Theatre
Matt Wolf
Adrian Lyne met controversy in the cinema with it head on, while Vladimir Nabokov's novel prompted one of the resounding Broadway flops of Edward Albee's stage career. (Trust me: I am among the few who caught its 1981 New York run.) So here is Lolita once more, this time filleted and distilled into a one-person show suspended somewhere between a stage reading and an actual play. Call it what you will, the result is mesmerising.By letting Nabokov's own sly, ever-shifting narrative voice do the talking, Richard Nelson's adaptation cuts to the quick in a way that the various other Lolitas simply Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Why do writers end up parodying themselves? The late Harold Pinter was a case in point: in the 1950s and 1960s, his voice was fresh, his pauses enigmatic and his style delivered the shock of the new. In the 1970s, he played imaginative games with theatre form; in the 1980s, he discovered politics. By the 1990s, his new plays seemed to be parodies of his own style. The dialogues were too Pinteresque, the pauses risible, the form contrived.
The latest victim of the same affliction is Mark Ravenhill, who leapt onto the scene in 1996 with his shock-fest debut, Shopping and F***ing, and Read more ...
Ismene Brown
With five first-magnitude stars in it you're expecting at least a five-star show from Eonnagata, the collaboration between ballerina Sylvie Guillem, theatre director Robert Lepage, choreographer Russell Maliphant, designer Alexander McQueen and lighting genius Michael Hulls - possibly even the Milky Way. But I can't divvy up more than two stars for the result. There is too much courteous mutual admiration going on to allow light to shine as theatre, with the exception of some of the last minutes of the 90, which are blindingly good and left me gnashing my teeth at what could have been Read more ...