Theatre
Mert Dilek
Few would have imagined that Kenneth Branagh’s return to the West End would see him garbed in fur-lined, prehistoric clothes. But this is how he takes on the gargantuan role of King Lear, in a compact, fast-paced production of Shakespeare’s great tragedy featuring a cast of RADA graduates and directed by himself.Branagh not only distils the play to an intermissionless two hours, but also sets it in a neolithic period of sticks, stones, and spears, where Lear’s tale of psychic and political dispossession gains a timeless aura. Jon Bausor’s set is surrounded by a Stonehenge-like series of Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The day after I saw the show, as went about the mundanities of domestic life, I wondered how long it would take to come across a reference to 1984. My best bet was listening to an LBC phone-in concerning next week’s conference at Bletchley Park on Artificial Intelligence, but the advertising break intervened, so I switched to Times Radio. Sure enough, at 12.11pm in a report on an apology issued by the Cabinet Office to journalist, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Big Brother Watch was mentioned as the organisation that animated the complaint. It was not felt necessary to explain much about its purpose Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A dystopian present. Sirens ring out across the city. Firefighters rush to the wrong locations. A man insists on entry to a big house. He’s not selling anything, so he can’t be an arsonist can he? His friend turns up and she’s pretty upfront about her intentions – and the barrels of petrol in the attic rather give the game away. But the wealthy homeowner, so ruthless at work, is so polite at home, the coming conflagration all but accepted as a matter of… manners, social convention, apathy?Max Frisch’s 1950s play started as a radio production that has moved to theatres around the world, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
We’ve all heard of the male gaze, but what about its subversion? Overturning masculine dominance is one of the themes of Boy Parts, the acclaimed debut novel by Eliza Clark, first published in 2020 and now adapted as a monologue for the stage by Gillian Greer.Playing in the main space at the Soho Theatre (currently also expanding into Walthamstow) and co-produced with Metal Rabbit, both great advocates of the capital’s new writing, this psychological thriller features Aimée Kelly and raises some disturbing questions about gender stereotypes and the relationship between art and life.The story Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There’s an old-fashioned feel to the story at its outset: Young woman, guitar in hand, Northern accent announcing as much as it always did, who makes a new life in London, all the money going on a room in Camden. One recalls Georgy Girl or Darling, films that were very much of their time. But it's safe to say that, even if you missed the extensive trigger warnings on the way into the Southwark Playhouse auditorium, a volume of swear words to give a Tory backbencher pause is enough to tell you that this show is very much 2023. Maimuna Memon’s song cycle is a deeply personal story of Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Lynn Nottage’s second London opening this year, the Donmar premiere of Clyde’s, is a comedy about a sandwich, the perfect sandwich. With just a little more punch to the plotting it would be another masterwork from this award-winning American playwright whose book for the musical MJ arrives on the West End next spring.Ebullient truckstop owner Clyde (Gbemisola Ikemulo, pictured below, left) takes on ex-cons as workers. This entraps them from the off: nobody else will be in a hurry to hire them, so Clyde is free to exploit and harangue them and generally make their iives tense. She does Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Penelope Skinner’s new play is one of the most eccentric things I’ve seen in a long time. It’s undoubtedly entertaining, with an engagingly bonkers attempt by Kristin Scott Thomas to navigate an almost impossible role, perched between victim, diva and madwoman, equally reminsicent of Norma Desmond and one of the posh recluses from Grey Gardens. But tonally it’s exasperating, undecided whether it wants to be a #MeToo drama, a Tennessee Williams-infused tragedy, a fable, or comedy, with one moment that is literally trousers-round-your ankles farce. And its message is depressingly Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
How to describe Alexander Zeldin’s latest, The Confessions? It is almost a kitchen-sink drama, but also a picaresque trawl through the life of an Australian woman that’s verging on epic, spanning most of her 80 years. And it’s stirring stuff, alternately enraging, sad and very funny. The woman is called Alice, and what we see are her adventures in the unliberated Oz of the late 20th century. As the older Alice, played by Amelda Brown, she addresses the audience directly with the house lights up, a tentative, slightly flustered woman who assures us she isn’t at all interesting. Then she Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It was interesting, in the same week that the England football team trounced Italy 3-1 in a Euros qualifier, to see Dear England again, the National Theatre smash that has just embarked on a West End run at the Prince Edward Theatre.One of the three goals was a penalty scored by captain Harry Kane. England manager Gareth Southgate’s task of fixing the England team's woeful record on that score seems to be complete: England have overcome their fear of penalties. No England fan would be that confident, however, and James Graham’s play, among other things, spells out why. Buried under all Read more ...
Jane Edwardes
In 1994, the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin commissioned Marina Carr to write a play to celebrate its centenary. She walked the wards, met the new mothers, and wrote in a hospital study.Who knows what the commissioners were expecting, maybe something more upbeat, but what they got was a harrowing portrait of a young mother in the grip of depression. It came to the Royal Court in 1996 when Irish playwrights were all the rage. Nowadays, it’s the Irish novelists and not the playwrights that make the headlines.The main character is called Portia and she lives in Belmont, but that’s where Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A flea bites a rat which spooks a horse which kicks a man and… an empire falls?James Fritz has won writing awards already in his developing career, but he has set himself quite the challenge to weave a thread that can bear that narrative weight. Two and a half hours later in this retelling of the late 19th-century Cleveland Street scandal, the empire survives, the fall guy takes the inevitable tumble and we’re a little punchdrunk. Here is a play that beats you up with its sheer volume of artistic choices but also dips into stretches of unnecessary exposition that drain energy away: there’s a Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Mustapha Matura’s 1981 play, Meetings, is still a knockout. Supply the characters with mobile phones and it could be set in the present day. What makes it topical is the central issue it chews on: is the modern world all it’s cracked up to be, or is progress a toxic brand? Jean, an advertising executive who loves all things contemporary, including fast food, is married to a businessman, Hugh, who is increasingly hankering for the tastes of his youth – swordfish in yellow gravy, okra and rice, manicou, that kind of thing. The culinary quest that begins in their snazzy Trinidad Read more ...