Theatre
Laura de Lisle
“The crocus of hope is, er, poking through the frost.” When he uttered that dodgy metaphor back in February, Boris Johnson probably didn’t predict that it would become the opening number of the third edition of Living Newspaper, the Royal Court’s anarchic, hyper-current series of new writing. Then again, there’s little BoJo does that the Living Newspaper writers can’t tear to pieces accompanied by a jazzy saxophone riff. There’s a new group of writers this time, providing short scenes stitched together into one big "newspaper", all set in different spaces within the Royal Court building Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Just what the Zoom era has brought to theatre – to performers and audiences alike – is something we will no doubt be pondering for some while yet, certainly still in the much-anticipated eventual hereafter when stages in their “traditional” multifariousness are once again standard. Watching director Jenny Caron Hall’s livestream rehearsed reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, an offshoot of the Suffolk-based SHAKE Festival and a loose follow-on from her December Tempest, raised some such questions rather intriguingly.Following one of the best-known phrases from this early Shakespeare comedy, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Does a subjective theatre piece encourage a subjective critical response? I think it might, especially when it’s a memory play about dementia, so here goes: first I turn off the lights, then I press play. From the darkness comes jaunty music – it’s a dance class. The teacher says, “We’re not used to having a man in class, are we ladies? But you’re very welcome Mark.” Fade out, but don’t forget: at the age of 50 playwright Mark Ravenhill starts doing a ballet class at the same time as his mum, Angela, is suffering from Alzheimer’s in her mid eighties.Fragments: Mark telephones his mum in Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“Your task is to imagine the future.” That’s what the citizens of Assembly, a new streamed production performed and devised by the Donmar Warehouse’s Local Company, are told. It can be anything they like, so long as they make it together – which is the catch, of course. Since when did a citizens’ assembly ever agree on anything? Assembly marks the Donmar Local Company’s first production, co-created with writer Nina Segal and director Joseph Hancock. It was originally scheduled for 2020, but the virus intervened, rendering it basically a beefed-up Zoom production. The technical Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Let’s face it, most adaptations of classic novels are disappointingly pedestrian. They are so middle-of-the-road – fancy-dress characters speaking fancy-dress dialogue in fancy-dress plots. But there are memorable exceptions: Amy Heckerling’s film Clueless brings Jane Austen’s Emma squealing into our world, while Martin Crimp’s Misanthrope and Cyrano de Bergerac do the same for theatre’s Molière and Rostand. Now the team that delighted me with their version of Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! last year are back and they have dusted off Oscar Wilde’s 1890 classic, with a little help from Joanna Read more ...
aleks.sierz
All theatre is local — if you can’t get to where a show is playing you can’t see it. That is, until a pandemic closes all theatres and forces their shows to go online. The latest offering from Sheffield Theatres, now streaming to your home, is local in another way: Chris Bush’s The Band Plays On is an entertainment that has place at its very heart — it is a musical and historical love letter to the city of Sheffield. Over about 100 minutes, we get a mixture of female monologues and some spirited covers of mostly well-known songs by local heroes, from Dave Berry to Jarvis Cocker.This is a show Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Which of Shakespeare’s plays is most plagued by misperception? For my money, I would argue A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Most people encounter it at school age because of the ease with which it can be dressed up as a light comedy involving fairies. Yet at heart this is a deeply primal work which draws upon the raw power of the elements to look at the arbitrary nature of desire and how radically it can rewrite any individual’s life.This aspect of the play has informed the RSC’s latest interpretation, though it is rightly the high-tech nature of its Dream that has dominated all the preview Read more ...
Clare Norburn
Love in the Lockdown started out as my “Lockdown 1.0 project” - although, of course, we didn’t call it Lockdown 1.0 back then. We didn’t know other lockdowns would follow and that nearly one year on, here we would be, locked down again with theatres and concert halls still closed. It seems inconceivable now, but a year ago, I had never heard of Zoom. Right now, I live on Zoom: my online play with music is being rehearsed, directed and filmed over Zoom - and by actors and musicians on their phones and recording devices. The nine short episodes are directed by Nicholas Renton Read more ...
aleks.sierz
As the events of last year made clear, the police have a problem with race on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK, BAME people are more than twice as likely to die in police custody while being forcibly restrained than people from other social groups. Written by award-winning actor and writer Ryan Calais Cameron, Typical is a powerful and inspiring example of how theatre tackles institutional racism. First performed in 2019 at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the play then transferred to the Soho Theatre for a sell-out run. Now, during the pandemic, this piece has been filmed on location at Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
I’ll admit, I’ve never been a fan of murder mysteries. Patience is not one of my virtues; if I can’t work something out in 30 seconds, I’m liable to give up, and whodunnits tend to need a bit longer than that. Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Hung Parliament was, therefore, a lovely surprise: well-paced and earnest without taking itself too seriously, it’s a new interactive experience from Les Enfants Terribles, the company known for madcap, immersive work like their 2016 Olivier-nominated Alice’s Adventures Underground (which returned the following year). Don’t be fooled by Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The four monologues that make up Barnes’ People were filmed in the grand surroundings of the Theatre Royal, Windsor, and that venue's atmospheric spaces (now deserted, of course) seem to tell a sad tale of their own, one that chimes rather appropriately with the mood of some of them. Peter Barnes wrote them for Radio Three in the 1980s – the eponymous first series appeared at the beginning of that decade, its successor (More Barnes’ People) towards its end – and they have now been lovingly developed by Original Theatre Company for these filmed adaptations, treated with what feels like Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
This production of The Color Purple is an extraordinary testimony to the fact that many of the 20th century’s most joyous forms of music – jazz, ragtime and of course blues – had their roots in misery and oppression. Alice Walker’s powerful story of how a teenage black girl transcends rape, serial abuse and brutalisation first became an unlikely candidate for success as a musical in 2004, playing in Atlanta before it successfully hit Broadway in 2005.Last month it was announced that a film version of the musical will be released in cinemas – microbes permitting – in December 2023. In the Read more ...