Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
Pericles is a play of voyages. Lands and landscapes crowd in, one after the other – Tyre, Tarsus, Ephesus, Antioch, Mitylene – until our dramatic sea-legs are decidedly unsteady. The demands are great for any theatre, but for the Globe’s tiny, candle-lit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse they are impossible, freeing director Dominic Dromgoole to ignore spectacle and visual dislocation in favour of an emotionally-driven, chamber take on this late romance.Designer Jonathan Fensom’s visuals may be coherent, and unity underlined in careful cast doublings, but tonally Dromgoole tosses us from mood to Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
Love, loathe or feel totally indifferent about Jedis and Stormtroopers, there will be no avoiding the Force when the cinematic phenomenon that is Star Wars rolls out a fresh instalment in a few short weeks. The latest in a long, long line of Star Wars videogames doesn’t capitalise on the new source material and instead focuses on the universe of the original three films. You’ll reenact the icy Hoth battles from The Empire Strikes Back, creep through the dense foliage of the Ewok-infested Endor forest, and kick sand in the face of naughty imperial scum on Tatooine.We’re in the world of first ( Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A lot of people are going to be enraged, frustrated, or confused by Evening at The Talk House, and in the authorial world of Wallace Shawn, wasn't it ever thus? This is the playwright who gave pride of place to a softly-spoken fascist in Aunt Dan and Lemon and challenged his audience's complacency directly with The Fever, so if I say that his latest play is of a piece with his earlier ones, that is intended as high praise, indeed. From its opening monologue onwards, Talk House could only be the work of this particular writer, Shawn's singularity of vision as undimmed by time (he's now 72) Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
If the title wasn’t already occupied, television-wise, the BBC might have titled Capital “The Street”. It’s got the high soar-aways over urban geography that recall the soaps, but here they spread wider, taking in a metropolis. It’s “capital” as in London, and we may wonder just who’s been padding around the premises before John Lanchester’s 2012 novel, from which Peter Bowker’s three-part drama is adapted. As a big-blend city story, comparisons to Dickens have been plentiful. But throw in the other meaning of the title – foundations of capitalism, the movement of money and all that, in a Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Hollywood took 365 speaking parts, 50,000 extras and 2,500 horses to tell this epic tale in 1959; here at the Tricycle, it’s a cast of four and some enterprising puppet work. Playwright Patrick Barlow, following up global hit The 39 Steps, has chosen a comic contrast that could hardly be equalled: redux maximus.In fact, Ben Hur is closer in spirit to another Barlow phenomenon, the National Theatre of Brent. There’s more than a touch of pompous impresario Desmond Dingle in actor/manager Daniel Vale, of the Daniel Vale Theatre Company. Of course, the misplaced self-importance of Read more ...
Matthew Wright
James Morrison has spent several years out of the limelight, with family difficulties to attend to. Would age and experience give the gravelly soul-pop star’s soft-focus romantic ballads sharper edges on his return? The underwhelmed reviews of his recent fourth album, Higher Than Here, suggested not, but last night’s live show, in a swaying, crooning, heaving Shepherd’s Bush Empire, showed an astute, modestly charismatic performer, and a warm embrace of a gig.Higher Than Here has only been out a few weeks, and it showed in the crowd’s choral reticence, so it was important to mix things up, Read more ...
David Kettle
First-time writer/director Sanna Lenken’s touching anorexia drama is such a heartfelt, fragile thing that it feels churlish to criticise it. Herself a former eating-disorder sufferer, Lenken brings a real warmth and sincerity to her portrait of an ordinary Swedish family rapidly unravelling when their elder daughter seems unable to overcome the horrible physical effects of her aching self-doubt.Precocious tweenager Stella (a magnificent Rebecka Josephson) idolises her older sister Katya (played by former child star Amy Deasismont), dreaming of emulating her figure-skating successes, and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The show's title, Outside, Looking In, might suggest we're in for some philosophising from Ed Byrne – but then, after 22 years in the business, the Irish observational comic has earned the right. And indeed, he covers subjects such as feminism, slut-shaming and gender imbalance, but in the mix there is also some material about the perils of dating and a graphic description of food poisoning. Even the cleverest comics – and Byrne is assuredly one of those – can't resist the occasional lavatorial gag.And while he has some serious points to make, the political stuff is never preachy and Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Welcome to the hellmouth. In Jamie Lloyd’s startling 50th anniversary revival, the seething, primal hinterland of Pinter’s domestic conflict is made flesh: the metal cage surrounding an innocuous living room glows a devilish red, sulphur-like smoke belches from the ether, and snatches of Sixties music distort into horror film cacophony. Purists may carp, but it gives a long-revered play a welcome shot of adrenaline.Lloyd, in concert with Soutra Gilmour (design), George Dennis (sound) and Richard Howell (lighting), has created a memorably cinematic haunted house. At times the bold, Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The strikingly architectural space that forms the upper portion of Botticini’s Palmieri altarpiece is well-suited to an entrance, forming as it does a sort of triumphal arch heralding great things beyond. And so it is that for years this painting hung over the entrance to the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing, oddly well-placed, but in truth of course, entirely out of place. In its new, albeit temporary position, we have a better sense of how this painting might have been seen some 500 years ago, when it adorned the altar of the funerary chapel dedicated to the humanist scholar, poet, Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The 100 Club is dark. Really dark. People are shrouded in the ink-light. I think it’s to save their embarrassment as they order a drink and realise they’ll have to either apply for a loan or sell a child in order to get drunk. In any case, the indoor gloaming provides the perfect setting for the opening act of the evening, Demian Castellanos. The creative helm of psych-rock act The Oscillation, he's on his own tonight with a wordless solo set showcasing new material.Starting off with tones and drones, Castellanos doesn’t so much create a mood as conjure up musical weather. There’s a gadget Read more ...
aleks.sierz
RD (“Ronnie”) Laing was a typically eccentric 1960s guru. A Scottish psychiatrist who was one of the leading lights of the anti-psychiatry movement, his 1960 classic The Divided Self helped a whole generation to a deeper understanding of mental illness and especially the experience of psychosis. This new drama, by theatre writer and critic Patrick Marmion, is an exploration of an imaginary episode in his life, and is staged on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Philadelphia Association, a therapeutic collective which Laing co-founded, and of his experimental asylum at Kingsley Hall Read more ...