Theatre
Rachel O'Riordan
The Beauty Queen of Leenane is a vicious, sad and extraordinary play.On the surface, Martin McDonagh's play, first seen 25 years ago and revived now in a collaboration between Chichester Festival Theatre and my home base, the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre, is about a toxic, dysfunctional relationship between a mother and daughter in a lonely rural setting [pictured below: director Rachel O'Riordan]. Painfully funny and savage in its treatment of family dynamics, it pillories small town Ireland, while moving with supreme skill from comedy to violence and back again. It is romantic, acerbic Read more ...
Cordelia Lynn
As I write this, we've just had our final day in the rehearsal room and are going into tech onstage next week with my new play, which is also reopening the Donmar not only to live performance but follows major renovations at their home address.It’s a funny thing, but I can find it hard to describe what the play is "about" at this time. It has been unmade and remade, become something vividly new outside my own head, which is the process of making a play. If I go back to the initial impulse, it is about a young couple, roughly here, roughly now, and their relationship across roughly 10 Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The first two stage adaptations of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies – written by Mike Poulton, way back in 2014 - were a very different beast from the novels, but they were at least eyecatching plastinations of her unruly human characters, made attractive to those who had not read the novels. But by now, the audience is well acquainted with Mantel’s luxuriously textured, dazzlingly nuanced and psychologically acute conjurings, and The Mirror and the Light feels different in all the wrong ways – less plastinated than eviscerated.It’s Read more ...
Bill Mayblin
The opening sentence of Andrea’s 2010 historical novel The Long Song is in the voice of Thomas Kinsman, who is introducing the reader to his mother, July."The book you are now holding in your hand was born of a craving," Kinsman declares. "My mama had a story – a story that lay so fat within her breast that she felt impelled, by some force that was mightier than her own will, to relay this tale to me."I have always felt that if you substitute "Andrea Levy" for "my mama" that we have a pretty accurate description here of Andrea’s own literary career. The Long Song was the last of the Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Ovid was exiled – or to put it in twenty-first century terms, "no-platformed" – by an indignant Emperor Augustus for the scandal caused by his three-book elegy on love, Ars Amatoria. Most scholars believe the intrigue behind his banishment to be more complex, but as this vibrant, dark and witty version of Metamorphoses demonstrates, his poetry continues to push at the edges of what society finds acceptable. Sean Holmes and Holly Race Roughan’s production has itself been forced through several changes because of the shapeshifting tricks of the pandemic (Covid's Metamorphoses?!). At one Read more ...
Heather Neill
It is a truism that every Hamlet is different, depending more than any other play on the casting of the lead. Each production moulds itself around the personality of the actor playing the prince. In Cush Jumbo, working here with Greg Hersov, who successfully directed her in As You Like It and A Doll's House at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, we have an accomplished actor of wit and intelligence, relishing Shakespeare's language and expressing the complex emotions and intellectual challenges of Hamlet, sometimes street-cool, sometimes febrile, always modern.A woman in the role is nothing new Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Few sights speak so eloquently of loss, of an especially cruel and painful loss, as one glass of wine, half-full, alone on a table. A man speaks to a partner who isn’t there, wishes her back, but knows that she has gone. Then another woman materialises to speak of of the futures he could have enjoyed - but now will not - and of the many, many futures that hunger for life, shut out of our world by deliberate action and unintentional chance. They crowd him, but only a child, bouncing with optimism, emerges fully to insist that he, this potential human being, will happen.Into her 80s but as Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Hypocrisy. Is this the right word? I don’t mean the play, but the audience. Of course, in the middle of the current COVID 19 crisis, there’s bound to be a certain amount of discomfort when watching Larry Kramer’s 1985 modern activist classic about the AIDS epidemic, since both cost many thousands of lives, but it feels really odd to me to be in the middle of a National Theatre audience where only half are wearing their masks. So while everyone cheers this story about how selfishness has to be challenged in order to preserve public health, only half are acting unselfishly in keeping us all Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Despite its painfully relevant title, How To Survive An Apocalypse was written in 2016. If only Canadian playwright Jordan Hall knew, eh? The end times aren’t just creeping but hurtling towards us, these days. Luckily for those weary of Covid stories, this play is more about millennials sensing impending doom, and how that experience impacts upon their personal relationships, than the doom itself. Jimmy Walters’ production for the charmingly intimate Finborough Theatre sparks intriguing ideas on which it doesn't quite fully follow through.Jen (Kristin Atherton, who really knows how to wear a Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Jasmine Lee-Jones has a hard act to follow – namely, herself. Her award-winning 2019 debut play, seven methods of killing kylie jenner, announced the arrival at the Royal Court of a blistering writing talent whose two sparring women made the room crackle and pop. Still only 22, she has for her second stage piece opted for something rather different, as if to show she has more than just a sharp ear for great dialogue.Curious, which its author performs solo at the Soho Theatre, begins with a striking image: in a full skirted ballgown, she runs on the spot under strobe lighting, so Read more ...
Heather Neill
Lucy Bailey's production of Christie's Witness for the Prosecution, first staged at County Hall in 2017, has a few years to make up on The Mousetrap's near 70, but it has already proved its staying power, despite the hiatus of the lockdown months.The venue is inevitably a significant part of its attraction. The courtroom at County Hall - once the chamber which saw the political debates of the Greater London Council - is a magnificent, atmospheric space, standing in for the Old Bailey. A statue of Justice, scales in hand, presides over the action and 12 members of the audience are co-opted as Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There’s a lot of going back to the future in theatres just now - shows (like this one) postponed by 18 months or so and delayed still further by co-star Roger Bart being indisposed on press night are bringing the bright lights back to the West End. Once you read all the Covid advice sent in advance (is there an way of making it a bit less intimidating, as it’s never quite the expected blizzard of certificates and glowing QR codes on the door), we’re back to, if not quite 26 October 1985, then 26 October 2019 - and doesn’t that feel good!Doc Brown has pimped up his DeLorean with his time- Read more ...