Reviews
Marina Vaizey
What was it about the privileged male Victorian/Edwardian British writer that led to such a fantastical outpouring of books for children that were to embed themselves so thoroughly that they have stayed with their readers into adulthood? All when published were further immortalised by collaborative illustrators: Lewis Carroll and the Alices, illustrated by Tenniel; JM Barrie and Peter Pan; Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (illustrated by EH Shepard), and AA Milne’s four short books of poems and stories (also by Shephard). In their own time these writers were also variously polymaths Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The city of love provides a backdrop for marital discord and worse in Belleville, Amy Herzog's celebrated Off Broadway play now receiving a riveting British premiere at the Donmar. The director, Michael Longhurst, is rivaling Dominic Cooke (of Follies renown) as the British theatre's current American chronicler of choice, with the glorious Gloria and Chichester's Caroline, or Change already well-received this year. Belleville is a more elusive and slippery piece: a Hitchcockian study in physical and emotional displacement that isn't beyond occasional forays into grand guignol. But Longhurst Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
For the third and allegedly final time, we hasten back to the Kent coast for another outbreak of cross-Channel crime. Not all that surprisingly, this new series of the Franglais cop show focuses on a people-smuggling racket bringing bedraggled Syrian refugees over to Britain from the French coast, though it might have been a bit more fun if we’d had a mackerel war between French and British fishermen, or were plunged into the unfolding crisis as a Eurostar-load of Brussels bureaucrats were forced to drink Kentish sparkling wine.Anyway, it’s bonjour all over again to dogged British detective Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It raised some eyebrows when Al Murray announced he was to make his pantomime debut – top comics rarely make that crossover these days – but, considering his alter ego The Pub Landlord is already an over-the-top creation, the character fits right into this production.It's at a theatre recently famed for its starry and glitzy pantomimes; First Family Entertainment used to stage the pantos here, but now its old rival, Qdos, working in partnership with ATG, is running the show. On this evidence the new producers are yet to find the same magic. Yes, Jack and the Beanstalk has big names in Murray Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Royal Northern College of Music’s production of Massenet’s Cendrillon has a particularly strong professional production team, and it shows. This is one of the most attractively spectacular operas the college has mounted for years.Director Olivia Fuchs and designer Yannis Thavoris stage the story in Versailles (the Hall of Mirrors, in particular) in the era of Louis XIV, and the set makes a wall of two-way mirrors its abiding theme, providing not only for impressive visual effects but also an easy and symbolic transition from the home of Cendrillon and her nasty step-mother and sisters to Read more ...
Katherine Waters
The familiar doesn’t have to get old. Last night at the Coliseum there were children in the boxes, adults in the circle and grandparents in the stalls. Seasonal favourite Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker brings all ages to the ballet — as well as each audience member's inner child, and this year's revival by English National Ballet is no exception.The magic begins with Peter Farmer’s designs. Snow falls in gusts as guests arrive to the party by skating across a frozen lake; the interior of the house is festooned with lavish drapery which makes the most of the space’s depth and later warps Read more ...
william.ward
Even more than some of Shakespeare’s other histories, Julius Caesar inevitably offers itself to “topical interpretation”, a Rorschach test of a play which directors short of an original idea can extrapolate to project their own political aperçus upon. Over the last century, Ancient Rome’s most famous autocrat has been endlessly re-spun as a leery dictator of the modern totalitarian variety.Angus Jackson (overall director of the RSC’s Rome MMXVII season now at the Barbican), has wisely chosen to eschew such modish nonsense and concentrate instead on clarity, drawing out of the text itself all Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This week we were all meant to be gripped by a bunch of ancient geezers nicking diamonds in Hatton Gardens. The postponement of ITV’s nightly four-part drama – the second of four (four!!) different versions of the infamous burglary – is a bit of a mystery. Now you see it on the cover of the Radio Times. Now it’s in mothballs. The beneficiary of this hasty swerve was Bancroft. Originally made for ITV Encore, a channel which is about to become an ex-channel, it has suddenly come in from the cold.What does it say about a drama that was to have been launched in a graveyard where thousands not Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
If this play really were “A Debate in One Sitting” as its author called it in 1909, it would have sunk without trace. “Talk, talk, talk, talk”, complains Hypatia Tarleton (Marli Siu), daughter of an Edwardian underwear magnate. Sick to death of the menfolk talking at her and over her, she longs to be “an active verb”, and we sympathise. One expects loquacity in a Bernard Shaw play but in Misalliance the ideas tumble forth like a river breaking its banks: the evils of Empire and British class snobbery; the benefits of socialism, feminism, physical exercise, free libraries and frank Read more ...
David Nice
Director Richard Jones watched all 156 episodes of The Twilight Zone as research for this Almeida production. I've never seen a single one, to the amazement of the American fan on the tube home who saw me reading the programme and, having grown up with the TV series in the early 1960s, told me a lot more about the skill of creator/scriptwriter Rod Serling and which instalments I should seek out. I shall now.The question why may trouble all but diehard enthusiasts as the opening actions unfold and intertwine, but by the end of this giddying evening Twilight Zone virgins may feel they've been Read more ...
Helen Wallace
An icy, wet wind snuck under the door of house number 8 in Fournier Street, where Uri Caine, bundled in coat and woolly hat, conjured Schumann’s darkly powerful "Im Rhein". Beside him, perched on a weaver’s stool, was improvising legend Phil Minton, rasping, whistling and groaning his way through "The wilderness of my life". Caine wove ragtime into plunging storm-tossed sequences, along with polkas, waltzes, blues and honky-tonk; as he plumbed the river’s murky depths, Minton scattered gasped husks of memory upon its surface. Caine’s playing felt too big for the handsome front parlour; but it Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Is there a key to “infinite variety”? The challenge of Cleopatra is to convey the sheer fullness of the role, the sense that it defines, and is defined by only itself: there’s no saying that the glorious tragedy of the closing plays itself out, of course, but its impact surely soars only when the ludic engagements of the first half have drawn us in equally. Monarchs, in the words of Shakespeare’s contemporary John Webster, may “brook no contradiction”, but this Egyptian Queen practically demands it – including self-contradiction, most of all. In Antony and Cleopatra we have a heroine who is Read more ...