Theatre Reviews
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Rose TheatreTuesday, 16 February 2010
It’s the pretext that reunites Judi Dench and Peter Hall to collaborate on Shakespeare’s comedy nearly five decades after they first ventured into the Athenian woods together at the RSC. But the conceit of conflating the fairy queen Titania with Gloriana doesn’t come close to lending Hall’s workaday production the necessary sense of enchantment. It’s performed on Elizabeth Bury’s sparse and decidedly... Read more... |
Jerusalem, Apollo TheatreWednesday, 10 February 2010
Looking at posters outside the Apollo Theatre, where the West End transfer of Jez Butterworth’s award-heavy Royal Court success opened last night, you might be tempted to start humming: “And did those feet in ancient time…” But such nostalgic sentiments are unlikely to survive the opening scene of this phenomenal play. Soon after the curtain, a symbolically faded flag of St George, rises, we see a familiar rural scene: under-aged kids stoned out of their minds, dancing in a thumping rave. Read more... |
A Life in Three Acts, Soho TheatreTuesday, 09 February 2010
You may know the actor, drag artist and gay activist Bette Bourne from his portrayal of Quentin Crisp in the theatre, or perhaps his Lady Bracknell for English Touring Theatre (a role he was surely born to play) but outside the gay/theatrical London loop, he is less well known. That’s a shame because this charming and rather unorthodox piece of theatre shows that his life story - from an East End childhood, through early gay liberation, the scourge of Aids and the advent of queer theatre to... Read more... |
Really Old, Like Forty Five, National TheatreWednesday, 03 February 2010
Okay, now that you’re a citizen of Dystopia, and you’ve reached the regulation old age, it’s time to check into an approved care home. Please enter the Ark, and take your allotted bed. A government official will be with you in due course. Yes, that’s right, just take those pills and you will be fine. Will you be expecting visitors? Okay. Any problems, just ask Nurse. In Tamsin Oglesby’s satirical new drama, which opened last night at the National's Cottesloe space, the biblically named Ark... Read more... |
Waiting For Godot, Theatre Royal HaymarketThursday, 28 January 2010
The wait is over. Less than six months after dramatic literature's defining tramps departed the West End, here are Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo) back again, with some new faces to flesh out Beckett's eternal verities about that grievous but also grimly funny thing we call life. Read more... |
Wet Weather Cover, King's Head TheatreThursday, 28 January 2010
"Plays about cinema tend to be written by people who have done some movies, come back and filled their fountain pens from their spleen," the Oscar-nominated screenwriter Larry Gelbart once told me. David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow is probably the best-known example, followed by such works as Christopher Hampton's Tales From Hollywood, Martin Crimp's The Treatment and, most recently, last week's ... Read more... |
The Whisky Taster, Bush TheatreWednesday, 27 January 2010
Synaesthesia is a tricky beast. It’s basically a neurological condition which condemns those afflicted with it to a life in which words evoke colours, and emotions can be experienced as colour. Sometimes it is almost playful, with the mere names of the days of the week evoking tonal sensations; at other times it is intensely painful, with the mere glimpse of a buzzy pattern causing dizziness or strong feelings conjuring up great blasts of colour, an unbearable onslaught of confusion and... Read more... |
The Little Dog Laughed, Garrick TheatreThursday, 21 January 2010
Tamsin Greig takes her mighty stage chops to a new level in The Little Dog Laughed, a minor Broadway comedy that gets a major star performance from Greig in her first West End role since God of Carnage. Read more... |
Progress, Union TheatreThursday, 21 January 2010
Sexual politics has always been fertile (oops) ground for comedy, and Doug Lucie’s vigorous satire — whose 1984 premiere starred Lindsay Duncan, David Bamber and Kevin Elyot — is here given a revival on the London fringe. We are in Kilburn during the Thatcher era, and the local trendy lefties have turned inward. Read more... |
Enron, Noël Coward TheatreWednesday, 20 January 2010
Crisis makes people hungry. In the case of the banking collapse, this seems to take the form of an ignoble itch for revenge, and a more laudable hunger for knowledge. What exactly happened and what went wrong? As Enron, Lucy Prebble's wonderful play about a previous financial scandal, roared into the Royal Court after its sell-out run at Chichester, there was time to reflect on just why this play has been such a huge success. And by success, I really mean success. 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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