Theatre Reviews
Moonfleece, Rich MixThursday, 04 March 2010
Although our culture is obsessed with youth, very few adults can connect directly with teenagers. Instead teens have become the object of our fears — there’s even a posh word for this: ephebiphobia. In drama, teens are often portrayed as a problem to be solved, and deprived of their own voices. By welcome contrast, Philip Ridley’s Moonfleece, which opened last night in London and will tour the north of England, is unforgettably teenage in every way — it is young, young, young! Read more... |
Ghosts, Duchess TheatreWednesday, 24 February 2010
It is difficult for modern audiences to appreciate just how shocking Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts was when it was first published in 1881. Its sexual and syphilitic storyline - how the sins of the fathers are visited upon their sons - was considered immoral, loathsome even, and audiences must have felt deeply uncomfortable watching their Victorian, Christian hypocrisies laid bare. So how to make Ghosts relevant to today’s theatregoers? Read more... |
Mercury Fur, 3-4 Picton Place, W1Tuesday, 23 February 2010
Imagine a future, a near future, in which gangs of teenage boys roam the deserted streets of the metropolis, selling hallucinatory butterflies and organising parties in squats for rich clients who have extreme tastes in sexual abuse. Imagine. This is the vividly conceived sci-fi world of Philip Ridley’s Mercury Fur, first staged in 2005 and now revived in an old London office block by the thrilling fringe company Theatre Delicatessen. Read more... |
Off the Endz, Royal Court TheatreSunday, 21 February 2010
Over the past decade, much of the energy in new writing has come from black Britons. Homegrown talents such as Roy Williams, debbie tucker green and Kwame Kwei-Armah have sent us updates about the state of hybrid, streetsmart culture, and alerted us to the experiences of minorities. In doing so, they have reinvented punchy dialogue, with stage chat that zips along with dizzy humour and linguistic freshness. Read more... |
Serenading Louie, Donmar WarehouseFriday, 19 February 2010
American spiritual anomie, that beloved realm of cultural enquiry that has fuelled the likes of Revolutionary Road and Ordinary People and much else besides, gets its latest theatrical airing in the form of Serenading Louie, a Lanford Wilson play that is almost as infrequently seen States-side as it is here. Now, here it is at the Donmar, in a mournful, acutely... Read more... |
Dunsinane, RSC/Hampstead TheatreThursday, 18 February 2010
Scottish playwright David Greig’s new play, for the Royal Shakespeare Company in their London season at Hampstead, picks up where Shakespeare’s Macbeth left off (almost). We are in 11th-century Dunsinane, the seat of power in Scotland. Read more... |
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... |
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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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