Theatre
aleks.sierz
Hurray, the two-part epic wizard-fest Harry Potter and the Cursed Child lands in the West End this summer, and its playwright is the ever-versatile Jack Thorne (who also successfully adapted the vampire romance Let the Right One In for the stage). But audiences who’d like to enjoy Thorne at his thorniest, rather than most Rowlingesque, might prefer to take a look at this, his 2015 two-hander about a couple and their loss of a child. It’s a Hogwarts-free zone and its main emotional fuel is horrific loss coupled with courageous honesty. Strictly for adults only.Like any romcom, the story of Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“Murder is hilarious,” quips Zawe Ashton’s scheming maid, and in Jamie Lloyd’s high-octane, queasily comic revival of Jean Genet’s radical 1947 play, it really is. It’s also lurid, strange, bleak and powerfully transcendent, as befits a piece that locates hunger for creation and liberation in the imitation and destruction of another. Lloyd employs Benedict Andrews and Andrew Upton’s salty new translation – the latter’s wife, Cate Blanchett, led a 2013 Sydney Theatre Company production – to emphasise the unflinching modernity of Genet’s piece, which uses and unmasks theatrical Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A prevailing sense of farewell ripples through this closing production in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse's hugely welcome season of Shakespeare's final quartet of plays. That valedictory feel is traditionally true of The Tempest, a text commonly regarded as Shakespeare's own leave-taking and one that here also marks the final staging after a decade at the helm of the venue's sure-to-be-missed artistic director Dominic Dromgoole, who now hands over the reins to Emma Rice.It's tempting, of course, at such moments to view the staging itself as some sort of summary achievement whereby a director's Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Shakespeare’s plays have proved remarkably resilient to everything that’s been thrown at them down the years, including – in the case of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its flowery bowers and fairies – cloying Victorian whimsy. Peter Brook’s white box production in 1970 effectively Tippexed out that option for the late 20th century. In turn, this version by the touring company Filter has put down a marker for the 21st.Premiered at the Lyric in 2012, and now back there after a long tour, it shows, as never before, how hootingly funny this play can be – and not just in the Mechanicals’ scenes. Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Theatregoers suffering from First World War fatigue may want to pass on Jonathan Lynn’s merely competent historical drama about two mythic figures: Charles de Gaulle and Philippe Pétain. It’s a fascinating subject – de Gaulle had his former mentor tried for treason in 1945 after Pétain led France into Nazi collaboration – but Yes Minister co-creator Lynn, who also directs, seems unsure whether it warrants winking satire or solemn historical re-enactment, settling for a fitfully engaging hybrid.The relationship began in 1913, with de Gaulle supporting Pétain's (Tom Conti) unpopular Read more ...
mark.kidel
Alan Mahon’s Hamlet in Andrew Hilton’s production for Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory bristles with teen spirit and this is no bad thing. The Prince of Denmark, even before his father dies, is beset with the angst that goes with the territory of late adolescence. The production presents, on one level, a tragic coming of age drama, one in which the young heroes are consumed by madness and caught in the political and sexual machinations of their elders.This is production that builds, from a slightly underpowered first half to an emotionally overwhelming dénouement. During the first Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Although everyone agrees that Sarah Kane was one of the most influential British playwrights of the 1990s, revivals of her work have been few and far between. Now, at last, some 17 years after her suicide at the age of 28 in 1999, our flagship National Theatre has finally decided to stage one of her best works (artistic director Rufus Norris, thank you). But although she became infamous for the media-fuelled scandal and atrocity-fest aspects of her work, subsequent reconsideration suggests that her main theme was nothing less than romantic love. Now revived by star director Katie Mitchell ( Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Given that Edmond Rostand’s 1897 tragicomic verse play Cyrano de Bergerac gave the word "panache" to the English language, it’s an irony that panache is the quality most woefully lacking in Russell Bolam’s production of Glyn Maxwell’s adaptation. It ought not to be so. With its all-female cast and stripped-down staging, it ought to feel radical and fresh, stimulating new lines of enquiry into the nature of role-play and what constitutes maleness and male heroism, shedding new light on a familiar text.The story of Cyrano de Bergerac, the soldier-poet who selflessly uses his literary gift to Read more ...
Anthony Weigh
In the icy early hours of 1 February 1918 a bizarre figure was seen wandering aimlessly along the platform of a railway station in Lyon. A solider. Lost. When asked his name he answered, “Anthelme Mangin”. Other than that he had no memory of who he was, of where he had been, of where he was going, or of what had happened to him prior to arriving on that station platform on that frigid February night.The story of Anthelme Mangin captivated France. For many he was the living embodiment of the unknown soldier buried beneath the Arc de Triomphe. A walking, talking memorial to the horrors of the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Eimear McBride’s debut novel, the provocatively titled A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, won the first Goldsmiths Prize in 2013, as well as the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction a year later. This phenomenal book, which was written when McBride was 27 years old, but took nine years to find a publisher, has been adapted by Annie Ryan and is performed solo by Aoife Duffin with a compelling mix of bruised charm and sheer intensity. Having opened at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 2014, then wowed the Edinburgh Festival last year, it now visits London as part of a nationwide tour. Can it grip Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Actor and director Simon McBurney’s one-man Complicite show has arrived in London after gathering plaudits in Edinburgh and elsewhere last year – before setting off again on a nationwide and European tour. It’s the story of a much more adventurous journey, which took place in 1969 when Loren McIntyre, a photographer for National Geographic magazine, got lost in the Amazonian rainforest while seeking the Mayoruna tribe, the “cat people”. Although he made contact with them, he found himself suddenly completely dependent on their good will.It’s a situation that immediately suggests the question Read more ...
Marianka Swain
War bad, theatre good. That’s about the level of insight available from this amiable show, transferring after a successful run in Bath. It’s one of the weaker entries in the ever-popular backstage genre, sharing Vaudevillian DNA with Gypsy and a Nazi backdrop with Cabaret, but lacking the profundity of either. Though our girls bare all to stick it to Hitler, the drama remains skin-deep.In this love letter to showbusiness, wealthy widow Mrs Henderson (Tracie Bennett) is the evangelical late convert, who decides on a whim to buy the Windmill Theatre rather than invest in a donkey sanctuary: “ Read more ...