Theatre
Kris Nelson
LIFT 2024 is nearly here. It’s a festival that will take you on deep and personal journeys. We’ve got shows that will catch your breath, spark your mind and rev up your imagination. There’s adrenaline too. It’s international theatre for your gut. With three world premieres and a host of London debuts, this year’s LIFT takes on two themes. The Personal is Epic explores deeply personal stories of justice, migration, and protest, amplifying them to mythic proportions. Meanwhile Play the Future, Play the Past is a strand of shows that reframe history and imagine the future. We start the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
“Welcome to motherhood, bitch!” By the time a character delivers this reality check, there have been plenty of laughs, and some much more awkward moments, in Richard Molloy’s The Harmony Test, which premieres in the Hampstead Theatre’s Downstairs studio space.As directed by the venue’s Associate Director Alice Hamilton, this promises to be an evening of taboo- as well as rib-tickling comedy, and certainly something a bit more serious: the play’s title comes from the DNA-based blood screening test for the most common chromosomal abnormalities, including Down’s syndrome.Set in the kitchen of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
When does creativity become mannered? When it’s based on repetition, and repetition without development. About halfway through star director Katie Mitchell’s staging of Margaret Perry’s adaptation of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets – despite the casting of the always watchable Ben Whishaw – I had the horrible feeling that this 80-minute show was on repeat. Moody words, repeat, moody visuals, repeat, moody mood, repeat, repeat, repeat.Which is very sad because Bluets is the first offering from Royal Court’s new artistic director David Byrne, hyped up as, in his words, “the path of maximum adventure”. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
One of Shakespeare's longest plays gets gets served up fast and filleted courtesy the director of the moment Jamie Lloyd, who is second to none when it comes to revealing the hidden performance strengths of various (and very varied) stars.Last year, his shivery Doll's House on Broadway brought Jessica Chastain a deserved Tony nod (she should have won), and his furiously dystopian Sunset Boulevard, starring an entirely revelatory Nicole Scherzinger, rightly swept the Olivier Awards last month, and will hit New York in the autumn. If Lloyd's alchemy doesn't work quite the same magic on the Read more ...
David Nice
Catchy even when the lyrics are at their cheesiest, the Jerry Herman Songbook serves up a string of memorable tunes: you’ll probably find that, like me, you recognize about 80 per cent of the material in Jerry’s Girls. But is it enough when you (read I) have fallen in love with productions of Dear World and La Cage aux Folles but haven’t yet seen Hello, Dolly! or Mame on stage? The appetite still needs gratifying.All’s well that ends well in Hannah Chiswick’s decent staging. But the first stretch will be a vexation to some spirits. It’s an over-extended tits-and-teeth mélange which has you Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a fierce, dark energy to the Globe’s new Richard III that I don’t recall at that venue for a fair while. The drilled cast dances seemed more frenzied, and there are more of them, and for once let’s start with a shout-out for James Maloney’s musical score. It’s a thing of some wonder, ranging from jazz palpitations and wiry strings to the throbbing beats of intrigue that riff on the rapid action of the “troublous world” unfolding beneath the musicians’ balcony.Elle While’s production fair speeds along, too, cutting a play that comes in the top five for length in the Shakespeare Read more ...
aleks.sierz
It’s often said that contemporary American playwrights are too polite, too afraid of giving offence. But this accusation can’t be levelled at Stephen Adly Guirgis, whose dramas – from Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train in 2002 to The Motherfucker in the Hat in 2011 – are dirty-tongued and often fiercely emotional. Now his Pulitzer-Prize-winning play, Between Riverside and Crazy – which opened Off-Broadway in 2014 and has also won other prestigious awards – comes to the Hampstead Theatre in a production directed by Michael Longhurst, and with a cast headed by the excellent Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
From New York’s Public Theater, the venue that nurtured Hamilton, comes another estimable pocket musical, Passing Strange. It was first staged in 2008, to Tony-nominated acclaim, and it shows. Its forthright cheek and irreverence are refreshing and welcome.First impressions might suggest this is another gig-musical, rather like MJ. The Young Vic’s main space has been tricked out as a recording studio, with a glass booth for a drumkit, flanked by three stations for keyboards and guitar stands. Around the stage area runs a raised narrow platform with sections that can glide in and out. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There are many definitions of bravery, and taking on the challenge of embodying John Cleese as Basil Fawlty in Cleese’s own stage adaptation of Fawlty Towers would undoubtedly be one of them. But Adam Jackson-Smith pulls it off with aplomb, deftly nailing Basil’s every acidic aside, outburst of impotent rage or episode of manic terror. Or, indeed, silly walk.Prior to curtain-up, misgivings hovered about what the evening might hold. Could Fawlty Towers survive the transition to the stage without bathos or anti-climax? Could a new cast hold a candle to the much-venerated original team? Would it Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It’s unusual for a play to be revived with its original director and star, let alone a decade after they premiered the piece. But here we are, with Jeremy Herrin again steering Denise Gough through Duncan MacMillan’s thorny, provocative, exhilarating account of addiction, rehab and a kind of redemption.For those who didn’t see the original National Theatre and Headlong production in 2015/16, this is a chance to catch one of the most lauded new plays of recent years, and one of the great performances. Nine years on, the sensational Gough reinhabits her troubled character with conspicuous Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Let’s put our cards firmly on the table here. I am a big fan of Bruce Robinson’s cinematic masterpiece about two out-of-work actors who live in Camden Town in 1969 and escape to the countryside for some rejuvenation, and must have seen it multiple times since it was released onto the big screen 37 years or so ago. Clearly, I’m not the only one, for Withnail and I has since achieved serious cult status – to the extent that it’s something of a surprise that it’s never been the focus of a dodgy Hollywood make-over or even been turned into a rock opera by the likes of Ben Elton.Therefore, it was Read more ...
Jane Edwardes
Who is Sappho? What is she? Not much is known about the influential Greek poet who was born some 2500 years ago. Her poetry was celebrated during her lifetime, but very little has survived. Those fragments that do exist speak of love, passion and longing. Her name lives on, not just because of her poetry, but because both she and Lesbos, the island she lived on, have given their name to the love of one woman for another. And so Wendy Beckett’s glitzy, short comedy celebrates the life of the poet through the prism of gay love today.Although most of the cast are dressed in Greek tunics of the Read more ...