Theatre
aleks.sierz
Lorraine Hansberry’s debut, A Raisin in the Sun, was the first drama written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway, where it opened in 1959. It is now an American classic, but it’s her last play, Les Blancs, that in the current context of the Black Lives Matter movement and resistance to institutional racism both in the US and UK feels even more relevant. Showing the clash between the dying colonialist rule of the whites, as indicated in the title, and the rise of African nationalism in an unspecified African country, it has a tremendous resonance and power, especially with a top-notch Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
I knew what a Howard Hodgkin painting would look like before I ever saw one because of Nigel Slater. There’s a recipe in one of his very early books, Real Cooking, for “A creamy, colourful, fragrant chicken curry” which he candidly admits is “seriously unauthentic”, with ingredients that will leave some purists “really pissed-off”. But it’s a wonderful recipe, and as ever this is partly to do with the words he chooses to describe it. Towards the end, when the chicken, tomatoes, yoghurt, and assorted spices are simmering he declares ‘It will be yellow, green and red. Like a Howard Hodgkin Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Can this weekly lineup really now be three months old? As we move towards at least some degree of relaxation on the social restrictions that have long been in place, the offerings of theatre online continue to afford many a reason not to leave your laptop. National Theatre at Home has a particularly weighty (and timely) entry in its capacious rendering of Lorraine Hansberry's rarely glimpsed Les Blancs, whilst the Old Vic down the road places the music industry under the microscope via the Joe Penhall play Mood Music. You get recipe cards if you tune into Toast, not to mention the Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks’ best-selling First World War novel, has been adapted quite a few times in its twenty-seven years. First came the TV series in 2012, starring Eddie Redmayne and Clémence Poésy; then there was Sir Trevor Nunn’s 2010 stage production for the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. This new digital Birdsong coincides with the anniversary as well, but otherwise it’s quite unlike the others – and, indeed, unlike any other pre-pandemic play.The effort to produce a socially distanced show must have been monumental. Brought together in less than six weeks, Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The movie adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights was meant to hit cinemas this summer, but, in response to Covid-19, has been put back to 2021. Instead, we get the early release on Disney+ of Miranda’s Hamilton – filmed, NT Live style, with the original Broadway cast at three performances in June 2016, and now available to a wide audience for the first time. Who could say no to this? Stage director Thomas Kail also helms the film, and the result is an exhilarating, immersive experience of this dynamic musical about America’s forgotten Founding Father, who travels from Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Nicholas Hytner’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, filmed for NT Live at the Bridge Theatre last summer, is – as it gleefully acknowledges – completely bonkers. But it doesn’t start out that way. A troop of actors trudge through the audience, singing dirge-like psalms in dark suits and The Handmaid’s Tale-esque headwraps. This is Athens, a terrifyingly patriarchal society in which a woman can be killed for refusing to marry the man her father chooses. It’s the part of the play you always forget: the waking nightmare, which makes the flight into the forest all Read more ...
Marianka Swain
A musical featuring two people who are physically separated? Jason Robert Brown’s work is a shutdown natural – as this new digital theatre version demonstrates. Lauren Samuels and Danny Becker, who play doomed lovers Cathy and Jamie, recorded their parts entirely in isolation, with Samuels (previously starring as Cathy in 2011 at Chiswick Playhouse) also directing.The result is a piece that firmly retains its theatrical DNA – in contrast to the Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan-starring movie adaptation, which changed up the format to have the characters sharing space. Of course, current social Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Might we be nearing light at the end of the lockdown tunnel? It definitely seems that way, with the news in recent days that social life beyond the home may be resuming soon, at least after a fashion. All the while, theatrical offerings continue to come thick and fast, all the while offering up a cheeringly broad away of online prospects. This week's quintet includes a piece of installation art that you are encouraged to experience lying flat on your back, alongside an acclaimed Shakespeare extravaganza from just last year that many at the time experienced on their feet. We've got something Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Ian Holm was once in his local cinema on High Street Kensington, enquiring at the ticket office about concessions for people who appeared in the film they wished to see. The unlucky vendor failed to make the connection between the short customer with full beard and the clean-shaven priest in the sci-fi caper showing on Screen Four upstairs. He had to make an internal call to the manager. "There's someone here who says he's in The Fifth Element. Wants a discount." "Oh yeah. What's his name then?" "Ian Holm." "Ian Holm!"Holm, who has died at the age of 88, became a prolific screen actor partly Read more ...
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 ...