Reviews
Heather Neill
Here's a recipe for a successful National Theatre production: take a well-loved classical comedy, employ an outstanding young director and a talented writer (so much the better if they have a proven track record together) and cast gold-standard actors, including, if possible, someone with a screen presence. What could possibly go wrong? Well, unfortunately, just such a promising mix fails to gel in Tartuffe. Director Blanche McIntyre and John Donnelly were responsible for a well-regarded tour of The Seagull in 2013, while favourite actors Olivia Williams, Kevin Doyle and Susan Engel are among Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
An angry little boy, in jail after stabbing someone, stands in a Beirut courtroom and tells the judge that he wants to sue his parents. Why? For giving birth to him when they’re too poor and feckless to care for him. And he wants them to stop having children.Fair enough. Director/writer Nadine Labaki’s Oscar-nominated third film – it also won the Jury Prize at Cannes last year - is in a different league to her two previous quite jolly features, Caramel and Where do we go now? It is a passionate indictment of the plight of Lebanese street children. Unregistered and without birth certificates Read more ...
David Nice
Give me some air! Stop screaming at me! Those are not exclamations I'd have anticipated from the prospect of a Vienna Philharmonic Mahler Ninth Symphony, least of all under the purposeful control of Ádám Fischer. Less well known here than his younger brother Iván - both have been admirably outspoken critics of Orbán's regime - Ádám has impressed with his stunning Budapest Wagner and his masterful Mahler cycle as chief conductor of the little-known Düsseldorf Symphony. Maybe if he'd brought the Düsseldorfers here, there would have been more of a sense of inner feeling; maybe the Viennese are Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Just when you think you may have heard (and seen) enough of Donald J Trump to last a lifetime, along comes Anne Washburn's ceaselessly smart and tantalising Shipwreck to focus renewed attention on the psychic fallout left by 45. How did we get here from there? Washburn certainly brushes up against the topic that animated a recent, similarly Trump-inflected play, Sweat. But Washburn's purposefully baggy, shape-shifting play resists categorisation at every turn: equal measures history play, polemic, and generational saga, Shipwreck confounds expectation and may at times confound an Read more ...
Tim Cornwell
Breathe in the love and breathe out the bullshit. After the Arcola Theatre's founder and artistic director Mehmet Ergen read Keith? A Comedy, a wild spin on the quasi-ubiquitous (these days, anyway) Tartuffe by the critic and writer Patrick Marmion, the theatre moved to cast and stage the play in a matter of weeks. Fresh and timely is the result. Marmion's central couple Morgan and Veena are your archetypally idiosyncratic North London family in the age of Corbyn. Morgan is a reformed hedonist who made a fortune from a start-up pocket-money app; Veena, an Anglo-Asian Professor of Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
Did you play videogames back in 2010? If you did, there’s a reasonable chance you played Crackdown 2. Only a reasonable chance as the game was just on Xbox 360 – this was back in the days when there was a lot more console-exclusive titles. But if you did play, you would know just how much fun this sprawling open world run, gun and mega jump game could be.Crackdown 2 was a vertigo-inducing urban romp, where as a super powered law enforcement agent you traverse the city with giant, gravity-defying leaps. Your abilities increase as you explore and complete objectives, bringing you new powers, Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Bodies is the latest in Two's Company's series of what they deem "forgotten masterworks", this one making a less-than-triumphant return to the London stage after almost 40 years away. Written by James Saunders in 1977, it opened at the Orange Tree in Richmond before transferring to the Hampstead Theatre and then on to the West End. It's now been revived by the director Tricia Thorns at Southwark Playhouse.Husband and wife Anne (Annabel Mullion) and Mervyn (Tim Welton) invite their old friends David (Peter Prentice) and Helen (Alix Dunmore), back in Blighty after a spell in the States, round Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was TV gold-dust. The original seven series of Only Fools and Horses were broadcast on BBC One from 1981-1991, and a string of Christmas specials kept the show running until 2003. It was showered with awards and critical acclaim, and in 1996 the episode "Time on Our Hands" drew a record-breaking 24.3 million viewers.This musical version at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, authored by Paul Whitehouse and Jim Sullivan (son of the show’s creator John Sullivan, who died in 2011), whisks us back to 1989, and deftly recreates the dodgy Peckham milieu of the Trotter family. This consists largely of Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
For its first ever performance in this country, the Symphony Orchestra of India - formed in only 2006 - kicked off its UK tour in spectacular style at Symphony Hall, Birmingham yesterday evening. Based at the National Centre of Performing Arts in Mumbai, the SOI is India’s first and only professional symphony orchestra. Founded by NCPA chairman Khushroo Suntook and Khazak violinist Marat Bisengaliev - who’ll join the orchestra as a soloist for some of the tour’s later dates - this is a group that’s achieved a remarkable amount in its 13 years of existence. They’ve worked with a host of world- Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Time once again to roll out that line about the road to hell being paved with good intentions. The creators of All in a Row, a new play at Southwark Playhouse about the last evening at home for an autistic non-verbal 11-year-old before his despairing parents send him away to residential school, was doubtless conceived with the dramatists’ belief that they were shining a light on a dark place. But the result is a grim 90-minute shouting match of bitter mutual recriminations and self-lacerating jokes which only reinforces every stigmatising cliché about the torment of having a child with Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
When the world is as crazy as it is right now, its political life dominated by dolts and villains, it needs a new kind of hero. That’s why Americans are embracing an octogenarian woman with more guts and integrity than virtually anyone at her level of public life, and why in quick succession we’ve had two films about her. The Oscar-nominated documentary RBG was released in January and is still available in some cinemas and on streaming platforms. It tells the story of the now 85-year-old Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a remarkable woman who in the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
David Ireland is a playwright who likes to jolt his audience and Cyprus Avenue, a dark absurdist comedy about an Ulster unionist afraid of losing his identity, does just that. This co-production between Dublin's Abbey Theatre and the Royal Court was first seen in 2016, followed by runs in Belfast and New York. Now, with a slightly changed cast, it's being given a very welcome revival, again under the steady stewardship of director Vicky Featherstone.Set among the festering sectarian bitterness in Northern Ireland, Cyprus Avenue tells the story of Eric (Stephen Rea) an Ulster Protestant in the Read more ...