Theatre
aleks.sierz
There’s something endlessly fascinating about T E Lawrence. In popular culture, he has been immortalised by Peter O’Toole’s dazzlingly blue-eyed performance in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, but is there more to this English eccentric than freedom fighting on the side of the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks? Howard Brenton certainly thinks so, and his portrait of this strange, curiously unworldly and painfully conflicted character is, like its hero, full of great potential, much of which it fails to realise.It’s 1923, and Lawrence has returned from the Middle East, now a national hero Read more ...
Marianka Swain
In this 400th anniversary year, amid what feels like 400 million shows and tributes, it’s increasingly difficult for a Shakespeare production to stand out. No such problem for Emma Rice’s opening salvo, which responds to those critical of her appointment in resolute fashion. Never thought you’d see fireman’s poles, amplification, Indian sitar and disco lights at the Globe? Think again.Rice’s Dream honours the spirit of the building without feeling bound by its period-perfect architecture. Rather than Athens, we are in the here and now, with Hippolyta a leopard print-clad Russian bride, Read more ...
bella.todd
If Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes were (a lot) more like Ibsen, our national viewing habits would be in good hands. But then, as the hero of An Enemy of the People discovers, presuming to know what’s good for the public is a dangerous game. In his first full stage role in 12 years, the Earl of Grantham, AKA Hugh Bonneville, returns to his local Chichester Festival Theatre as a whistleblower who thinks he’s doing his town a favour. Come the fifth act of Ibsen’s political comedy, he’s been driven out of job, house and inheritance and is fighting off the mayor with an umbrella.This is a Read more ...
David Nice
You rarely see a full production of Shakespeare's dream play so magical it brings tears to the eyes. But then you don't often get 42 players and 14 voices joining the cast to adorn the text with Mendelssohn's bewitching incidental music, plus the Overture composed 16 years earlier – certainly the most perfect masterpiece ever written by a 17-year-old. Add a fluent ensemble of actors, a sense of high style in costume design and, above a simple stage with audience on three sides and the orchestra on the fourth, a hammerbeam oak forest in the very hall where Twelfth Night had its first known Read more ...
David Kettle
And so, it’s farewell to Mark Thomson with his final production as artistic director of Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre, after 13 years in the job (incoming artistic director David Grieg unveils his new season next week). With Homer’s The Iliad, in a new dramatisation by Clydebank-born playwright Chris Hannan, Thomson is going out with a bang – it’s a big, bold show that tackles one of our culture-defining myths, albeit a lesser-known one (‘the greatest story never told" is how the goddess Hera describes it within the play itself). And while their Iliad has got its flaws, you can’t help but admire Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Nick Payne has carved out a distinctive dramatic territory – neuroscience. In his big 2012 hit, Constellations, he explored the effect on memory of living with a brain tumour, while two years later in Incognito, the story of what happened to Albert Einstein’s brain was married to the case of a man who had parts of his grey matter removed to cure his epileptic seizures. Now Payne returns to the fertile landscape of inner space with a story about a lesbian couple who, when one of them fails ill with a dangerous cerebral condition, benefit from rapid advances in medical science.Set in Read more ...
bella.todd
Smoking weed on the Orient Express. Drinking at a brothel in Paris. Tricking the military police in Istanbul. Smuggling a Da Vinci into Paraguay. As travel itineraries go, it’s certainly no Saga break. But then Graham Greene’s Augusta is no ordinary literary aunt. The antidote to Oscar Wilde’s Augusta Bracknell, Greene’s 75-year-old heroine is a lusty free spirit who terrorises Victorian values and turns her nose up at the law. Having reentered her nephew’s life at what he supposes to be his mother’s funeral, she co-opts this retired bank manager as her travelling companion and tears him away Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The Cotton Blossom looks mighty fine in its latest London iteration, Daniel Evans's winning Sheffield Theatre revival of Show Boat joining the ongoing runs of Guys and Dolls and Funny Girl to offer West End audiences a synoptic view of Broadway musical history. And surely no Broadway title remains more iconic than this one – the 1927 collaboration between Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern that set the musical form on course towards a level of maturity and daring that few up until that time would have thought possible.But which Show Boat to stage? That as ever remains the question with a Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Blood, sexual violence, power games and lashings of nudity. Not Game of Thrones, whose new season has just premiered (yes, he’s really dead. Well, for now) – and whose shadow Kit Harington is trying to escape – but Jamie Lloyd’s graphic take on Marlowe. It’s a production determined to hold your attention, and, thanks to its comic carnival of excess, largely successful in that pursuit. However, like the magic tricks bestowed on its soul-selling protagonist, it’s rather more flash than substance.This is iFaustus, with an up-to-the-minute version of the play’s contested middle section from Colin Read more ...
David Nice
Banished from the Barbican are the hollow kings of the mediocre RSC Henrys IV and V. In their place comes a whole new procession of living, breathing monarchs in a vision that's light years away from bad heritage Shakespeare. Doyen of Dutch-Belgian - and world - theatre Ivo van Hove has filleted Henry V, the three Henry VI plays and Richard III to create his own trilogy of Greek-tragedy leanness and power, focusing above all on the totally different characters of three men making crucial decisions in times of civil, internecine and international war. Shakespeare, whose language remains intact Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Today marks 400 years since the death of William Shakespeare. To celebrate this and, indeed, put the two together, the Brighton Festival 2016 commissioned The Complete Deaths, a show based around the 74 deaths that take place onstage in the work of the most renowned playwright in history. It's a collaborative effort between physical theatre group Spymonkey and theatrical innovator Tim Crouch, both acclaimed Brighton talents. Here, digging deeper into this morbid, poignant, and sometimes unexpectedly comic subject matter, Tim Crouch reveals, exclusively for theartsdesk, his own Top 10 Deaths Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Vaudeville is having quite the West End moment, with Funny Girl inheriting the Savoy from Gypsy and Mrs Henderson Presents over at the Noël Coward. Gypsy is the pick of the bunch dramatically, delivering theatre history with real psychological heft, but Sheridan Smith’s luminous Fanny Brice gives Funny Girl a fighting chance. She’s such a natural vaudevillian that you begin to wonder if she’s somehow been transported from another age.Smith isn’t a vocal match for original Fanny Barbra Streisand (who is?), though the loss of otherworldly balladry actually makes for a more convincing Read more ...