Theatre
Rachel Halliburton
This scary, electrically beautiful adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s book about living on the faultline between imagination and reality is a fantastically alternative offering for the festive season. While the parameters of the story are dark, it’s an edgy, stunningly thought through tribute to the wild and wonderful life of the mind, and its ability to help us engage with the horrors that life flings at us. Though there is no shortage of Gothic special effects, the success of the production is due in no small part to Samuel Blenkin’s superb, comically gawky turn as the “Boy” at the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When Qdos brought back pantomime to the Palladium three years ago after an absence of nearly 30 years, it set the bar high with superb production values, a large ensemble, a live band – and a stage stuffed with stars. Now those stars – Julian Clary, Paul O'Grady, Paul Zerdin, Nigel Havers and Gary Wilmot – have become a sort of panto ensemble in their own right and reassemble for this year's outing, Goldilocks and the Three Bears.Traditionalists will quibble – perhaps fairly – as it's several minutes into the show before it even looks like a panto, when O'Grady's baddie, Baron von Savage Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Inua Ellams’ Three Sisters plays Chekhov in the shadow of war, specifically the Nigerian-Biafran secessionist conflict of the late 1960s which so bitterly divided that newly independent nation. It’s a bold move that adds decided new relevance to the action, grounding proceedings that are more often generalised in their listless disappointment to a very particular time and place. We certainly view the travails of the Chekhov’s eponymous protagonists – instead of Olga, Masha and Irina, here they are Lolo, Nne Chukwu and Udo – in a different light when starving refugees and the battle Read more ...
The Duchess of Malfi, Almeida Theatre review - a radically original perspective on Webster's tragedy
Heather Neill
This play can be a challenge for modern audiences: a woman who is ostensibly in a position of power, "a prince" in Renaissance terms, is nevertheless constrained by social expectations and a prisoner of the will of her overbearing brothers. A widow, she defies them to marry her steward Antonio in secret and tragedy ensues. The action can seem to move from one set-piece of madness or terror to the next, including scenes of visceral violence, while the onlooker is expected to accept unlikely possibilities such as that the Duchess (who is never named) could have given birth to three children in Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Actor James McAvoy is much in demand: in the BBC's His Dark Materials he is busy saving a parallel world, while in the poetic universe of Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac he is tasked with soothing more than one aching heart. Opening at the Playhouse Theatre, in a brilliant new version by master penman Martin Crimp, this classic tale is directed by Jamie Lloyd, whose company's revival of Harold Pinter's Betrayal – starring Tom Hiddleston – has this year wowed both West End and Broadway. This time, McAvoy comes up with a breathtaking career-best performance, and the entire evening is a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview comes to the Young Vic with the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama under its belt, and a reputation for putting audiences on their mettle through a build-up of theatrical surprises that culminate in a denouement about which the playwright has urged all who have seen the play to keep silent. It certainly delivers a final act that places viewers in a theatrical position that they have probably never experienced before, one that will prompt reflection long after the impassioned note on which the play's frenetic 90 minutes conclude.The result is ingenious in every way Read more ...
Marianka Swain
We’ve had Chess the musical; now, here’s Chess the play. Tom Morton-Smith, who has experience wrestling recent history into dramatic form with the acclaimed Oppenheimer, turns his attention to the 1972 World Chess Championship in Reykjavík, in which American challenger Bobby Fischer battled the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky. The event gained outsize importance from the Cold War propaganda battle – the two men pawns in their countries’ games, and the match characterised as the lone hero versus the Soviet machine.The play follows the tournament through, as both Fischer (Robert Emms, pictured Read more ...
Heather Neill
"Dickensian" commonly means both sentimental Victorian, apple-cheeked family perfection (especially at Christmas) and abject poverty. The story of Scrooge encompasses both as the old curmudgeon learns to mend his miserly ways and open his heart to others in a tale of redemption.Matthew Warchus's enveloping production has already had two successful outings here (with Rhys Ifans in the "Bah Humbug" role in 2017 and Stephen Tompkinson last year) and another iteration of it has just opened on Broadway.This version, by Jack Thorne (a writer whose work is familiar to all-age audiences for Harry Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There’s slight (White Christmas, to name but one) and then there’s The Boy Friend, a period musical so unabashedly vaporous that if you sneeze, it might blow away. All credit then to the Menier Chocolate Factory for anchoring Sandy Wilson’s onetime theatrical mainstay in a sustainedly nostalgic billow of song and dance to draw attention away from the fact that comparatively little of consequence happens across three acts. Matthew White's production would seem to be predicated on the assumption that nature abhors a vacuum, in which case, when in doubt, dance – and why not? Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Eve Leigh is an experimental playwright who has tackled difficult issues for more than a decade. Yet most members of the public will know her, and her actor husband Tom Penn, as the neighbours who recorded an altercation between Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds in June this year. At least, that's what it says on the internet. But don't let this distract you. Her new play, Midnight Movie, marks her debut at the Royal Court and takes as its subject the hypnotic attractions of the net. In particular, it explores the way that people with a disability can use the digital world for good as well as Read more ...
Heather Neill
This is the third Emlyn Williams piece to be presented here in a decade: The Druid's Rest in 2009 was followed by the enormous success of Accolade, directed by Blanche McIntyre, two years later.If it's a truism that neglected plays may well have been neglected for good reason, it is also true that forgotten work can chime unexpectedly with current taste or reveal new elements in the output of a writer previously dismissed as out-of-date. Terence Rattigan's reinstatement in the canon is the most obvious example, but the Finborough has made a reputation for rediscovering the work of writers no Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Of all the groups you probably wouldn’t want to be part of, surely the hyper-adrenalised, hardscrabble populace of The Wolf of Wall Street, the Jordan Belfort memoir made into an amphetamine rush of a film by Martin Scorsese, must rank near the very top. And yet here, against expectation, is an immersive theatre adaptation of the non-fiction memoirs that spawned the 2013 movie. What’s more, it is being staged in a capacious address located a coke-fuelled trot away from London’s City equivalent of the do-or-die New York milieu from which Belfort has since emerged post-imprisonment as some Read more ...