Theatre
alexandra.coghlan
The confidence trick to end all tricks, Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist is so utterly recognisable, so clearly contemporary, that to update the setting feels a bit like underlining the point in red pen. In this transfer from Stratford's Swan Theatre director Polly Findlay plays things 17th-century straight, allowing her audience to make the connection with just a little help from an irreverent new epilogue.The year is 1610 and plague has driven the wealthy away from London to their country estates, leaving the city and their possessions in charge of the underclass – servants, clerks, whores and Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The family is a war zone. Bam, bam, bam. For some people, it can be the most dangerous place on earth. Its weapons include domination and betrayal, blackmail and abuse, and its frontline is memory – what really happened, and who is most to blame? In actor-playwright Nathaniel Martello-White’s new drama, this war zone is crossed and re-crossed with passionate vigour in a minimalist production that has some strong points and some frustrating aspects too.A young woman, Angel, has called a family meeting because she wants to discuss what happened to her when her mother swapped lovers, and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
What price a human soul? That’s the question Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus asks – a question whose answers are rooted in faith and theology. But in a society with little use for faith and still less for theology, how do you reframe the question? Director Maria Aberg offers a deft if not always entirely coherent answer in her breathless, punky take on the play for the RSC.In this monologue of an age, an era in thrall to the selfie and the narcissistic navel-gazing of the blogosphere, our ambitions and loves are turned inwards, but also our fears. It follows that a contemporary Faustus is fascinated Read more ...
aleks.sierz
We’re living in the age of the small play. Although there are plenty of baggy epics around on our stages, they are outnumbered by the small and short two-hander, whether it's John O’Donovan’s gloriously titled If We Got Some More Cocaine I Could Show You How I Love You at the Old Red Lion or the equally gloriously acted Counting Stars by Atiha Sen Gupta at Theatre Royal Stratford East. And, sure enough, the latest new play at the ever-enterprising Orange Tree, Zoe Cooper’s Jess and Joe Forever, is small and short. But it is also a hugely enjoyable romcom.Cooper’s choice of theatrical form Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Part Biblical melodrama, part Carry On Up The Colosseum, with a bit of Horrible Histories thrown in for good measure, it’s hard to see how John Wolfson’s wildly uneven The Inn at Lydda graduated from a rehearsed reading last season to a full-blown production. Director Andy Jordan does what he can with this historical mishmash, but there’s no disguising the fundamental flaws in the play’s construction.Wolfson, curator of rare books at the Globe, has taken the New Testament Apocrypha as a starting point for a Classical counter-factual fantasy. The dying emperor Tiberius Caesar (he of “Render Read more ...
David Nice
She gave us the most moving King Lear years before the news broke that Glenda Jackson would be playing the role. Only Mark Rylance has recently matched the malicious wit of her Globe Richard III. Now Kathryn Hunter spellbinds in a very Shakespearean downfall drama about the court of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie – but this time the Elect of God doesn’t actually appear in person, not literally at any rate, and the triumph is shared by everybody involved, lighting and soundscape designers included.Hunter plays 12 parts, the voices of the ruler’s courtiers as reported in Ryszard Kapuściński’s Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Ever since Lucy Prebble’s hit masterpiece, Enron, opened our eyes to the possibilities of staging plays about global finance in a thrillingly theatrical way, the hunt has been on for another story that can be as informative and as well staged. Step forward Beth Steel, whose Wonderland, her previous play at this address, looked at Yorkshire miners in the 1980s Miners Strike. Now she travels across the pond in the late 1970s, to look at the similarly arcane activities of New York bankers. This time her characters are not the good sons of toil, but at the bad boys of spoil.Sadly, much of the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Alice Birch is one of the most exciting playwrights to have arrived in the past five years. This restaging of the brilliantly titled Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. – which was first put on as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Midsummer Mischief festival in June 2014 – demonstrates not only the power of her theatrical imagination, but also her enormous technical skill and sense of emotional truth. In the original playtext, she stresses that “this play should not be well behaved”, which sounds like an incitement to messiness. Luckily, Erica Whyman’s production is tight, taut and Read more ...
aleks.sierz
For the final show in his year-long stay at this West End address, Kenneth Branagh has chosen to revive and star in John Osborne’s 1957 play. By doing so, he finds himself once again treading in the footsteps of Sir Laurence Olivier, who originally created the role. It’s not the first time he’s shadowed the legendary actor. In 1989, he played Henry V on film, and then also the great man himself (in the 2011 film Marilyn and Me). But can Branagh make this Angry Young Man period piece, which is both an attack on the British government’s handling of the Suez Crisis and a love letter to the music Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Do you carry a small part of the Congo every day on your person? Probably. Your mobile phone will contain coltan, aka columbite tantalum, which is used to make your electronics work better. And this is mined in the Congo. The trouble is that fluctuating prices for this mineral, as well as competition for such resources, encourages conflict between militia groups, which is one reason for the constant wars in this region of Africa. Another reason is the legacy of colonialism. Another reason is unfettered masculinity. And so it goes on.Adam Brace’s new play, whose title alludes to the advert for Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Angel by Henry Naylor, Gilded Balloon ★★★★Rehana tells us what her hometown Kobane, in Syria, is like – “A small border town where nothing happens … like Berwick-on-Tweed” – a typically wry and smart line in Henry Naylor's final instalment of his “Arabian Nightmares” triptych (following The Collector and Echoes).It's based on the modern legend of Rehana, or “The Angel of Kobane”, a Kurdish resistance fighter and sniper who reputedly killed 100 Isis jihadis. She tells her story chronologically and plays all the people mentioned; we begin by seeing her close relationship with her farmer Read more ...
David Kettle
Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs ★★★★★ Is this even theatre? Hardly – cabaret, more like, as Scottish actor-author-provocateur Alan Cumming sings his way through songs by Sondheim, Weill, Lady Gaga and more, interspersing them with anecdotes about tattoos, Liza Minnelli and a less than happy childhood. It’s one of the flagship shows of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, which has transformed the hall in its own Royal Mile HQ into a sumptuous nightspot for the event, with crowds – including Mark Thomas and First Minister Nicola Sturgeon on this particular evening – flocking to Read more ...