Theatre Reviews
A Christmas Carol, Noël Coward TheatreThursday, 10 December 2015
Is Jim Broadbent Britain’s best-loved actor? The slate of screen roles he’s accumulated over the years – this Christmas Carol is his return to theatre after a decade away – has surely given him a very special quality in the nation's consciousness, a combination of general benignity with more than a hint of absent-mindedness, an almost madcap bafflement at the world. Read more... |
You for Me for You, Royal Court TheatreWednesday, 09 December 2015
North Korea is the kind of place that haunts the imagination of the West – and not in a good way. One of the last hardline Communist dictatorships, it is also a country of immense sadness, a landscape of food shortages and human-rights abuses. Yet its regime calls this dismal place the "Best Nation in the World". To us, it’s a secret world, a strange culture difficult to comprehend, easy to fear. Read more... |
Cymbeline, Sam Wanamaker PlayhouseWednesday, 09 December 2015
There’s a happy, cyclical logic to this first production of Cymbeline – Shakespeare’s late tragicomedy of love and jealousy – at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. The first play Shakespeare wrote for the candle-lit, indoor Blackfriars Playhouse, Cymbeline was quite literally made for this space. Read more... |
Hangmen, Wyndham's TheatreTuesday, 08 December 2015
Just what constitutes reasonable behaviour in an enlightened society? Not long ago, the death penalty fell under that umbrella in Britain, and state-sanctioned killing as punishment for the crime of, well, killing is just the kind of twisted irony that cries out for the Martin McDonagh treatment. Here it is, ending the playwright’s 10-year absence from the London stage, and his Royal Court hit fully earns its West End transfer. Read more... |
Macbeth, Young VicFriday, 04 December 2015
Events have overtaken this Macbeth, dramatically heightening its queasy topicality. Not just brutal beheadings and torture, but the cost and collateral damage of conflict without end, and the scourge of a tyrant slaughtering his own people, strike one anew in the wake of recent debate. Carrie Cracknell’s interpretative, modern-dress production traps us in a military underground bunker, drained of light and colour – a Hell as acutely psychological as it is physical. Read more... |
Around the World in 80 Days, St James TheatreFriday, 04 December 2015
One of the joys about this stage adaptation of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days is the contrast between its phlegmatic hero Phileas Fogg, who deals with everything in terms of precision and logic, and the picaresque confusion of his journey. Fogg (Robert Portal) has the habit of laying down portentous truths in an attempt to mediate the scampering mix-ups that he encounters at every stage. Read more... |
Funny Girl, Menier Chocolate FactoryThursday, 03 December 2015
It's hard not to invoke the B word - Barbra, that is, not Brice - and I speak as one who bunked off school to catch her at a midweek matinee when Funny Girl first played London almost 50 years ago. It was standing room only at the Prince of Wales Theatre but by then she was pretty much phoning in her performance, and only the thrill of that voice (smaller than one expected but laser-intense) carried her through. Read more... |
Howard Barker Double Bill, Arcola TheatreWednesday, 02 December 2015
Two plays for the price of one. What’s not to like? Particularly when they resonate so strongly with each other on a hard, uncompromising theme. Broadly, that theme is love and war, sex and death, but more specifically, both plays home in on the truth games played by a man and a woman at critical moments of intimacy. Read more... |
Linda, Royal Court TheatreWednesday, 02 December 2015
Don’t you just love celebrity hype? Kim Cattrall’s name alone sold out this show, which runs over the notoriously difficult Christmas period. But sometimes star-casting backfires, and when she had to withdraw from the production for medical reasons, the theatre had to find a replacement. Step forward Noma Dumezweni, an Olivier-award-winning performer who’s due to make her directing debut at this venue next February. Read more... |
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Royal Lyceum Theatre, EdinburghTuesday, 01 December 2015
Christmas has kicked off early in the Scottish capital’s theatreland, with traditional panto Snow White over at the King’s Theatre, and the Lyceum’s high-class offering – as befits the theatre’s 50th anniversary year – in the form of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Read more... |
Pages
Advertising feature
★★★★★
‘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.
latest in today
Dunedin Consort, Mulroy, Wigmore Hall review - songs of love...
The sixteen voices of the Dunedin Consort raided the large store of music inspired by the Song of Songs and the sonnets of Petrarch in a sensual...
People, Places and Things, Trafalgar Theatre review - a scin...
It’s unusual for a play to be revived with its original director and star, let alone a decade after they premiered the piece. But here we are,...
Withnail and I, Birmingham Rep revenue - Bruce Robinson’s 19...
Let’s put our cards firmly on the table here. I am a big fan of Bruce Robinson’s cinematic masterpiece about two out-of-work actors who live in...
Jack Doherty, Soho Theatre review - warm and witty childhood...
For fans of a certain age the name Jack Docherty will always be associated with a very good run of chat shows on Channel 5; he was also the star...
Album: Jack Savoretti - Miss Italia
It’s a long way to the middle. Jack Savoretti has worked hard to get there. He’s grafted. His first album, 2007’s Between the Minds,...
Two Tickets to Greece review - the highs and lows of a holid...
Two women were best friends at school but they haven’t...
Hoard review - not any old rubbish
A visually dazzling, fiercely acted psychological drama with a manic comic edge, Hoard channels an 18-year-old South Londoner’s quest to...
Hidden Door 10th Birthday Party, St James Quarter, Edinburgh...
It’s hard to imagine that The Arches – a string of stylish glass-fronted units in prime city centre location, housing boutique bars,...
Blu-ray: Chocolat
Claire Denis’ 1988 debut is a sensual madeleine to her Cameroonian childhood, with its taste of termites on butter, sound of birdsong and insect...
Coote, LSO, Tilson Thomas, Barbican review - the triumph of...
Programme notes for Mahler’s monumental symphonies will often...