Theatre
aleks.sierz
Your sweet tooth can get you into trouble. Lots of trouble. In this revival of Lucy Prebble's provocative debut, first staged at the Royal Court in 2003, the metaphor of sugar, and of the powerful attractions of this drug-like substance – bad for you, but providing an instant hit – is explored through a disturbing story about paedophilia and the internet. Since writing this play, Prebble has gone on to create large-scale contemporary classics such as Enron and A Very Expensive Poison, but, with the exception of The Effect, none of her later plays match her first one for sheer emotional Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Changing the gender of the title character “highlights the way in which women still operate in a world designed by and for men,” argues Chris Bush, whose reimagining of Marlowe’s play premieres at the Lyric ahead of a UK tour. It’s certainly a compelling idea – albeit one already explored in previous productions like Pauline Randall’s 2018 gender-swapped Faustus at the Globe – but the resulting piece, though impassioned, is unfortunately rather a muddle.Johanna Faustus (Jodie McNee) is the epitome of powerless: a low-born, 17th-century woman whose apothecary father (Barnaby Power) crushes her Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Uncle Vanya must surely be the closest, the most essential of Chekhov’s plays, its cast – just four main players who are caught up in the drama's fraught emotional action, and four who are essentially supporting – a concentrated unit even by the playwright's lean standards. Its overlapping strands of unrequited love and desperate loneliness are tightly wound, so organically so that any single false note risks throwing the whole off balance. That’s never the case in director Ian Rickson’s exquisite production of this new adaptation by Conor McPherson, one which stretches the original in Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Cormac McCarthy’s two-hander, premiered at Chicago's mighty Steppenwolf Theatre in 2006, has by this point been everything short of an ice ballet: a self-described “novel in dramatic form”, as one might expect from the American author of such titles as All the Pretty Horses and The Road, followed by a film made for TV directed by, and starring, Tommy Lee Jones, opposite Samuel L Jackson.Its British premiere at the fledgling Boulevard Theatre represents a further audacious programming move by this new arrival to London’s array of venues but looks unlikely to reap the plaudits of its Read more ...
aleks.sierz
History plays should perform a delicate balancing act: they have to tell us something worth knowing about the past, that foreign country where they do things differently, and also something about our current preoccupations. Otherwise, what's the point? So the fact that playwright Lucy Kirkwood, whose Chimerica was a brilliant rocket that lit up the sky in 2013, has set her feminist play about women's bodies and experiences in the mid 18th century raises expectations that it will also say something about the #MeToo movement and our contemporary anxieties about gender issues. At first the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Last night, I discovered the gasp index. Or maybe just re-discovered. The what? The gasp index. It's when you see a show that keeps making you exhale, sometimes audibly, sometimes quietly. Tonight I gasped about five times, then I stopped counting – I was hooked. I was obviously in the right place: the Royal Court has the reputation of being a powerhouse (to use a marketing term) of new writing. Yet, often my experience here has been of seeing old writing in a youthful guise; but this time was differenet – it feels like the real thing. From the start, Mancunian playwright Miriam Battye's Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Armageddon would appear to be at the gates in Sam Steiner’s intriguing if ramshackle play, a co-production between Paines Plough and Theatre Royal, Plymouth, that has reached London while still seeming a draft or so away from achieving its full potential. Inside a Samaritans-like call centre called Brightline, pregnant work supremo Frances (Jenni Maitland, chipper to a fault) is trying to keep the mood light.But beyond the doors of an office seen to be engaging in its own physical collapse lies a clearly toxic outside world: bridges are collapsing, mould is running rampant, and the Brightline Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“Take our country back!” is the rallying cry of the self-identified “real” Americans gathered to protest the arrival of immigrants. It could be a contemporary Trump rally – or, indeed, the nastier side of current British political discourse – but in fact this scene is from a 1986 musical, set in 1910, from an all-star creative team: book by Joseph Stein (Fiddler on the Roof), score by Charles Strouse (Annie) and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz (Wicked). Despite that pedigree, it bombed on Broadway, but this opportune revival, transferred from Manchester’s Hope Mill Theatre, gains potency by Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Do you hear the people sing? In recent months, you're more likely to have heard news stories about the longest running West End musical than the actual music. Stephen Sondheim – who celebrates his 90th birthday in March – missed the gala opening of the venue which has been renamed after him (formerly the Queen's), due to a fall – and some Les Mis singers have been pulling out as rapidly as champagne corks. At one point, Matt Lucas stepped in as a substitute, only to fall sick himself. Celebrity gossip aside, producer Cameron Mackintosh dumped the legendary Trevor Nunn and John Caird Read more ...
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 ...