Theatre
Demetrios Matheou
Rebecca Frecknall opened 2023 with a youthful, visceral, and brutal Streetcar Named Desire at the Almeida; she ends it with another startlingly vigorous adaptation, again of a play in which women are abused by men both physically and psychologically. Meanwhile, Cabaret, her West End revival of which is now entering its third year and is also headed for Broadway, is set in Nazi Germany. Frecknall is becoming a supreme exponent of dazzling darkness. Ultimately, her National Theatre debut with The House of Bernarda Alba doesn’t hit the solar plexus in the same way Read more ...
David Nice
This is the show that launched a thousand puns, mostly ancient-Greek-oriented, and just as many corny rhymes, all delivered with high energy and greeted with joyful groans. To say it’s no epic is a compliment: Charles Court Opera’s boutique pantos rely upon perfect focus in small spaces, and this is a tight little craft, with five brilliant women firing up director/writer John Savournin’s script and David Eaton’s musical arrangements.The gods aren’t happy with stagnation in Ithaca and Odysseus so far from home. The delivery service from Tamoy Phipps’ easily dispirited Hermes/Mercury has a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Familiarity has bred something quite fantastic with the Old Vic Christmas Carol, which is back for a seventh season and merits ringing all available bells - those and a lost love called Belle being crucial to the show. Matthew Warchus's staging at this point seems a seasonal imperative, and in a wild-haired Christopher Eccleston, Jack Thorne's adaptation of Dickens's 1843 call to empathic arms has its most emotionally piercing and resonant leading man yet. I've seen all the various Scrooges, from Rhys Ifans in 2017 onwards, including a memorable Covid-era turn from Andrew Lincoln Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The National Theatre these days seems to be going from hit-to-hit, with transfers aplenty and full houses at home. And there's every reason to expect that this fizzy adaptation of Roald Dahl's 1983 creep-out, The Witches, has the West End and further in its sights.The first major musical drawn from the singular mind of Dahl since the runaway success that was (and is) Matilda in 2010, the show couples musical theatre newbies (the Olivier winning director-writer team of Lyndsey Turner and Lucy Kirkwood) with dab hands in the field like composer and co-lyricist Dave Malloy and the veteran Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In Annus Mirabilis, Philip Larkin wrote,"So life was never better than In nineteen sixty-three (Though just too late for me) – Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban And the Beatles' first LP."That might be the only point on which he and Joan Littlewood, a fellow poet, might agree, because she caught the zeitgeist and was doing iconoclastic work of her own in Stratford (emphatically not "upon Avon") with her revolutionary musical Oh What A Lovely War. Though it feels now to be something of an artefact in theatre’s archaeology, it has not lost its sting nor its Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Henrik Ibsen may well have wanted to shake things up, to rile against the social mores of his time. But his visionary critiques didn’t usually come with anything as radical as, say, optimism. And there’s no more of a downer than Ghosts.Directing his own adaptation, Joe Hill-Gibbins offers an intense night of the soul, which feels horribly contemporary in its depiction of characters suffocating in the fear of gossip, tarnished reputation and shame. Lest that appears too depressing, he’s aided by an excellent cast in nimbly navigating between despair and the kind of amusement that flows Read more ...
Heather Neill
Oliver Goldsmith was a literary all-rounder – novelist, poet and playwright – remembered chiefly for one example of each discipline, respectively The Vicar of Wakefield, "The Deserted Village" and, of course, above all, She Stoops to Conquer. This play, Goldsmith wrote, was a return to "laughing comedy" as opposed to the fashionable "sentimental" kind, which exhibited "the virtues of private life" rather than exposing its vices, and focused on the distresses of characters rather than their faults. It is 250 years old this year and regularly revived, its laughter quotient intact Read more ...
Gary Naylor
“But that’s what they’re paying for!” replied my son as we, a little shellshocked by the previous three hours, skirted Trafalgar Square on the way home. I had reservations about some key components of the alchemy that produces great theatre, but none about the spectacle, even more impressive (as we subsequently agreed) than the big Cirque du Soleil extravaganzas that cost a helluva lot more for a seat in Vegas. On its own terms, The Mongol Khan is a five-star show – and I’m already recommending it to friends. Not without reservations of course. As is the case for Grand Opera newbies, one must Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“It’s nothing like Christmas,” Rachel (Amy-Leigh Hickman) hisses at her brother David (Kishore Walker). She’s trying to wrangle her family into their first ever Diwali celebration, but everything’s going wrong. Her dad Yash (Bhasker Patel) is getting on far too well with her boyfriend Matt (Jack Flammiger). And to top it off, mum Ruth (Catherine Cusack) has found everything but the most important item on Rachel’s meticulous shopping list: the matches.Passing, Dan Sareen’s new “family comedy-drama” at the Park Theatre, raises some interesting points about identity and belonging. But it goes Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The Comedian runs, bounces even, onto the stage. The audience immediately applauds. He seizes the mic and makes self-deprecatory gestures. Then he rubs the mic stand suggestively. We laugh. When he turns around we can see a laughing mouth printed on the back of his shirt. It’s Samuel Barnett – former history boy and star of stage and screen – and the audience instantly warms to him. He’s that kind of guy. Which is just as well because the Comedian who delivers Marcelo Dos Santos’s 65-minute monologue, now at the Bush Theatre after opening last year at the Edinburgh Fringe, is not Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Four centuries on from the publication of the First Folio, is there anything new to be said about William Shakespeare? Well, the fact that there is nothing old to be said about him (very little is known about the life of the glover’s son from Stratford) means that there’s always something new, as the evidence to gainsay any claim is minimal. Tedious conspiracy theories aside, it’s the kind of paradox the man himself might have appreciated.That’s the jumping off point for 72 Films’ lavish production for BBC Arts, a three-hour series that sits somewhere between the "clips and talking heads" Read more ...
Gary Naylor
You really don’t want to pick up The Time Traveller’s Wife in a game of charades. Half the clock would be run down just showing that it’s a novel, a film, a TV series and a musical. That spawning of spin-offs over the last two decades is a testament to the appeal of Audrey Niffenegger’s characters and story, but their relatively lukewarm critical and popular receptions speaks to the difficulty of going from page to screen. Is it any more successful travelling from page to stage? For anyone who has not seen any of those previous adaptations, the plot is tricky to follow Read more ...