Theatre Reviews
London Road, National TheatreThursday, 14 April 2011
The murders of five prostitutes in Ipswich: it’s hard to imagine a less likely subject for a musical, not least because the memory of the crimes of forklift-truck driver Steve Wright, committed in late 2006, is still so horribly fresh. But there is nothing lurid about this exceptional piece of theatre, created by Alecky Blythe and composer Adam Cork, and directed with restraint, tenderness and potent simplicity by Rufus Norris. It’s moving, fascinating and even funny. Read more...
|
Betty Blue Eyes, Novello TheatreThursday, 14 April 2011
Foot fetishists will have a field day at Betty Blue Eyes, given that the producer Cameron Mackintosh's latest venture is also the first in my experience to sing of bunions, calluses and corns, the last encompassing a passing reference to a lyric from Oklahoma!: another show on Sir Cameron's CV. Read more... |
Moonlight, Donmar WarehouseWednesday, 13 April 2011
One wants to be antagonised by Harold Pinter. In his substantial early dramas (The Homecoming, The Caretaker, The Birthday Party), aggression and menace coil through the texts like rattlesnakes. He was, then, revolutionary. Maybe it's glib - critical shorthand - to suggest that there were, thereafter, two to three decades of falling away; but some of us... Read more... |
Thrill Me, Tristan Bates TheatreMonday, 11 April 2011
Does the perfect murder make for the perfect musical? One doesn't have to make undue claims for the work's chamber-size appeal to warm to Thrill Me, the American two-hander that has arrived at the Tristan Bates Theatre as this season's entry in retelling the story of the Chicago killers, Leopold and Loeb. Read more... |
The Tempest, Cheek By Jowl, Barbican TheatreSaturday, 09 April 2011
Tradition, in the form of Victorian performance, conferred on The Tempest the VC of Highest Shakespearean Poetry, though it probably wasn't Shakespeare's final play. John Gielgud was in an important sense the last great Victorian English thesp and, in the apparently valedictory role of Prospero, took the island parable to an Olympus of rhetoric. Read more... |
Brontë, Tricycle TheatreWednesday, 06 April 2011
“Too fat, too miserable, too pinched” for love and life, the Brontë sisters famously made a kingdom out of their dingy rectory home in rural Yorkshire. Denied not just a room but an existence of their own, these three Victorian spinsters found authority and expression in novels the world would have them unfit to read, let alone write. Read more... |
Wastwater, Royal Court TheatreTuesday, 05 April 2011
Wastwater is the deepest lake in England, overshadowed by rugged Cumbrian screes and described by Wordsworth as “long, stern and desolate”. In this new play by Simon Stephens, directed by Katie Mitchell, it becomes a central metaphor: terrors may lie beneath its dark, still surface, like the violence and secret suffering behind a suburban front door. Read more... |
Terminus, Young VicMonday, 04 April 2011
Mark O’Rowe is one of Ireland’s leading contemporary playwrights, and Terminus was first produced in 2007 by the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. It transferred to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2008 and is now being revived by the Abbey in an international tour. His play charts another ordinary night in Dublin city, but as this captivating triptych unfolds the events his characters - simply named A, B and C - describe are anything but. A man and two women deliver a series of overlapping... Read more... |
The Mill - City of Dreams, Drummonds Mill, BradfordMonday, 04 April 2011
Bradford, once the worsted capital of the world, now employs fewer than 1,000 workers in the textile industry. Some of the disused mills have been transformed into tourist attractions – nearby Salts Mill has a huge collection of artwork by David Hockney and a posh bistro. Drummonds Mill has lain silent since closure, to be reopened... Read more... |
Smash!, Menier Chocolate FactoryFriday, 01 April 2011
If you're going to put on a show about putting on a show, you gotta get a gimmick, as a wise man not unconnected with the late Jack Rosenthal's autobiographical comedy once wrote. Put it another way: if the show/film/TV series depicted is compromised, you need something or someone off-centre to stand out from the crowd. In Barton Fink, it was a hotel corridor and what the Coen... 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
'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages...
