Theatre Reviews

Matilda the Musical, Cambridge Theatre

Carole Woddis Friday, 25 November 2011

WC Fields once famously cautioned against working with children or animals. He might very well have gone crazy had he been involved with the RSC’s hit musical production Matilda, which started out in Stratford-upon-Avon last November, garnering fistfuls of rave reviews, and has just won this year’s Evening Standard and Theatrical Management Association awards for Best Musical.

The Kitchen Sink, Bush Theatre

aleks Sierz Thursday, 24 November 2011

This play has a deliberately evocative title: not only does it suggest overabundance (“everything but the kitchen sink”), but also a whole genre of playwriting (Kitchen Sink Drama). At the same time, the kitchen is the heart of family life.

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Judith Paris, Waxing Lyrical, New Diorama

Judith Flanders Thursday, 24 November 2011

Mme Tussaud was born in Bern in 1760. Well, in Strasbourg in 1761. Her father was a respectable tradesman. Or possibly the local hangman. Her mother was a clergyman’s daughter. Or more likely a servant.

The Riots, Tricycle Theatre

aleks Sierz Wednesday, 23 November 2011

Ever since 9/11, political theatre has mobilised the techniques of verbatim drama, and the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, north London, has an impressive reputation for its tribunal plays, often staging the proceedings of judicial enquiries. Earlier this year, they bought us Tactical Questioning: Scenes from the Baha Mousa Inquiry.

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Judgement Day, The Print Room

alexandra Coghlan Tuesday, 22 November 2011

There comes a point in a writer’s life when he – it’s usually a he – stops writing about life and starts writing about writing. With Ibsen this stage arrived in the self-reflexive rage and unquiet of When We Dead Awaken – the play the author seemed to realise would be his last. Brooding on genius, art and the clamour of the everyday, it’s an inhospitable work and not one we see often; London’s last professional revival was almost 20 years ago.

How the World Began, Arcola Theatre

aleks Sierz Saturday, 19 November 2011

It’s the God factor. Although, until very recently, most British playwrights - being a secular bunch - have shied away from tackling questions of religious belief in their work, their American counterparts have had no such inhibitions. The market leader of this trend in the new generation is Catherine Trieschmann, whose 2006 play Crooked featured a “holiness lesbian”, and who now turns her sights on the clash between belief and science in rural Kansas.

Reasons to be Pretty, Almeida Theatre

Carole Woddis Friday, 18 November 2011

This needs confessing. Neil LaBute and I have an uneasy relationship. David Mamet - in Oleanna or Boston Marriage mode – also gets under my skin. It’s a close-run thing: misogyny exposed, or the thing itself? After Fat Pig (2004) and The Shape of Things (2005), Reasons to be Pretty is the third in LaBute's trilogy of plays about female appearance, and his seventh collaboration with the Almeida.

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Juno and the Paycock, National Theatre

Veronica Lee Thursday, 17 November 2011

“The whole world's in a terrible state of chassis,” says Captain Jack Boyle more than once during Sean O'Casey's great play, set in 1922 and the second of his Dublin trilogy, bookended by The Shadow of a Gunman (1923) and The Plough and the Stars (1926).

The Lion in Winter, Theatre Royal, Haymarket

Matt Wolf Wednesday, 16 November 2011

Don't be misled by the mini-history lesson with which Trevor Nunn's belated London stage premiere of The Lion in Winter begins, a sequence of dates, facts and maps that scroll up a decoratively appointed screen and threaten to turn the sumptuous Haymarket Theatre (Nunn's home now across four productions) into an upscale schoolroom.

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Beautiful Thing, Royal Exchange, Manchester

philip Radcliffe Tuesday, 15 November 2011

Nearly 20 years have whizzed by since Jonathan Harvey, then a 24-year-old comprehensive school teacher, wrote a play in the school holidays – and caused a stir. That play was Beautiful Thing, dealing with the then (and now?) contentious issue of two 16-year-old schoolboys, next-flat neighbours in the high-rise south-east London council estate of Thamesmead, who fall in love – and overcome prejudices and obstacles, not least their own self-realisation.

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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.

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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.

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