thu 28/03/2024

Theatre Reviews

The Sting, Wilton's Music Hall

Demetrios Matheou

One of the oldest and most striking venues in London lends itself to immersive theatrical experiences. A few years ago the Victorian interior of Wilton’s Music Hall was infused with pre-show activity to recreate the 1920s of The Great Gatsby. Now a similar flick of the wrist by the same director draws punters into the 1930s and an adaptation of one of cinema’s great con capers.

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Photograph 51, Noël Coward Theatre

Matt Wolf

Nicole Kidman has returned to the West End 17 years after causing an innuendo-laden sensation in The Blue Room, the David Hare play that promptly transferred from the Donmar to Broadway, where one major magazine at the time actually bothered to inform readers where best to sit for the optimal view of a stage semi-neophyte en déshabillé

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Mouthful, Trafalgar Studios

Marianka Swain

Metta Theatre’s didactic "short plays" evening takes a rigorously Poppins approach: a spoonful of drama to help the medicine go down. The sobering facts – “We need to produce more food globally by 2050 than we have done in the whole of human history” – come thick and fast, emblazoned on a screen and spouted by four versatile performers. Some pieces, written in collaboration with scientists, are fuelled by those stats, others crumble under their weight.

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One Minute, The Vaults

Tom Birchenough

The repercussions of loss ripple inexorably through Simon Stephens’ 2003 play One Minute. Foreshadowing elements the prolific playwright has developed in his later work, it’s a testing piece that speaks most of all about the currents of loneliness that fan out within the fabric of the modern metropolis.

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Future Conditional, Old Vic

Marianka Swain

Can we – should we – control the future? That’s the dilemma faced by anxious parents attempting to steer their offspring through a labyrinthine school system, educational think-tanks, and the teachers shaping young lives. Tamsin Oglesby’s play is an intriguing opener for the Matthew Warchus era: impassioned, fiercely topical, and – with its relatively youthful cast – kicking against the “old” in “Old Vic”. That, and electric guitars as rousing musical accompaniment.

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Lela & Co, Royal Court Theatre

aleks Sierz

When is a monologue not quite a monologue? When it is interrupted by another voice, one that contradicts and argues with it. In Cordelia Lynn’s Lela & Co, her Royal Court debut which is effectively and savagely staged in the claustrophobic heat of the upstairs studio space, the drama starts off as a classic monologue, with Lela telling the story of her life, starting with her birth. Then she tells of her rather brutish upbringing up to the age of about 15.

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When We Were Women, Orange Tree Theatre

Marianka Swain

Can you peg a whole play on a decent twist? When We Were Women’s narrative tease pays off interestingly, but takes a hell of a long time getting there. It leaves little space to explore the ramifications of an intriguing revelation, a frustration amplified by the constant chronological cross-cutting in this revived Sharman Macdonald work, first seen at the National in 1988.

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Song from Far Away, Young Vic

Marianka Swain

“My brother died.” That’s the reality New York-based banker Willem struggles to inhabit when he returns to his estranged family in Amsterdam. There is no sense in Pauli’s loss – a sudden heart attack at 20, cradled by a stranger in the street – nor finality. Willem’s response is to continue the conversation through an elegiac series of letters, countering the abandonment and searching for meaning in both a life interrupted and his own isolated existence.

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People, Places and Things, National Theatre

aleks Sierz

We all know what the word “addict” means, but what does it feel like to be one? Thirtysomething Emma – a minor actress played with immense conviction and quirky charm by Denise Gough – knows exactly. At one point in Duncan Macmillan’s engrossing new play, she says, “People who aren’t addicted to anything are really missing out, you know?” For the addict lives a life of glory: they feel complete, and loved and satisfied. Yes, that’s it.

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Murmel Murmel, King's Theatre, Edinburgh

David Kettle

It felt a bit like we were seeing things. At the fag-end of Edinburgh’s 2015 August of festival mayhem, with extreme exhaustion and input overload mixing to brain-addling effect in the heads of most festival-goers and participants, a hallucinatory, day-glo farce of a show that obsessively repeats just a single word seemed pretty fitting.

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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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