Theatre
alexandra.coghlan
It’s clear from the start – from a Prologue that quickly dissolves familiar rhythms and words into a Babel of clamour and sound. This RSC Romeo and Juliet, newly transferred to the Barbican, isn’t much interested in what is said. Actions not words are what count in Erica Whyman’s swift, youthful staging – a production that dances on the balls of its feet like a boxer, always braced for attack, and ready to lunge in its turn. Do its dramatic blows land? Often they do, though it lacks the knock-out punch that really should floor you by the end.Tom Piper’s set is an unprepossessing thing. A Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s a story of a mad old man who imagines himself to be a knight errant. On his quests he sees virgins in prostitutes and castles in roadside inns. His adventures have spawned an adjective that describes delusional idealism, typified by the activity of tilting one’s lance and charging at windmills one has mistaken for an army of giants.For Milan Kundera, the modern era – “and with it the novel”, he adds – is born when Don Quixote rides forth on his nobbly nag Rocinante. The Adventures of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes was published in two parts, the first in 1605. By the time the second Read more ...
aleks.sierz
You can see why artistic director Indhu Rubasingham chose to stage this version of Zadie Smith's classic White Teeth as part of the Kiln's opening season. The bestselling 2000 debut novel is set in Willesden, Kilburn and thereabouts so it's a good fit for what is essentially a play that pays tribute to the area's multicultural character. Ironically, of course, the Kiln's previous incarnation, the Tricycle Theatre is mentioned in the book, and Canute-like protestors outside the venue continue to campaign in vain for the old name to be reinstated. But how does Stephen Sharkey's adaptation cope Read more ...
Matt Wolf
To the recent spate of shows that put their own narrative-building first, we can now add Still No Idea, with the addendum that this self-penned two-hander may be the funniest and fiercest of them all to date. Eight years ago, Lisa Hammond and Rachael Spence brought to the Young Vic their show No Idea; the starting point there was to throw open to the public a possible narrative for a theatre evening featuring one performer who is disabled (Hammond) and another who is not (Spence).Have prospects improved much in the interim? The title of this Royal Court-Improbable collaboration, written by Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Two countries; two histories. Being black in the US; being black in the UK. Compare and contrast. Which is exactly what debbie tucker green’s amazingly ambitious new epic, which straddles centuries and continents, succeeds in doing. Taking a forensic look at what it means to be at the sharp end when you are Black British or African American, the show has a thrillingly unexpected theatre form and is written in green’s distinctive style of reiterative and repetitive punchy dialogues, which here are both emotionally passionate and imaginatively modernistic. Covering both contemporary experience Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Adultery seldom looks less adult than in the form of the mild-life crisis – that much-satirised condition in which desire is eclipsed by delusion, wisdom by foolishness, and sensible coats by leather jackets. Joanna Murray-Smith’s scalpel-sharp drama – first performed in Australia in 1995 (and acted here at the National Theatre in 2003 with Corin Redgrave and Eileen Atkins in the starring roles), now revived at the Park Theatre - triumphs because it anatomises marital breakdown with a cold-eyed clarity that goes beyond cliché to ask profound questions about the meaning of love decades after Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Here's a good pub quiz question: after Shakespeare, who was the most performed playwright in America last year? Arthur Miller? Tennessee Williams? David Mamet? None of those. It was Lauren Gunderson, and here is the UK premiere of her intimate two-hander Young Adult play, I and You, which is directed by Edward Hall and has two striking stage debuts.We are in a teenage bedroom – messy, with lots of pinks, fairy lights and glitter. There's a slightly claustrophobic air about it which makes sense when we learn that its occupant, Caroline (Maisie Williams, Arya Stark in Game of Thrones), is all Read more ...
james.woodall
The Royal Court Theatre has long been a leader in new British drama writing. Thanks to Elyse Dodgson, who has died aged 73, it has built up an international programme like few others in the arts, anywhere. At the theatre, Elyse headed up readings, workshops (in London and abroad), exchanges and writers’ residencies that might have suggested a team of 15 or so but her department was modest in size. Her largely unsung influence on how London audiences and critics got to know what’s going on in theatre around the world was, for over two decades, incalculable. She will be sorely missed.She began Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Beware the smile that Edward Hogg wears like a shield in the opening scenes of The Wild Duck, the Ibsen play refashioned into the most scalding production in many a year by Robert Icke, here in career-surpassing form. Playing James Ekdal, the photographer previously known as Hjalmar, Hogg disarms you from the outset with a bonhomie just waiting to snap. By the play's end, there's precious little evidence of mirth given the cumulative wreckage on view: building upon his forays into Shakespeare, Schiller, Chekhov, and the Greeks, Icke propels Ibsen's 1884 text straight into the heart of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
It's all in the title, isn't it? Martin McDonagh's surreal new play comes with a warning that not only screams its intentions, but echoes them through repetition. Okay, okay, I get it. This is going to be a dark story, a very very very dark story. And, talking of repetition, the show's cast — in its premiere at the Bridge Theatre — is led by Jim Broadbent, who has form with this playwright. He was also in McDonagh's The Pillowman at the National in 2003 — and that was also a dark tale that was bleaker than bleak. Hot on the heels of the hilarious massacres of the recent revival of his The Read more ...
Heather Neill
It has been said before: Macbeth's reputation for bad luck has more to do with the difficulty of bringing off a successful production than the supernatural elements in the play. Even those of us who have seen dozens of interpretations can count the number which "worked" on the fingers of one hand, and veterans still recall Trevor Nunn's 1976 production for the RSC, starring Ian McKellen and Judi Dench, as a rare truly successful one.The challenges are clear enough. The Weird Sisters suggest a witchy power it is difficult for modern audiences to accept. The ghost of Banquo (do we see him or Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"What could possibly go wrong?" The question ends the first act of Wise Children, the debut venture from the new company birthed by a director, Emma Rice, who must have asked herself precisely that query at many points in recent years. Unceremoniously dumped by Shakespeare's Globe, where her A Midsummer Night's Dream remains one of the most buoyant in my experience, Rice has picked herself up and moved gallantly on, partnering her fledgling company with no less tony an address than The Old Vic. Oh, and guess what: the company is called Wise Children, too.So it's somewhat disheartening to Read more ...