adaptation
Uncle Vanya, Orange Tree Theatre review - Chekhov served up choiceMonday, 11 March 2024"We all live here in peace and friendship," notes Telegin (David Ahmad), otherwise known as Waffles, early in Uncle Vanya, to which one is tempted to respond, "yeah, right."As casually bruising a play as I know, Chekhov's wounding yet also brutally... Read more... |
Dune: Part 2 review - sombre space operaSunday, 03 March 2024Dennis Villeneuve’s Dune sequel is a sombre science-fiction spectacle that insists on the scale of cinema: erupting sandworms are Cecil B. DeMille colossal, the sound design centred on Hans Zimmer’s score thunderously enveloping. In a genre once... Read more... |
Cruel Intentions, The Other Palace review - uneasy vibes, hit tunes and sparkling stagingFriday, 01 March 2024Transgression was so deliciously enticing. Back in the Eighties when I saw Les Liaisons Dangereuses in the West End on three occasions, life was simpler – or so us straight white men flattered ourselves to believe. Consent was for unproblematic... Read more... |
An Enemy of the People, Duke of York's Theatre - performative and predictableWednesday, 21 February 2024Real life is a helluva lot scarier right now than you might guess from the performative theatrics on display in the new West End version of An Enemy of the People, which updates Ibsen's 1882 play to our vexatious modern day.Matt Smith is in... Read more... |
Othello, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse review - 21st century interpretation delivers food for thoughtThursday, 08 February 2024Detective Chief Inspector Othello leads a quasi-paramilitary team of Metropolitan Police officers investigating gang activity in Docklands. With a chequered past now behind him, he has reformed and has the respect of both the team he leads and his... Read more... |
Metamorphosis, Lyric Hammersmith review - vivid images, but where's the drama?Wednesday, 07 February 2024Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis is a novella whose cultural resonance has echoed loudly down the years. As a modernist metaphor for alienation in our times it has frequently been adapted for the stage. There have been classic, and popular, adaptations... Read more... |
Bronco Billy, Charing Cross Theatre - schmaltzy musical brings the feelgood factor just when it's neededTuesday, 06 February 2024When entering a particular, well-populated region of MusicalTheatreLand, one has to check in a few items at the border. Weary cynicism, the desire for narrative coherence, that nerve that starts to throb when sentimentality oozes across the fourth... Read more... |
The Zone of Interest review - garden gates of deathFriday, 02 February 2024The jokey serious point in Mel Brooks’s The Producers is that you shouldn’t be able to make a musical set among Nazis. But if you shouldn’t make a musical, can you make any fiction?The renowned chronicler of the death camps, Elie Wiesel, said that a... Read more... |
La Strada, Sadler's Wells review - a long and bumpy roadThursday, 01 February 2024Federico Fellini’s 1954 classic La Strada ought to be a gift to a choreographer. The film has pathos, good and evil, a bewitchingly gamine heroine, and incidental music by the great Nino Rota, a composer who can find melancholy in the music of... Read more... |
The Most Precious of Goods, Marylebone Theatre review - old-fashioned storytelling of an all-too relevant taleTuesday, 30 January 2024As last week’s news evidenced, genocide never really goes out of fashion. So it’s only right and proper that art continues to address the hideous concept and, while nothing, not even Primo Levi’s shattering If This Is a Man, can capture the scale of... Read more... |
The Color Purple review - sensational second time round for Alice Walker's novel on screenSaturday, 27 January 2024How many re-tellings can Alice Walker's The Color Purple take? A helluva lot, as the candid Sofia, one of the work's seminal characters, might put it.Adapted by Steven Spielberg for the screen in 1985, and then as a Broadway musical that had two... Read more... |
The Good John Proctor, Jermyn Street Theatre review - Salem-set drama loses some of its power in LondonSaturday, 13 January 2024It is no surprise that the phrase “Witch Hunt” is Donald Trump’s favoured term to describe his legal travails. Leaving aside its connotations of a malevolent state going after an innocent victim whilst in the throes of a self-serving moral panic, it... Read more... |
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