Theatre
aleks.sierz
Middle-class family angst continues to be this season’s theme at the Royal Court Theatre, but this time it is seen through the eyes of 10-year-old girls at a 1990s boarding school. But don’t expect this to be an episode of Malory Towers or even the rather good-natured naughtiness of St Trinian’s. No, this is a bleak institution where the girls are foulmouthed and vicious in their rivalry. As Mrs B, who supervises the dorms, says to the headmistress: “They are small dogs doing what small dogs do.”Certainly, E V Crowe paints a vivid and atmospheric picture of this boarding school, with its Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Suicide, parricide and salivation!” Not the ecstasies of a masochist, but the mangled verbal fanfare announcing that The Rivals – Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s classic comedy of manners – is once again a fixture in London’s West End. When it comes to powerhouse comedic casting, the National Theatre has long had the laurels for 2010 sewn up in Simon Russell Beale’s voluminous britches. Partnered by Fiona Shaw in Dion Boucicault’s London Assurance, the pair were mighty indeed. Now, in the dying breaths of the year, we have Penelope Keith and Peter Bowles reunited in two much-beloved comedy roles Read more ...
David Nice
"Can't go on, ev'ry thing I had is gone". Hear Judy Garland deliver those lines from Arlen's "Stormy Weather" live at Carnegie Hall in 1961 and you'll know that no singer, not even Callas, could go further turning heartbreak into art and serving up the naked truth. I wasn't expecting this production of Peter Quilter's play, previously seen in Northampton, to do much more than echo your average queen's "such a tragic life" line, nor Tracie Bennett to go beyond a Star Impersonation. But after a first act of saying and doing theatre, the will-she-go-on nature of Judy's last appearances became Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Halvard Solness and Hilde Wangel have stalked each other among the shadow goblins of Henrik Ibsen’s extraordinary symbol-laden drama in two major productions this year. In Chichester, Philip Franks’s staging and David Edgar’s new version of the text gave us a shivery, haunted-house interpretation. Now comes American director Travis Preston’s modern-dress offering, starkly designed by Vicki Mortimer, but performed with such over-deliberate mannerism and stylised Expressionist movement by Stephen Dillane in the title role that it sometimes manages to be both po-faced and faintly ludicrous.The Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Just about the time you're losing patience with the Young Vic revival of Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie - wondering at some of the variable accents and directorial overembellishments and the heavy sledding accompanying this most fragile and beautiful of plays - along comes one of the great, prolonged encounters of all 20th-century drama: that between an emotionally indrawn, "crippled" (in more ways than one) young woman and the scarcely less damaged swain who all too briefly offers salvation in a natty suit. And suddenly, as another character in a later Williams play would go on to Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
For me there is a trinity of black musicians, visionaries who reshaped music in the last half-century: James Brown, Miles Davis and Fela Kuti. And just as it’s hard to imagine a biographical musical of James Brown or Miles Davis coming off - because which mere actor is ever going to have their charisma, attitude or moves - likewise it seemed a stretch to imagine Fela! being much more than sophisticated karaoke. Karaoke with a message and some groovy dancing, no doubt. But somehow this production pulled off the impossible. Near as dammit anyway.One immediate plus of the show, transferring from Read more ...
carole.woddis
It’s just the luck of the draw. I’ve been sent to prison twice now in the past four days. Last Friday it was Clean Break’s day-long six-play epic in Soho. Last night it was an 80-minute all-male affair at the Roundhouse. Needless to say the encounters were planets apart. Men, after all, come from Mars, already primed for battle, women from Venus. Philip Osment’s Inside, however, once again provides living proof of the absurdity of such simplistic, reductive analysis. People are people. Each individual has their own story to tell and is shaped by conditions and environment and what they have Read more ...
carole.woddis
Facts first. In the last decade the number of women in prison has increased by 60 per cent: 63 per cent are in prison for non-violent offences. Between 2002 and 2009 there were 55 self-inflicted deaths by women prisoners; in 2008, there were 12,938 reported incidents of self-harm. Goodness knows how many more went unreported. Too few plays reflecting the reality of women’s lives appear on our stages - only 17 per cent of productions in English theatre are by female playwrights.Into this gap, however, marches Clean Break, the theatre company founded more than 30 years ago by two women, Read more ...
carole.woddis
Last year Brian Friel became an octogenarian. Yet the Irish playwright who has been greeted by the English like no other has so far failed to have that fact either celebrated or acknowledged with a retrospective festival by theatre’s major shakers and movers. It’s been left to The Curve in Leicester (that remarkable glass-fronted, inside-out, state-of-the art high-tech new theatre designed by Uruguyan, American-based architect Rafael Viñoly) to take the initiative.Building on a tradition of featuring other Irish writers, its visionary and persistent artistic director Paul Kerryson (the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
London’s world-famous experimental pub-theatre has secured its future with a move into Shepherd’s Bush old library. Church and council permission were given yesterday for conversion of the library (owned by the Church of England) to be ready for curtain-up in 2011 when the lease on the Bush’s space in O’Neill’s pub, Shepherd’s Bush Green, expires.The theatre established links with the library last year when it set up a script library asking publishers to donate play texts - now running to hundreds of volumes. It’s taken 18 months of negotiating with Hammersmith and Fulham Council to find a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Directing an Oscar Wilde play is rather like being a chaperone at a party: at best you are invisible, at worst actively intrusive. Marshalling Wilde’s politicos, dandies and duchesses through this latest ball of An Ideal Husband, Lindsay Posner is quick to lose himself among the elegant riot of gilded sets and gorgeous dresses. Faithful to the letter (pink-papered, naturally), the production plays it straight, relying on the skills of a splendid cast to save it from straying into the limp pastiche of amateur dramatics.Weightier than either Lady Windermere’s Fan or A Woman of No Importance, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Few playwrights have been so successful at moulding our view of a nation as Athol Fugard. It’s impossible to think of South Africa, especially during the apartheid years, without thinking of his Sizwe Bansi is Dead, The Island or Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act. Since the end of the old regime in 1994, the moral fuel that powered his plays may have evaporated, but this new work, one of nine premiered by the 78-year-old author in the past 15 years, shows that his feeling for stagecraft and his concern for human dignity remain undiminished.Opening with the narrator, Simon, a Read more ...