Almeida Theatre
King Lear, Almeida Theatre review - Danny Sapani dazzles in this spartan tragedyThursday, 22 February 2024Less than three years after her magnificent Macbeth, Yaël Farber returns to the Almeida with another Shakespeare tragedy. Her take on King Lear (main picture) offers a full-bodied, slow-burn version of this devastating drama, where Danny Sapani... Read more... |
Cold War, Almeida Theatre review - compelling bittersweet tale of love in post-war EuropeFriday, 15 December 2023There’s a touch of Dr Zhivago about director Paweł Pawlikowski’s screenplay for his 2018 film Cold War. Its plot is driven by the same Lara/Yuri dynamic, of an overwhelming love affair trying to outflank the forces of history. Now it's been... Read more... |
A Mirror, Almeida Theatre review - unconvincing and contrivedFriday, 25 August 2023This is a play about censorship in a totalitarian state – but, no, I’m not reviewing The Pillowman again. Instead, I’m watching A Mirror by Sam Holcroft, a playwright who – as her 2015 play Rules for Living amply illustrated – is interested in... Read more... |
Romeo and Juliet, Almeida Theatre review - muscular action interspersed with moments of telling stillnessMonday, 19 June 2023Rebecca Frecknall’s Romeo and Juliet burns like ice, paring back and tightening the script so that love and death are constant bedfellows. She underscores her vision with a thrilling, furious physicality, interspersing explosive fight scenes with... Read more... |
Patriots, Noël Coward Theatre review - crash-bang brilliant Putin comedy does it againThursday, 08 June 2023With apocalyptic floods pouring through the Kakhovka dam, and millions of Ukrainians displaced or bereaved, it doesn’t feel decent to be laughing at a witty black comedy about his rise from nonentity to full-blown tyrant. On the other hand, how can... Read more... |
The Secret Life of Bees, Almeida Theatre review - stirringly delivered musical about civil rightsTuesday, 25 April 2023The cast of The Secret Life of Bees first parade onto the Almeida stage hefting big glass storage jars full of a golden substance: honey. The jars glow as if they are beacons, lights that guide. Which they turn out to be.Most of the people in this... Read more... |
Women, Beware the Devil, Almeida Theatre review - bewitching, up to a pointThursday, 23 February 2023A man in modern garb reads a tabloid newspaper and makes smarmy wisecracks about the malaise of contemporary Britain – strikes, NHS waiting lists and the rest of it. But hang on a minute: isn’t this meant to be a period drama? Lulu Raczka’s new... Read more... |
A Streetcar Named Desire, Almeida Theatre review - Patsy Ferran rises above fussy stagingFriday, 13 January 2023It’s a long way from the dank chill of an English winter to the stultifying heat of a New Orleans summer, but we’ve been here before at this venue. Five years on from their award-winning Summer And Smoke, Rebecca Frecknall is back in the director’s... Read more... |
Tammy Faye, Almeida Theatre review - Elton John's often dazzling new musicalFriday, 28 October 2022I’ll confess to a certain schadenfreude when the American televangelists who seemed so foreign to us Brits were led away to be papped on their perp walks, ministers in manacles: One big name after another skewered on their own hubris, gulling the... Read more... |
The Doctor, Duke of York's Theatre review - Juliet Stevenson will see you nowMonday, 10 October 2022Robert Icke is an expert in corporate tragedy. I don’t mean that in a bad way - just that he has a penchant for taking classics (Hamlet, The Oresteia, Mary Stuart) and transporting them, with the help of designer Hildegard Bechtler, to the frosted-... Read more... |
The Clinic, Almeida Theatre review - race and the status quoWednesday, 14 September 2022As Dipa Baruwa-Etti’s latest play, The Clinic, reminds us, the Tory party has a strong showing of Black MPs – Badenoch, Cleverly, Kwarteng. It was finished long before the latest Cabinet appointments, but presciently picked those three names, all... Read more... |
Patriots, Almeida Theatre review - a brilliant drama from Peter Morgan about rampant Russian power gamesWednesday, 13 July 2022To watch a Peter Morgan drama is to have a fly-on-the-wall’s perspective of modern history. Over the last two decades he has chronicled everything from David Frost’s bid to interview Richard Nixon to the disintegration in the relationship between... Read more... |
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