Complicite
Demetrios Matheou
By all accounts, whenever The Chairs is dusted off for a new production it manages to resonate for audiences, as would any half-decent play laughing in the face of the futility of existence. And this cheeky, charming, often uproarious new spin on Eugène Ionesco’s "tragic farce" has landed at just the right time.How much of a punch the play ever lands, though, depends on the balance it strikes between comedy and pathos. Perhaps director and translator Omar Elerian feels that the pandemic world has had a bit too much suffering; maybe he was just enjoying himself too much. Read more ...
David Nice
Prolific, fitfully great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig's two biggest popular biographies, Marie Antoinette: The Story of an Average Woman and Mary Stuart, would be a gift for any screenwriter, given their fully realised dramatic scenes. His best-known and most substantial novel, Beware of Pity (its German title translates as "The Heart's Impatience"), seems less adaptable, given the revealing consciousness of its first-person narrator, an officer describing his disastrous relationship with a crippled girl brought to an end by the First World War. It did in fact become a 1946 movie, and now Read more ...
Jasper Rees
On 23 February 1942 at half past four in the afternoon in a secluded Brazilian hilltown called Petrópolis about an hour from Rio, a maid and her husband pushed at the bedroom door of a modest rented house. Despite the late hour, the tenants had not yet stirred. The door swung open to reveal, lying on the bed, a young woman in a cotton dress rolled over on her side, an older supine man wearing a jaunty moustache and a punctilious tie. The woman’s body was still warm.Word of the suicide of the famous writer Stefan Zweig and his wife Lotte hastened as rapidly around the globe as any news could, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Some have responded to the very notion of a musical about cancer as if the idea itself were breaking some unwritten code of what is permissible to put on stage
– which seems a bit rich given that the same genre has accommodated pieces about AIDS (Falsettos, now being revived on Broadway), cannibalism (Sweeney Todd) and even singing-dancing pussycats (um, Cats).At the same time, the National Theatre has among the various strings to its capacious bow an interest in experimenting with musical form: one thinks of London Road, a defining production for the theatre's current artistic Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Simon McBurney and Complicite have made plays about many things – maths, circuses, immigration, Japan, old age – but, at core, they’re all really about the same subject: storytelling. Their latest project is no different. The Encounter takes its audience into the remote depths of the Brazilian rainforest, beyond language and civilisation, but the narrative that emerges is one about tale-telling and the connections we forge through stories, empathy and imagination.Taking the story of American photography Loren McIntyre, and his extraordinary account of his expedition to document the Amazon’s Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Actor and director Simon McBurney’s one-man Complicite show has arrived in London after gathering plaudits in Edinburgh and elsewhere last year – before setting off again on a nationwide and European tour. It’s the story of a much more adventurous journey, which took place in 1969 when Loren McIntyre, a photographer for National Geographic magazine, got lost in the Amazonian rainforest while seeking the Mayoruna tribe, the “cat people”. Although he made contact with them, he found himself suddenly completely dependent on their good will.It’s a situation that immediately suggests the question Read more ...
mark.kidel
Complicite have, for several decades, been Britain’s most consistently adventurous theatre company. The term "physical theatre" sells them short, for the intelligence of their shows, from The Street of Crocodiles to The Elephant Vanishes, The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol to Mnemonic goes far beyond a spectacular use of the human body and the endlessly inventive use of props and space.The Encounter, a wholly extraordinary one-man show by the company’s co-founder Simon McBurney, is all of these things, but a good deal more. This is a show that re-invents theatre with a brilliance and sense Read more ...
fisun.guner
The Master and Margarita is a rare beast. Not only is it considered to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, it also regularly tops reader-lists of all-time favourite books. So it’s no wonder that, since its publication in 1966, 26 years after the author’s early death, Mikhail Bulgakov’s Soviet-era masterpiece has attracted a steady stream of film-makers and theatre directors. But their adaptations have so often floundered that one genuinely fears for anyone fearless, or foolhardy, enough to take it on. With its genre-shifting multiple narratives and dense allegorical layers, Read more ...
simon.mcburney
For anyone who grew up in the former Soviet Union, Heart of a Dog is a seminal text. But it’s also in the great tradition of Gogol and all the Russian satirists. It springs out into absolutely delicious flights of fantasy, but really sharp-edged. The mixture is there in Ostrovsky too: both very dark and very funny and also suddenly beautifully poetic. The theme of the piece is the manipulation of people, about the way that in 1926, after the new economic miracle, Stalin has come into power and a lot of people realise that something is turning sour. It’s like when we got New Labour and people Read more ...
David Nice
From discreetly poisoned violets at Covent Garden to buckets of man-dog blood in St Martin’s Lane has been quite a leap this week. True, the bourgeois plastic surgeon of Mikhail Bulgakov’s scabrous, long-suppressed 1925 novella goes about singing Aida while implanting testes and pituitary glands. But such melodies are only satirical snippets in Alexander Raskatov’s febrile newish score. And that needs the jumpy fantasias of Complicite style, not the lavish historical realism of David McVicar: which means both ENO and the Royal Opera are currently excelling in what they do best.For make no Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Complicite’s Shun-kin delivers sex and violence aplenty. A warped, wilfully kinky fusion of the two lies at the core of the play and its central relationship – sexy, edgy material with just the right degree of poetry to help smooth its way across the sophisticated palate of London’s theatre-goers. Yet to dwell on this is both to misunderstand and misrepresent Simon McBurney’s generous drama. With a skill typical of this company, a tale rooted in the passions and perversions of a single character becomes an echo chamber for a muted symphony of historical and philosophical musings.Although it Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“I want to disrupt your sense of logic and show you something really thrilling,” explains a young academic, as her animated scribbling on the whiteboard gains pace and incomprehensible complexity. It’s a promise that Complicite’s A Disappearing Number – now making its third London appearance – has little trouble fulfilling. A maths lecture may seem an unprepossessing (if not downright unappealing) start to a play, but in loosing their theatre from the conventional unities of time, space, chronology and even the axes of vertical and horizontal, Complicite have also freed maths from the lecture Read more ...