, with its wheedling entreaties about the advantages of being caught in the rain, or putting on your best front, and all. Matthew White’s staging of Top Hat - said to be the first-ever theatrical version of the immortal 1935 Astaire and Rogers movie - is finely timed for a grim (and rainy) summer, with a smart and spirited production that pretty much puts the film on stage, making the best of what look like austerity budgets. If you manage to quell the thought that a Fred 'n' Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Simon Stephens is not only one of our most talented playwrights, he’s also the one most open to influences from German theatre. In 2007, he collaborated with director Sebastian Nübling on the world premiere in Hanover of his innovative play, Pornography, which took more than a year to be staged in the UK, in a superb version by Sean Holmes. Holmes is now head of the Lyric Hammersmith, which hosts Stephens’s latest collaboration with Nübling.Three Kingdoms is a dark thriller about sex trafficking. It begins with two British detectives, the botany-loving Ignatius and the German-speaking Charlie Read more ...