Theatre
Laura de Lisle
At just under five hours, Troy Story, the RSC’s adaptation of as many tales from Greek myth, takes about a third as long as it does to recite the whole of the Iliad. It feels like longer. Gregory Doran’s production is ambitious in its starkness, but never quite manages to break out of the plodding rhythm of its lines – or to bring the stories into the 21st century. (The venture, undertaken without sets or costumes, was livestreamed this past weekend and is available through Saturday to ticket-holders via catch-up.) Unlike Homer, Doran and dramaturges Cathleen McCarron and Anna McSweeney Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The twelve days of Christmas have nothing on the flotilla of Christmas Carols jostling for view this season, each of which is substantially different enough from the next so as to give Dickens's 1843 story its prismatic due. Hailing from Broadway, where it was a seasonal perennial for a decade, this adaptation from Disney regular Alan Menken, Ragtime lyricist Lynn Ahrens, and the late, much-missed Mike Ockrent puts the emphasis squarely on the big and the brash. If you want quiet moments of revelation, Shaun Kerrison's musical staged concert is not for you. On the other hand, I all Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ben Ashenden and Alex Owen together form The Pin, a sketch duo who have won much critical acclaim and full houses in the Edinburgh Fringe shows. They have also added a huge social media following in 2020 with their lockdown skits spoofing the new Zoom age. Now they move into theatre with – what is it? – an extended sketch, or a comic playlet? Whichever it is, The Comeback is hugely enjoyable.The idea has been developed from Backstage, the duo's 2018 Fringe show, and the conceit is that “Ben” and “Alex” are a double act who are the warm-up act for Jimmy and Sid, two old stagers knocking out a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Travis Alabanza is black, trans, queer and proud. And they’ve got a lot to be proud about. In 2016, they were the youngest recipient of the artist in residence post on the Tate workshop programme, and two years later starred in Chris Goode’s wildly overblown adaptation of Derek Jarman’s Jubilee. On Alabanza’s website, they boast that they are “known for increasingly paving much of the UK conversation around trans politics”, and certainly they’ve made an impact. If you want to know about safe spaces and communities for gender non-conforming and transgender people, this is the go-to activist. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Add the Hampstead Theatre to the swelling ranks of playhouses opening its doors this month, in this case with a revival well into rehearsal last spring when the first lockdown struck. Re-cast in the interim, Alice Hamilton's 60th-anniversary production of The Dumb Waiter finds the menace in a defining play from the early career of Harold Pinter, without catching the linguistic brio that in other hands can give this same text an often-surprising lift. Running just under an hour, this play was last revived in London at the start of 2019, as part of a double bill and bringing to near- Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
How do you create a secular version of the Nine Lessons and Carols? The original can feel like a formulaic trot through tunes and stories as stale as fossilised mince-pies. Yet it helps to remember that in essence it reflects on the story of a world suddenly turned upside down; a story of refugees, single motherhood, the kindness and cruelty of strangers, and the eternal curveballs that life can throw.It's completely fitting then that Rebecca Frecknall’s swiftly constructed response to the year of Covid derives its spiky power from the fact that it too portrays a world suddenly turned upside Read more ...
aleks.sierz
A Christmas Carol is a seasonal standard. In a normal year, there are a couple of versions to be enjoyed, usually led by the Old Vic in London, but this winter it feels like there’s an epidemic of adaptations. Whether this reflects an attempt to create a warmhearted response to the current depressing political and health atmosphere, or just an acknowledgement that this is Dickens’s evergreen masterpiece, doesn’t really matter. Watching Nicholas Hytner’s Bridge Theatre adaptation of this classic, which stars Simon Russell Beale, the only question is whether this is good theatre. And the answer Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A 35-year-old gay man has to figure out which way to turn in GHBoy, the Paul Harvard play whose connection to the chemsex world is embedded in its title. Will Robert (Jimmy Essex) settle into a relationship with Catalan university student Sergi (Marc Bosch) 15 years his junior, or will he succumb to the frequently unclad presence of Sylvester Akinrolabu, who plays the various tempters he meets along the way? What about the undertow of danger that has seen numerous men in Robert's stimulant-ready East London midst murdered of late? The grim spectre of serial killer Stephen Port has been Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
One of Marc Chagall’s last commissions was for a stained-glass window in Chichester Cathedral, which channelled his characteristically exuberant spirituality into a response to the verse from Psalm 150, “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord”. One of my earliest cultural memories is going as a schoolgirl to attend the window’s unveiling and seeing for the first time the clashing colours and fusing of folk and experimental art that made him one of the twentieth century’s most distinctive artists.Emma Rice’s ravishing, colour-saturated production of The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk takes Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Classical murder mysteries end with a neat solution — and with the arrest of the perpetrator. Postmodern murder mysteries play games with the genre, turning it upside down and inside out. This film adaptation of What a Carve Up!, Jonathan Coe’s 1994 bestselling novel, is a postmodern crime story — and then some. And then some more. And yet more of more. To say that it’s complicated is probably an understatement (it really is!), but it also has more than a few pleasurable elements, notably the cast: although we only hear their voices, director Tamara Harvey has persuaded Derek Jacobi, Stephen Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Women have an awful time of it in the Greek myths. Raped, abandoned, blamed for murdering people, blamed for not murdering people – you name it, it’s happened to an Ancient Greek woman, and they didn’t even get to talk about it themselves. Ovid picked up on this discrepancy, and, in a rare flash of wokeness, wrote The Heroines, 18 letter-poems from the neglected women of the myths. 15 Heroines, an epic new series of monologues commissioned by Jermyn Street Theatre and streaming this week, is a tricksy, playful adaptation of those letters, written, acted, and (mostly) directed by women. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Broadway tends to be the Darwinian environment where a show's opening night can also mark its closing. But such has been the Covid-prompted fate of the National Theatre's fiery return to the fray that Death of England: Delroy managed 11 performances before shuddering to a lockdown-induced halt following its Nov 4th opening night. The good news is that Clint Dyer and Roy Williams' sequel to last winter's National entry, Death of England, was filmed at that decisive performance for tranmission in due course. The even better news is that the play, and co-author Dyer's direction of it, Read more ...