Theatre
Marianka Swain
A musical featuring two people who are physically separated? Jason Robert Brown’s work is a shutdown natural – as this new digital theatre version demonstrates. Lauren Samuels and Danny Becker, who play doomed lovers Cathy and Jamie, recorded their parts entirely in isolation, with Samuels (previously starring as Cathy in 2011 at Chiswick Playhouse) also directing.The result is a piece that firmly retains its theatrical DNA – in contrast to the Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan-starring movie adaptation, which changed up the format to have the characters sharing space. Of course, current social Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Might we be nearing light at the end of the lockdown tunnel? It definitely seems that way, with the news in recent days that social life beyond the home may be resuming soon, at least after a fashion. All the while, theatrical offerings continue to come thick and fast, all the while offering up a cheeringly broad away of online prospects. This week's quintet includes a piece of installation art that you are encouraged to experience lying flat on your back, alongside an acclaimed Shakespeare extravaganza from just last year that many at the time experienced on their feet. We've got something Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Ian Holm was once in his local cinema on High Street Kensington, enquiring at the ticket office about concessions for people who appeared in the film they wished to see. The unlucky vendor failed to make the connection between the short customer with full beard and the clean-shaven priest in the sci-fi caper showing on Screen Four upstairs. He had to make an internal call to the manager. "There's someone here who says he's in The Fifth Element. Wants a discount." "Oh yeah. What's his name then?" "Ian Holm." "Ian Holm!"Holm, who has died at the age of 88, became a prolific screen actor partly Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
A British-Jamaican man is confused. It's the Second World War, and he signed up for the RAF on the understanding that he would serve as a pilot overseas. But instead he's ended up as ground crew in a grey Lincolnshire village. "You are overseas, aren't you?" sneers his sergeant. That question – of how great the distance between Jamaica and Britain was and is – lies at the heart of Small Island, Rufus Norris's epic, big-hearted production of Andrea Levy's 2004 ode to the Windrush generation, adapted for the stage by Helen Edmundson. It's also one of the reasons that the National Theatre Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As lockdown continues, National Theatre at Home has announced its final sequence of plays, and several of the very best are being saved for last. That certainly applies to this week's offering, Small Island, whose dissection of Britain's racist past couldn't be timelier. Broadway's Lincoln Center Theater, meanwhile, mined a bygone theatrical period in the comparably epic Act One, whilst the week's offerings also accommodate in-the-moment protest theatre, an acclaimed West African Hamlet, and a recent Olivier Award-winning actor playing a peacock, as you do. For more on the latest amalgam of Read more ...
Heather Neill
What could be better for a lockdown summer night "out" than a virtual visit to Shakespeare's Globe? Simultaneously in a theatre and the open air, we can share the visible enjoyment of hundreds of others, the very opposite of self-isolation and social distancing. And this Elizabethan-dress production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by Dominic Dromgoole in 2013, exploits the unique qualities of the Globe to the full. The cast, led by its present artistic director, Michelle Terry, as Titania/Hippolyta and John Light as Oberon/Theseus with Pearce Quigley as a hilariously bossy, attention- Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It has been the fate of George III – who on many levels was a visionary and accomplished monarch – to go down in history as a comic figure, most famed for losing first America and then his mind. This Nottingham Playhouse production tells his story with all the wit and elegance of a tune played on a harpsichord, yet it is made remarkable by the way in which it simultaneously excavates the pain and pathos underlying his condition.That is due not least to an extraordinary performance from Mark Gatiss in the title role. Gatiss arrives in this production on the wings of a prolific and varied TV Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The government may occupy shifting sands when it comes to handling Covid-19, but the arts thank heavens continue to step up to the plate with a dizzying array of online options. This week's output mixes a soul musical from 1970s Broadway alongside a major revival of a play by Alan Bennett whose enquiry into the psychological well-being of those in charge will doubtless resonate anew today.Not to be forgotten is a tiny west London venue that consistently punches above its weight, alongside a slice of something more radical coming soon to a continent near you. This quartet represents just the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
If any musical can live up to this title in these troubled times, it must be this show from Graeae, a theatre company whose mission is to champion the work of Deaf and disabled artists. Founded in 1980, its name alludes to the three sisters of Greek myth who shared one eye and one tooth between them, and since 1997 Jenny Sealey MBE has been its artistic director, and the company has embraced both plays about different kinds of disability and given new resonance to other work, such as revivals of classics.Graeae’s shows are always captioned and signed, which as well as being inclusive, also Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
An arrogant leader contemptuous of his people. Could there be a more perfect timing for Josie Rourke’s taut, visceral production of Coriolanus? As opinion polls reveal that following Cummings’ flit to Durham, trust in the government has nose-dived to 39%, it seems apt to revive a production that shows what happens when the apparent merits of one individual are trumped over accountability to voters. Yet it’s also, of course, a demonstration that one factor that defines a classic is its ability to reflect different tensions at different times. Tom Hiddleston’s scornful, muscular Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As we continue into a third month in lockdown, the arts continue to suggest ever-changing worlds beyond. The invaluable National Theatre at Home this week looks across the Thames to a smaller venue's large-scale Coriolanus, starring a certain superhero movie icon, whilst the equally cherished Graeae streams their lively musical theatre tribute to the late Ian Dury. Beauty and the Beast, from a Chichester ensemble of young people, reminds us of the durability of that tale as old as time, even as The Shows Must Go On continues to look beyond Andrew Lloyd Webber to other musical mainstays, this Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
There is a line of argument that – unfairly – blames playwright James Graham for Dominic Cummings. Would Cummings, some might ask, have achieved the influence he has now if it hadn’t been for his depiction in Graham’s brilliant TV drama Brexit: The Uncivil War in which he was played as an obsessive genius by Benedict Cumberbatch? The question’s unfair not least because Graham himself is horrified by the phenomenon of Cummings-driven politics and all it represents. A more interesting question is how a then 36-year-old had the insight to identify the impact and ascendancy of a Read more ...