Theatre
Saskia Baron
Scrounger is no comfortable evening in the theatre, for reasons both intentional and inadvertent. Athena Stevens’ new play recounts her 2016 battle with British Airways and London City Airport, who subjected her to the humiliation of being taken off a flight to Edinburgh because they couldn’t fit her custom-built electric wheelchair into the hold. Injury was added to insult when in the process of trying to cram the wheelchair into the plane, it was irreparably damaged. And all this happened despite the fact that Stevens had given them its dimensions well in advance. In the absence Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Mischief Theatre's “Goes Wrong” oeuvre is now well established: broad humour combined with physical comedy and slapstick mishaps. Magic Goes Wrong, though, is the company's first outside collaboration – with American magicians Penn & Teller, themselves purveyors of fine spoof comedy of the ta-da! kind.The set-up here is that we are at a fundraiser for Disasters in Magic charity, prompted by our host, Sophisticato (Henry Shields, main picture) recently losing his magician dad in a freak accident involving an attic stuffed with his props. As you might expect, the evening is on a steady Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
The Tyler sisters start as they mean to go on: bickering. Middle sister Gail (Bryony Hannah) has come home from uni to find that youngest Katrina (Angela Griffin) has stolen her room. “What about Maddy’s? Why didn’t you take that?” Gail snaps. “She’s in it,” Katrina points out. “I am in it, to be fair,” confirms eldest Maddy (Caroline Faber), trying her best not to take sides. “I am actually in it.”A traditional family drama might have maintained this dynamic throughout – so often in plays and television series, we see the same feuds arising between the same siblings in later life – even as Read more ...
David Nice
How is it that, in the nearly 900 pages of Sondheim's collected lyrics with extensive comments Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat, with numerous special boxes celebrating other composers and lyricists, he managed to mention Jerry Herman only once, and in passing? Most perceptions of their differences overstate the case: Sondheim could write big, generous melodies as rich as Herman's, Herman's lyrics can be as literate and as laugh-out-loud funny as Sondheim's, and invariably they fit the tune just as well (chances are higher when, like these two and Cole Porter, you do both).With Herman Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Political dysfunction and societal distress led many amongst us to the brink this year, so where better than the theatre to find succour if not always solace in the abundantly thoughtful offerings of a creative community as often as not working at full tilt? Even as a misplaced nostalgia seemed to be pulling Brexit-era Britain backwards, a contemporary light was shone on a community living tremulously on the edge in Alexander Zeldin's Faith, Hope and Charity and on the racial divide in Jackie Sibblies Drury's Pulitzer-winning Fairview, the latter one of a cluster of top-rank American plays Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Despair hangs like mildew over the small iron-ore mining town of Duluth, Minnesota, where dreams go to die, and the living haunt the clapped-out buildings like lost souls. This poignant collaboration between playwright Conor McPherson and Bob Dylan – himself born in Duluth in 1941, seven years after this play begins – takes us into a community in which music provides a rare release for individuals scavenging for reasons to stay alive. It was something of a surprise for McPherson to be approached by Dylan to create a theatrical vehicle for his music; when asked why he thought he had been Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Mischief Theatre is a wonder of modern commercial theatre. In 2008, a group of young actors who had met at drama school started the ensemble – writing, producing, directing and performing their own work. They had their big breakthrough with The Play That Goes Wrong, which started life in a pub theatre and went into the West End in 2013, and the “Goes Wrong” franchise has turned into a worldwide phenomenon.Now Mischief's touring version of Peter Pan Goes Wrong lands at Alexandra Palace for the festive season; it's in the “secret theatre”, a magnificent Victorian theatre recently given new life Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Who knew? This West End premiere of the 2007 Broadway entry from the legendary songwriting team of John Kander and Fred Ebb (Chicago, Cabaret) secured a prime holiday-season slot at the last minute when this playhouse's previous entry, The Man in the White Suit, closed prematurely. And the happy if unexpected news is that Paul Foster’s touring production – Wyndham's, unusually, is another stop on the road – is a pure delight. Curtains may not be the subtlest or most nuanced musical you’ll ever see, but it’s without a doubt one of this year’s most thoroughly Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The prolific Mike Bartlett – from whose pen have leapt television series such as Doctor Foster and Press, as well as stage hits such as King Charles III – has two things to celebrate tonight. On ITV his new three-part psychological drama, Sticks and Stones, begins, and this is also the opening night of his new play at the Kiln. Originally staged in Oxford a year ago, its title, Snowflake, alludes both to the old idea of a white Christmas and to the current derogatory sneer about young people being too fragile to cope with the heat of life.Set on Christmas Eve, in what looks like a draughty Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
History has corseted Elizabeth I with the title of “Virgin Queen” for centuries, but in Ella Hickson’s laceratingly witty new play she is revealed as nothing less than a lioness on a hot tin roof. In this pacy, dagger-sharp production we watch Elizabeth asses the dangers and contradictions of her inheritance, before ruthlessly reinventing herself so that she will not fall victim to the court’s deadly political undercurrents. “My mother seduced a man so successfully that he altered the constitutional history of this country.” Abigail Cruttenden’s crisp enunciation cuts the air Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If good intentions were everything, Teenage Dick would be the play of the year. As it is, this British premiere at the Donmar of an Off Broadway entry from summer 2018 grants centre-stage, and not before time, to two disabled actors, one of whom – the mesmerically fearless Daniel Monks – plays the Shakespeare-inspired figure of the title. But viewed purely in terms of text, author Mike Lew's nod towards the Bard's most charismatically demonic anti-hero feels some way still from finished and is so busy changing gears that even Michael Longhurst, the director, has to struggle to make Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The trouble with prejudice is that you can't control how other people see you. At the start of her career, playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's work was set in her own Sikh community. But, like other playwrights from similar backgrounds, she has tended to be pigeonholed in the category of "Asian playwright", and expected to write about clichéd subjects such as arranged marriage or religion. Now, however, she vigorously breaks free with this new play at the Royal Court, a story about life in contemporary Britain. This time she has expanded her cast of characters by creating a wonderfully Read more ...