Almeida Theatre
David Nice
Telling the truth about women in a war zone usually hits hardest through one of two means: clear reportage that presents the facts, or the devastating narrative of a survivor. Making a drama out of atrocity gets harder, though it's an age-old tradition, which is maybe why directors usually prefer to draw parallels through updating Euripides or Shakespeare. Lynn Nottage's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, fired by interviews with women in the Democratic Republic of Congo and premiered last year in New York, has two powerful assets which make it well worth seeing. It tries to show us how an attempt Read more ...
josh.spero
The thought of watching a filmed play is enough to make even the hardiest theatregoer flee screaming down the aisle. Recording the stage has a poor history, causing even the nimblest staging to seem thudding and deep performances transparent. But that was before Digital Theatre came along.Set up in late 2008 by theatre director Robert Delamere (Julius Caesar at the Manchester Royal Exchange, The Crucible at the Sheffield Crucible, among many others) and TV and radio producer Thomas Shaw, Digital Theatre films plays in front of their audience, edits them and offers them for download for £8.99 Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A banner year for the Almeida Theatre continues with Rope, director Roger Michell's taut, tense production of the 1929 Patrick Hamilton play better known from the subsequent Hitchcock film, starring a peculiarly cast James Stewart. Performed in the round - a first in my experience at this address - and without a break, the staging gradually tightens its own invisible noose around an audience sufficiently rapt that even a silly visual flourish at the very end can't sour one's enjoyment.Michell's good sense - more radical than it might sound - is to take absolutely seriously a scenario Read more ...