Theatre Reviews
Next Time I’ll Sing to You, Orange Tree TheatreSaturday, 12 November 2011
Some plays are so weird they defy description. Well, almost. One of these must surely be the late James Saunders’s deeply absurdist play, whose first outing in 1963 launched the career of the young Michael Caine. Soon after, its author won a promising playwright award. The current revival, part of the Orange Tree’s 40th-birthday season, gives us a chance to look again at a writer whose innovative work has been consistently promoted by Sam Walters, artistic director at this address. Read more... |
Yerma, Gate TheatreSaturday, 12 November 2011
If you didn't know Frederico García Lorca's Yerma before this show, you probably wouldn't be any better informed after watching Natalie Abrahami's engaging but flawed production. In “a new version by Anthony Weigh”, as it says on the programme cover, a backstory of the childless couple Yerma and Juan is interpolated in the Spanish playwright's 1934 "Tragic Poem in Three Acts and Six Scenes” and its chorus has been excised in a much-reduced cast. Read more... |
Festen, Barbican Pit TheatreFriday, 11 November 2011
Family occasions can be fraught affairs, as playwrights from Harold Pinter to Alan Ayckbourn have convincingly proved, but the mother of all family meltdown dramas must be Thomas Vinterberg’s Danish Festen, a Dogme 95 film made in 1998. Soon after, this was turned into a stage play by Vinterberg and Mogens Rukov, which had an outstanding success in David Eldridge’s version here in 2004. Now a Romanian theatre company, Nottara, from Bucharest, bring their version to London. Read more... |
Hamlet, Young Vic TheatreThursday, 10 November 2011
First come the strip-lit corridors, the stained breeze blocks, the locked doors; later there are restraints, drugs, needles. The time is out of joint, and we are all imprisoned in a nightmare of confusion, paranoia, guilt and despair. Who are the mad? Who the sane? In Ian Rickson’s thrilling production of Shakespeare’s great tragedy, it’s often frighteningly unclear. Read more... |
The Mikado, Charles Court Opera, King's Head TheatreTuesday, 08 November 2011
Is this the year that G&S became definitively chic again? The slow-burn effect of ENO's "Miller Mikado" and Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy now results in numerous fringe benefits. Sasha Regan's all-male Union Theatre regime has delivered its best yet - Iolanthe at Wilton's Music Hall, the most touching and funny show I've seen over the last 11 months - and now Charles Court Opera gives us more witty operetta-in-close-up with a cast of nine backed up by two pianos. Read more... |
A British Subject, Arts TheatreSaturday, 05 November 2011
Journalism is often used to create compelling true-life plays. This drama, written by award-winning actor Nichola McAuliffe, has both a journalistic writing style and a journalist - actually the playwright’s husband - as a central character in a tale about rough justice set in Pakistan. Having wowed audiences in Edinburgh and New York, what kind of impression does this piece, which opened in London last night, make in the metropolis? Read more... |
Collaborators, National TheatreWednesday, 02 November 2011
“Smackhead, groin doctor and smut-scribe”: that’s one way in which writer Mikhail Bulgakov is described in John Hodge’s debut stage drama. Read more... |
John Leguizamo: Ghetto Klown, Charing Cross TheatreMonday, 31 October 2011
At Murry Bergtraum high school in Queens, New York, John Leguizamo was voted the "Most Talkative" student by his classmates. Not much has changed. As this one-man show demonstrates, Leguizamo talks like a Gatling gun on speed, switching almost unconsciously between English and Spanish, and likes to rattle through a gallery of impersonations with scurrilous, hyped-up intensity. Read more... |
The Last of the Duchess, Hampstead TheatreThursday, 27 October 2011
Is it nostalgic to constantly revisit the history of the royal family? In this new play by Nicholas Wright, which opened last night, we travel back in time to 1980 when the aged Wallis Simpson - widow of the abdicated King Edward VIII - lived as a recluse in a mansion in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris. Despite the fact that a national treasure (Sheila Hancock) is starring in the play, is this a subject worth looking at again? Read more... |
27, Royal Lyceum, EdinburghThursday, 27 October 2011
Abi Morgan is on something of a multi-platform roll right now. Between writing the Beeb's enjoyably hokey The Hour and scripting The Iron Lady, the Margaret Thatcher biopic which will be hitting our screens shortly before Christmas with all the force of a jet-propelled handbag, comes a new play for the National Theatre of Scotland. Read more... |
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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.
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