Theatre
aleks.sierz
Botticelli is a household name, but who knows the true story behind his most famous painting? The painter's 1480s masterpiece, The Birth of Venus, is one of the most striking images of Renaissance Florence – and has achieved iconic status. Because it has been minutely dissected by generations of art historians, it takes a bold playwright to smash through the scholarship and give a memorably fresh, in not necessarily accurate, account of its commissioning. Enter Jordan Tannahill, the Canadian polymath whose work spans theatre, film, dance, novels and everything else. And he's still only 31. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Time has been not just kind but even crucial to Little Baby Jesus, the 2011 play from the multi-hyphenate talent Arinzé Kene, who since then has gone on become a major name on and offstage: the West End transfer of his self-penned Misty brought him dual Olivier nominations earlier this year as writer and actor, and he segued from that to playing the volatile son Biff in Death of a Salesman at the Young Vic.All of which means that catching this play at this point in Kene’s career is to witness an embryonic creative chomping rabidly and electrically at the bit Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Even the mighty Almeida is allowed the occasional dud and it’s sure as hell got one at the moment with Vassa. Maxim Gorky’s 1910 play (rewritten in 1935) about a matriarch in extremis some years back proved a stonking West End star vehicle for Sheila Hancock. It offers a chance to go hell-for-leather that should set the pulse racing. That same role was to have been played this time out by Samantha Bond, who bowed out and has been replaced by a game if not ideally cast Siobhan Redmond: her breathy exhalations tire after a while, and one misses the whiplash authority required of a Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Playing our monarch and her husband in The Crown has made actors Claire Foy and Matt Smith into TV drama royalty, so reuniting the pair onstage guarantees a hot ticket. What’s less clear is why Lungs, Duncan Macmillan’s rather thin 2011 play, merits a major revival at the Old Vic. A two-hander charting the evolution of a couple’s relationship as they grapple with the prospect of parenthood and the future of the planet, it recycles well-worn themes, and its tone and viewpoint are as middle-class, conventional and, frankly, about as dramatically exciting as a weekly shop in Waitrose.There’s a Read more ...
Hannah Khalil
It all started in 2009 in the National Portrait Gallery. I’d had a meeting nearby so popped in to get a cuppa and stare at the beautiful rooftop view of London from their top-floor café, but a picture caught my eye. It was part of an exhibition of Victorian Women Explorers, a photograph of a woman with a rather severe face. The label said something like: "Gertrude Bell – Mountaineer, Explorer, Diplomat and Spy. Travelled widely through the Middle East, spoke every dialect of Arabic and Persian and was responsible for drawing the lines of what became modern Iraq. Founder of the Museum of Iraq Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
At a point in history where – yet again – a few misplaced words from English politicians could wreak havoc with Irish lives, this is a welcome revival of Ian Rickson’s stunning production which first played here to rapturous reviews last year. Brian Friel’s 1980 play reveals itself once more as a simultaneously raw and poignant tragicomedy, which deftly demonstrates how any abuse of the complex relationship between language and identity can all too easily lead to bloodshed.The audience enters the Olivier to witness a landscape on which the low-lying clouds and reddish sky create a sense that Read more ...
mark.kidel
Tom Morris’s production of Cyrano starts with a procession of nuns, some of them bearded, chanting verses from the medieval mystic Hildegarde of Bingen. In this original and lively version of Edmond Rostand’s late 19th century classic, Morris has played fast and loose with the original text, translated here and brought up to date by the poet and theatre maker Peter Oswald.In the original story, Roxanne, Cyrano’s great and unreachable love, is found in a nunnery, reflecting on the tragedy of her life. Morris and Oswald have skilfully opened and closed the narrative in the convent, so that the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Clean Break, the theatre company that specialises in working with women in the criminal justice system, is doing a lot of celebrating. It's the 40th anniversary of this unique female organisation and already this year they have put on a variety of shows, from Chloe Moss's Sweatbox to the devised piece Inside Bitch. Now they are teaming up with Alice Birch, one of British theatre's most experimental writers, to produce [Blank] at the Donmar Warehouse, which likewise is reinventing itself as a cutting-edge venue. The theme, predictably enough, is the impact of criminal justice on women and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
David Greig’s reimagining of Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel has brought a masterpiece of intellectual science fiction back to its philosophical core. Over the concentrated two hours of Matthew Lutton’s production, which reaches the Lyric Hammersmith from Melbourne via Edinburgh, we are compelled to contemplate, in the best tradition of the genre, ideas that go “beyond the reach of human beings”, as Lem himself put it. The experience is mesmerising. And if that sounds somehow cold or inhuman, the dramatic kernel of the story hits home at a deeply human level: Lem’s premise in this space Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Sabrina Mahfouz is a British-Egyptian writer who has explored issues of Muslim and British identity in various formats. Her work includes poetry, fiction, anthologies and performances, as well as plays. And she's pretty prolific. Since her Dry Ice was staged at the Bush in 2011, she has written some 18 other plays, of various lengths. Now she makes her debut at the Royal Court, the capital's premiere new writing theatre, with a short play that boasts an intriguing title, A History of Water in the Middle East, and which features Mahfouz in the cast. It is also part of the recent trend for gig Read more ...
aleks.sierz
True stories, even in a fictional form, have the power to grip you by the throat, furiously shake your body and then give you a parting kick in the arse. This is certainly true of stand-up comedian Richard Gadd's Baby Reindeer, a blistering monologue which was first seen in Edinburgh this summer, and is now at the Bush Theatre in West London. Apparently based on his true experience with a female stalker, this is an obsessive story about about obsession, and one which asks pertinent questions about what it means to be a victim, complicit or not, and how difficult it is to recover from trauma. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If ambition were all, Groan Ups would get an A*. Marking the first of a very welcome three-show residency at the Vaudeville Theatre, this latest from the cheerfully unstoppable Mischief Theatre tethers the japery we have come to expect from the team behind The Play That Goes Wrong – mishaps aplenty, verbal hi-jinks – with a newfound interest in the human psyche. Think of an amalgam of, say, Alan Ayckbourn mixed with Feydeau, and you get somewhere near the landscape of a terrifically likable, if overlong, study of how we got here from there. Or how they got there, that is Read more ...