Theatre
mark.kidel
King Lear was the play that launched Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory 12 years ago. The company, under the inspired artistic direction of Andrew Hilton, opened its 2012 season with a brand new production that displays all the qualities that have made this remarkable company unique in Britain.The strength of all the shows has always drawn on the special atmosphere and architecture of the building. The theatre space at the Tobacco Factory is not just in the round. It is so small and relatively low-ceilinged that actors and audience are drawn into an alchemical vessel which Andrew Hilton has, Read more ...
graham.rickson
As an evening out, Angus is about as nutritious as the midget gems dispensed by one of the heroine’s confidantes (and offered in heaps to the audience waiting in the foyer). Directed by Ryan McBryde, this stage adaptation of Louise Rennison’s chirpy bestsellers just about hangs together, even though the moments where it succeeds most effectively are the points which most explicitly reference other coming-of-age narratives.Rennison’s source material does well in evoking the clumsiness, the sheer awkwardness of adolescence. And the familiar ingredients are all here: a quirky band of close Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Drum rolls, fiddles and flutes were all in action last night at the Donmar Warehouse to herald the beginning of an era. After ten successful years under the direction of Michael Grandage, it was the turn of the theatre’s new Artistic Director Josie Rourke to step forward and lay her claim to the West End’s most intimate space. If Rourke was making a statement with her first production, Farquhar’s broad comedy The Recruiting Officer, then it was one loud with capital letters and laden with exclamation marks – an exuberant, joyous shout of arrival.We all know where we stand when it comes to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Zach Braff (b 1975) is overwhelmingly known as the star of Scrubs, the hugely popular American hospital comedy which came with a side order of surrealism. But fans of low-budget indie cinema will also cherish fond memories of Garden State, which he wrote, directed and starred in alongside Natalie Portman. It told of a young actor/waiter on anti-depressants who after nine years in LA comes home to New Jersey for his mother’s funeral and finds a panacea in the form of a beautiful, equally troubled young woman.After that promising debut, Braff retreated into silence. Pinioned for nine seasons in Read more ...
David Seidler
George VI had been my hero since childhood because I was such a terrible stutterer. We had been evacuated from England to the US and during the war, particularly the latter stages, my parents would encourage me to listen to the King’s speeches on the wireless. “Listen, David,” they’d say, “he was a far worse stutterer than you, and listen to him now. He’s not perfect but he can give these magnificent stirring speeches that really work. So there’s hope for you.” It didn’t help me at the time but I thought, wow, he’s brave. When I grew up to be a writer I thought I would like to write something Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
One look at Tom Scutt’s meticulous design for Jeremy Herrin’s production of this savage Alan Ayckbourn comedy, and you know you’re in the 1970s. Wood veneer and faux leather lend a shiny, wipe-clean surface to this desolately unhappy home, where everything is in shades of brown: beige carpets, beige walls, beige lives. When laughter comes, it is often choking; Herrin’s direction is so mercilessly precise, and the acting so acute, that though it is undeniably funny, the play leaves you bruised and punchdrunk.It begins, with quiet, cruel deliberation, with two women in that ugly, expensive room Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Science rocks. In the theatre, this is a subject that offers to provide powerful experiments in metaphor. Most recently, in Nick Payne’s Constellations - and most classically in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen and Charlotte Jones’s Humble Boy - the world of quantum mechanics, cosmology and chaos theory suggests ideas about the randomness of our daily lives. And there is nothing quite so random as love.In the appealingly titled Mathematics of the Heart, Dr Paul MacMillan – a bearded boffin from Middlesex University – has a problem. He is a professor of chaos theory, and his Read more ...
Ismene Brown
When a young Charles Dickens visited New York in 1842 with his wife, he strolled down Broadway, happened upon an unusual dance and naturally checked out theatreland. As his bicentenary is celebrated, here, from his journal, American Notes For General Circulation, are some of his observations on the arts and culture of this foreign city, intervals of refreshment between the widespread social ills that he was principally reporting upon. Dickens on Broadway Was there ever such a sunny street as this Broadway!The beautiful metropolis of America is by no means so clean a city as Boston, Read more ...
David Benedict
A fired-up Maria Callas (Tyne Daly) is hectoring a student. “I don’t want it done like me, I want it done like Verdi!” “With music?” enquires the nervy pianist. “Yes,” she snaps, “With music: this isn’t a play.” Quite. What exactly is Terrence McNally’s Master Class? A classy version of “Tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be Maria Callas”? Yes, but no. There’s impersonation, but not of her singing.In terms of both the character and the actor playing her, the evening is a diva opportunity. It consists of a real-time masterclass at which we are the audience for one of 23 two-hour classes given by Read more ...
judith.flanders
Dickens has been getting all the press in his 200th year, but there is another performer, even older, who celebrates: in 2012, Mr Punch, of Punch and Judy fame, is 350 years old, and Improbable, in revitalising the old showman’s tradition, has given him the best birthday present that can be imagined.Improbable’s Punch and Judy is the story of Mr Punch and his poor battered wife and child – not to forget Toby the dog – as presented by two old turn-of-the-century troupers, Mr Harvey and Mr Hovey, played by Nick Haverson (pictured right) and Rob Thirtle, dressed à la Chaplin, complete with tail- Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Twentysomething emotional confusion is fertile ground for drama. In this new play, Stefan Golaszewski - writer of the BBC Three sitcom Him & Her and star of BBC Four’s Cowards - explores the situation of a young man who doesn’t really know what he wants. Well, except for lots of sex of course. With lots of different women. Or so it might seem. But does he really?The plot is as bare as a binge-drinker’s arse. Twentysomething Adam, who works in sales but has a really good idea for a new website, goes clubbing with his mates. During an evening of drinking and dancing, he manages to pick up Read more ...
ash.smyth
I have to confess it was about five minutes in to Dennis Kelly’s DNA last night before I concluded, definitively, that I had seen it before. Four years ago, it was part of the Connections programme at the National Theatre – a scheme for generating short, double-billable, "youth"-friendly plays that, practically speaking, don’t require the operating budget and elephant-handlers of a Veronese Aïda.But Kelly’s star is now in the ascendant – he is better known, principally, as Mr Matilda – and his quietly simmering ensemble piece is embarking on a national tour, in a production by Hull Truck. A “ Read more ...