Theatre Reviews

Big Society!, Leeds City Varieties

graham Rickson Monday, 23 January 2012

You approach the theatre via a cobbled side street and you’re harangued by a Salvation Army officer, pleading with you not to go inside this house of ill-repute. The City Varieties is an under-appreciated jewel of a venue, a Victorian music hall recently reopened after an expensive refit. The carpets are no longer sticky underfoot and the seats are slightly comfier. Fortunately, not much else has changed. This is an extraordinary time capsule of a place.

Alfie, Octagon Theatre, Bolton

philip Radcliffe Saturday, 21 January 2012

Alfie’s back. The eponymous scallywag from the late Bill Naughton’s picaresque yarn set in London’s so-called Swinging Sixties is at it again, canoodling the women and cuckolding their husbands. “Keep them all happy,” he says in cavalier style, “Happiness is transitory, of the moment.” He takes no responsibility other than helping to arrange the odd back-street abortion. Never get attached and never get dependent - these are his watchwords. Life’s a giggle.

Travelling Light, National Theatre

Sam Marlowe Thursday, 19 January 2012

An interfering producer, an accountant who keeps trying to cut corners and costs, even a casting couch – making movies was never easy, according to this amiable new play by Nicholas Wright. Set in 1930s Hollywood and, in flashback, in turn-of-the-century Eastern Europe, it is a kind of celluloid fantasia that charts a path from the shtetl to the stars.

Our New Girl, Bush Theatre

aleks Sierz Wednesday, 18 January 2012

Suddenly, it seems as if the brawling youngster that was once new writing for the British theatre has grown up. Now, all it wants to talk about is the family, about having babies, and about what it’s like to be a parent. In Nancy Harris’s new play, which opened last night, the dubious joys of parenthood in an upper-middle-class family are eclipsed by the unexpected arrival of a new nanny. The inevitable question soon comes screaming at you: whose hand will be rocking the cradle?

Lovesong, Lyric Hammersmith

aleks Sierz Friday, 13 January 2012

Till death do us part: love and death are, like the fingers of a couple holding hands, perfectly intertwined in this play by Abi Morgan, which has been touring the country since autumn and opened in London last night. For about 90 minutes, we watch the ups and downs of the marriage of Maggie and Billy across four decades and through several leaps into the unknown. In its ambition, beauty and delicacy, this is a ravishing piece of work.

Huis Clos, Trafalgar Studios

alexandra Coghlan Tuesday, 10 January 2012

Of all the 20th century’s literary dystopias, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has proved most tenacious, epitomised by its sinister promise: “Big Brother is watching you.” But what happens when he stops watching? What becomes of us when the all-seeing eye of civil authority blinks shut for good, leaving us gazing, alone in perpetuity, at one another? It’s the unsettling question posed by Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos.

Fog, Finborough Theatre

aleks Sierz Friday, 06 January 2012

Absent or abusive fathers are a staple of British drama. As such, they are both an explanation for ferocious male violence and a metaphor of a paternal state which, in an age of austerity, seems ready to abandon the needy to their own devices. In Tash Fairbanks and Toby Wharton’s punchy play, which is a remarkable collaboration between a woman born in 1948 and a man born in 1984, the consequences of a father’s abandonment of his children are played out with chilling logic.

Comment

2011: The Arts Brought to Book

Matilda Battersby Monday, 02 January 2012

In the year that Kindle electronic downloads surpassed book sales for the first time, the influence of literature on the wider arts is still as pertinent as ever. Cinemas have been filled with titles first read on the bestseller lists, from Kathryn Stockett’s The Help and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, to the second instalment of J.K Rowling’s final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

2011: Tinker Tailor Minchin Sheen

Jasper Rees Monday, 02 January 2012

On Easter Monday, as the sun came down over the sea, a crowd of 15,000 – it’s not quite right to call them theatre-goers – followed Michael Sheen as he dragged a cross to Port Talbot’s own version of Golgotha, a traffic island hard by Parc Hollywood. The culmination of a three-day epic, The Passion of Port Talbot was street storytelling at its most transformative.

2011: Mariinsky, Manon, and a German Dane

Judith Flanders Sunday, 01 January 2012

Highlights of the year are always interesting. Things you loved at the time do, sometimes surprisingly, fade very quickly. I really enjoyed the Gabriel Orozco retrospective at the Tate: I thought it inventive and exciting. But now I have hardly any memory of it, and can no longer visualise what enthused me. (Well, apart from the sweet photos of two scooters flirting with each other. But that’s really not enough.)

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★★★★★

‘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.