Theatre
Laura de Lisle
A British-Jamaican man is confused. It's the Second World War, and he signed up for the RAF on the understanding that he would serve as a pilot overseas. But instead he's ended up as ground crew in a grey Lincolnshire village. "You are overseas, aren't you?" sneers his sergeant. That question – of how great the distance between Jamaica and Britain was and is – lies at the heart of Small Island, Rufus Norris's epic, big-hearted production of Andrea Levy's 2004 ode to the Windrush generation, adapted for the stage by Helen Edmundson. It's also one of the reasons that the National Theatre Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As lockdown continues, National Theatre at Home has announced its final sequence of plays, and several of the very best are being saved for last. That certainly applies to this week's offering, Small Island, whose dissection of Britain's racist past couldn't be timelier. Broadway's Lincoln Center Theater, meanwhile, mined a bygone theatrical period in the comparably epic Act One, whilst the week's offerings also accommodate in-the-moment protest theatre, an acclaimed West African Hamlet, and a recent Olivier Award-winning actor playing a peacock, as you do. For more on the latest amalgam of Read more ...
Heather Neill
What could be better for a lockdown summer night "out" than a virtual visit to Shakespeare's Globe? Simultaneously in a theatre and the open air, we can share the visible enjoyment of hundreds of others, the very opposite of self-isolation and social distancing. And this Elizabethan-dress production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by Dominic Dromgoole in 2013, exploits the unique qualities of the Globe to the full. The cast, led by its present artistic director, Michelle Terry, as Titania/Hippolyta and John Light as Oberon/Theseus with Pearce Quigley as a hilariously bossy, attention- Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It has been the fate of George III – who on many levels was a visionary and accomplished monarch – to go down in history as a comic figure, most famed for losing first America and then his mind. This Nottingham Playhouse production tells his story with all the wit and elegance of a tune played on a harpsichord, yet it is made remarkable by the way in which it simultaneously excavates the pain and pathos underlying his condition.That is due not least to an extraordinary performance from Mark Gatiss in the title role. Gatiss arrives in this production on the wings of a prolific and varied TV Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The government may occupy shifting sands when it comes to handling Covid-19, but the arts thank heavens continue to step up to the plate with a dizzying array of online options. This week's output mixes a soul musical from 1970s Broadway alongside a major revival of a play by Alan Bennett whose enquiry into the psychological well-being of those in charge will doubtless resonate anew today.Not to be forgotten is a tiny west London venue that consistently punches above its weight, alongside a slice of something more radical coming soon to a continent near you. This quartet represents just the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
If any musical can live up to this title in these troubled times, it must be this show from Graeae, a theatre company whose mission is to champion the work of Deaf and disabled artists. Founded in 1980, its name alludes to the three sisters of Greek myth who shared one eye and one tooth between them, and since 1997 Jenny Sealey MBE has been its artistic director, and the company has embraced both plays about different kinds of disability and given new resonance to other work, such as revivals of classics.Graeae’s shows are always captioned and signed, which as well as being inclusive, also Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
An arrogant leader contemptuous of his people. Could there be a more perfect timing for Josie Rourke’s taut, visceral production of Coriolanus? As opinion polls reveal that following Cummings’ flit to Durham, trust in the government has nose-dived to 39%, it seems apt to revive a production that shows what happens when the apparent merits of one individual are trumped over accountability to voters. Yet it’s also, of course, a demonstration that one factor that defines a classic is its ability to reflect different tensions at different times. Tom Hiddleston’s scornful, muscular Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As we continue into a third month in lockdown, the arts continue to suggest ever-changing worlds beyond. The invaluable National Theatre at Home this week looks across the Thames to a smaller venue's large-scale Coriolanus, starring a certain superhero movie icon, whilst the equally cherished Graeae streams their lively musical theatre tribute to the late Ian Dury. Beauty and the Beast, from a Chichester ensemble of young people, reminds us of the durability of that tale as old as time, even as The Shows Must Go On continues to look beyond Andrew Lloyd Webber to other musical mainstays, this Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
There is a line of argument that – unfairly – blames playwright James Graham for Dominic Cummings. Would Cummings, some might ask, have achieved the influence he has now if it hadn’t been for his depiction in Graham’s brilliant TV drama Brexit: The Uncivil War in which he was played as an obsessive genius by Benedict Cumberbatch? The question’s unfair not least because Graham himself is horrified by the phenomenon of Cummings-driven politics and all it represents. A more interesting question is how a then 36-year-old had the insight to identify the impact and ascendancy of a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The live-ness of theatre seems further away with every passing week, but at least the art form itself lives on to tantalise and entertain, whetting the appetite until such day as we are sharing an auditorium once again. National Theatre at Home continues to lead from the front with a tantalising array of offerings, this week bringing to the fore the busy James Graham in his comparative creative infancy with This House. Throw in a trio of Broadway-related events to keep musical theatre mavens happy, and you've got a quartet worth multiple digital platform visits. Jerry Herman: You I Like Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Larry Kramer, who has died at the age of 84, was the Solzhenitsyn of AIDS who indomitably reported from the gay gulags of Manhattan’s quarantined wards and revolving-door hospices. “I felt very much like a journalist who realises that he has been given the story of his life,” he told me when I met him. “I don’t consider myself a writer. I don’t bring the question of art into it at all like most writers do. I’m a messenger. As with activism, you figure out your target and the best way of reaching that target.”His most celebrated work, The Normal Heart, was a polemic about the early years of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The National Theatre’s triumphant march through its archive of NT Live recordings continues this week with a glorious blaze of a show. Starring Gillian Anderson, Ben Foster and Vanessa Kirby, this 2014 revival of Tennessee Williams’s 1947 modern classic A Streetcar Named Desire was a Young Vic production, and its film version is presented by National Theatre at Home. Anderson had wanted to play the central role of Blanche DuBois for decades, she says, ever since at the age of 16 she learned one of the character’s monologues for a competition. So the character has been in her DNA for years – Read more ...