Theatre Reviews
The Libertine, Haymarket TheatreWednesday, 28 September 2016
Restoration theatre has the reputation of being a rake’s paradise – all those randy young aristos in hot pursuit of buxom wenches. But even in the depths of 17th-century playwriting, there was room for repentance and regret among the discarded petticoats and ripped bodices. So it is with Stephen Jeffreys’s The Libertine, his now sharply rewritten 1994 play that was also made into a film starring Johnny Depp. Read more... |
Imogen, Shakespeare's GlobeSaturday, 24 September 2016
What's in a name? Imogen has a softer music to it than Cymbeline, the only one of Shakespeare's plays in which the title character is marginal, and the daughter certainly dominates in a way that her regal father doesn't. So Cymbeline Renamed, as half the subheading of Matthew Dunster's bold production puts it, is fine. Read more... |
Pilgrims, The Yard TheatreSaturday, 24 September 2016
At its best, theatre is great at putting resonant metaphors on stage. And, as Elinor Cook’s new play abundantly proves, the activity of mountain climbing seems very promising as a metaphor for masculine endeavor. All that effort, all that heaving, all that straining. Blood and sweat and sometimes tears. And then the question: why do men want to stand on top of the world? And is it just men who have this urgent need for power and dominion? Read more... |
Good Canary, Rose Theatre, KingstonFriday, 23 September 2016
Very occasionally the playing of a play leaves a deeper impression than does the play itself. This is the case with Good Canary, a lippy, sweary tragicomedy by Zach Helm about secrets and addiction on the New York publishing scene. It has already played in translation in Mexico and in France, where it won Molière awards for direction and design. Read more... |
The Greater Game, Southwark PlayhouseThursday, 22 September 2016
Michael Head's new play is based on the book They Took the Lead by Stephen Jenkins, which tells the true story of events at Clapton Orient (now Leyton Orient) Football Club during the First World War, when 41 men associated with the east London team – players, backroom staff and supporters – joined up en masse to fight the Kaiser. Three never returned and several others were seriously injured. Read more... |
No Man's Land, Wyndham's TheatreWednesday, 21 September 2016
We are lost in the wood. In the limbo state between dream and reality, memory and present, youth and age, companionship and seclusion, life and death, struggle and success, fame and obscurity. Pinter often visits that place of in between, but the elusive and haunting No Man’s Land – electrifyingly presented by two of our greatest thespians – dwells deep within it. Read more... |
Things I Know To Be True, Lyric HammersmithSaturday, 17 September 2016
Growing up is a kind of grief: losing the person you once were to embrace the person you will become. That loss can fracture familial relationships, forced to adjust and reform as offspring alter, challenge, question and move away – physically, emotionally or both. Read more... |
The Alchemist, RSC, BarbicanThursday, 15 September 2016
The confidence trick to end all tricks, Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist is so utterly recognisable, so clearly contemporary, that to update the setting feels a bit like underlining the point in red pen. In this transfer from Stratford's Swan Theatre director Polly Findlay plays things 17th-century straight, allowing her audience to make the connection with just a little help from an irreverent new epilogue. Read more... |
Torn, Royal Court TheatreThursday, 15 September 2016
The family is a war zone. Bam, bam, bam. For some people, it can be the most dangerous place on earth. Its weapons include domination and betrayal, blackmail and abuse, and its frontline is memory – what really happened, and who is most to blame? In actor-playwright Nathaniel Martello-White’s new drama, this war zone is crossed and re-crossed with passionate vigour in a minimalist production that has some strong points and some frustrating aspects too. Read more... |
Doctor Faustus, RSC, Barbican TheatreWednesday, 14 September 2016
What price a human soul? That’s the question Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus asks – a question whose answers are rooted in faith and theology. But in a society with little use for faith and still less for theology, how do you reframe the question? Director Maria Aberg offers a deft if not always entirely coherent answer in her breathless, punky take on the play for the RSC. Read more... |
Pages
Advertising feature
★★★★★
‘A compulsive, involving, emotionally stirring evening – theatre’s answer to a page-turner.’
The Observer, Kate Kellaway
Direct from a sold-out season at Kiln Theatre the five star, hit play, The Son, is now playing at the Duke of York’s Theatre for a strictly limited season.
★★★★★
‘This final part of Florian Zeller’s trilogy is the most powerful of all.’
The Times, Ann Treneman
Written by the internationally acclaimed Florian Zeller (The Father, The Mother), lauded by The Guardian as ‘the most exciting playwright of our time’, The Son is directed by the award-winning Michael Longhurst.
Book by 30 September and get tickets from £15*
with no booking fee.
latest in today
Help to give theartsdesk a future!
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...
Towards Zero, BBC One review - more entertaining parlour gam...
The BBC’s latest “cool” Agatha Christie adaptation has many...
Album: The Burning Hell - Ghost Palace
Cultural references run up the flagpole on Ghost Palace include Deep Purple’s “Space Truckin’” buskers covering Lynryd Skynyrd and Ed...
Mansfield Park, Guildhall School review - fun when frothy, c...
Let’s call it Jane Austen fit for the West End, but with opera singers. The fact that it also serves as a fun ensemble piece for students is also...
Chuck Prophet, Mid Sussex Music Hall, Hassocks review - the...
Forty years ago, Chuck Prophet was the Keith Richards-like guitar hotshot in Green On Red, peers of R.E.M. and among the raw country-punk...
Echoes: Stone Circles, Community and Heritage, Stonehenge Vi...
Stonehenge is about 5,000 years old; three photographic artists currently exhibiting in the visitor centre are all under the age of...
Album: Anoushka Shankar - Chapter III: We Return to Light
Chapter III: We Return to Light is an unashamedly gentle and soothing escape from a hectic world. The last in a travelogue ...
Oscars 2025: long day's journey into 'Anora'
Amid these troubling times, can we not all live in the world of the 2025 Oscars' runaway success story, an ever-smiling Sean Baker? That thought...
Hylozoic/Desires: Salt Cosmologies, Somerset House and The H...
The railways that we built in India may be well known, but I bet...