Theatre
Matt Wolf
18 months or so after it opened in Chichester, Flowers for Mrs Harris launches a sequence of streamed productions from the West Sussex venue just in time to allow a new British musical to join the ever-swelling ranks of theatrical offerings online. This stage adaptation of the 1958 novel by Paul Gallico, directed by Daniel Evans, who brought the title along from his previous tenure running the Crucible, Sheffield, may be a show that really benefits from what advantages there are to experiencing theatre in this way.For starters, one can really zoom in on (you’ll forgive the choice of verb) Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The National Theatre’s online broadcasts got off to a storming start with One Man, Two Guvnors – watched by over 2.5 million people, either on the night or in the week since its live streaming, and raising around £66,000 in donations. Let’s hope that engagement continues with their next offering: Sally Cookson’s dynamic adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s novel, a Bristol Old Vic and National Theatre co-production which also toured the UK.Cookson’s devised work blows past the problems associated with transferring literature to stage. There is nothing stuffy or static about her version; on the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
She’s an ordinary young woman, and she really doesn’t know what to think. After all, things are way out of control. She knows that the natural world is pretty fucked, and that nothing grows in the earth any more — well, at least not on her patch. She knows that the gators, the semi-aquatic reptiles that used to live in swamps, have now taken to strolling through cities. And that they fall in love with humans, and serenade them, and feel bad when they are rejected. She also knows that there are codes of behaviour — ways of doing things in everyday life that are right, and those that are wrong Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The talk is of an “economy in ruin [with] unemployment through the roof”: a précis of Britain in lockdown? In fact, this is one of the many eerily apposite remarks to be found in Wonderland, the Beth Steel drama set in the early 1980s that marks the second in the Hampstead Theatre’s sequence of three productions streamed across as many weeks: Howard Brenton’s Drawing the Line comes next, and last.And what a pleasure it is to be reacquainted with the muscular drama – the author’s second-ever play – that brought Steel a 2014 Evening Standard Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright. The Read more ...
Matt Wolf
One of the most blistering stage performances in recent memory gets a renewed lease on life with the streaming of the 2019 screen version, aired last autumn on BBC Four, of Cyprus Avenue, the David Ireland play in which Stephen Rea unravels to memorable and merciless effect.A co-production between Dublin’s Abbey Theatre and the Royal Court (and seen later at New York’s Public Theatre), Ireland’s depiction of a mind in meltdown was a galvanic experience within the intimate confines of the Court’s tiny Theatre Upstairs almost exactly four years ago. The Court’s artistic director Vicky Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Artemisia Gentileschi has definitely had a hard time. Although she was an outstanding Renaissance painter in the style of Caravaggio, and the first woman to become a member of Florence’s Accademia di Arte del Disegno, her work was attributed to her father Orazio for centuries. Since she was rediscovered by feminist art critics in the 1970s, interest in her life and work has increased, but sadly the first major exhibition of her paintings in the UK, at the National Gallery, has had to be postponed because of the coronavirus. For the same reason, Breach Theatre’s drama about her was cancelled, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Armchair theatre-lovers rejoice. During the lockdown, the National Theatre is streaming a selection of its past hits for free for one week at a time. These shows, originally filmed as part of the flagship’s NT Live project (which broadcast beautifully produced recordings of shows to local cinemas nationwide and abroad), are now available on its YouTube channel. The first is Richard Bean’s gloriously silly farce, One Man, Two Guvnors, starring the irrepressible and Tony-award winning James Corden.Based on Carlo Goldoni’s 1746 Commedia dell’Arte classic, The Servant of Two Masters, Bean’s Read more ...
Matt Wolf
“The whole world is just tilting at the moment,” we’re told near the end of Wild, the Mike Bartlett play from summer 2016 that is available (through Sunday) online to help get us through these wild times right now. The first of three Hampstead Theatre titles, each one streaming online for a week (Beth Steel’s prize-winning Wonderland is next), Wild surely contains the most directly pertinent physical scenario to our own upended society in its story of a 28-year-old American, Andrew (a sympathetic Jack Farthing, pictured below), experiencing the equivalent of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
With everyone in lockdown, observing physical if not social distancing, a story about isolation can have a particular resonance. And there are few places in the UK that are as isolated as some parts of the Scottish Highlands. Ali Milles’s tartan gothic thriller, The Croft, is partly a study of the advantages and disadvantages of living in a remote location, and partly a more speculative and suggestive account of how family tragedy repeats itself down the generations. This staging, an Original Theatre production, was touring the UK until the lockdown happened, and this hastily filmed recording Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
“Whipped cream with knives” is how Harold Prince, who directed the Broadway premiere of A Little Night Music in 1973, famously described this particular Sondheim show. And nowhere is that borne out with more exquisite agony than in this duet between two unhappily married women. With a book by Hugh Wheeler, the musical, based on Ingmar Bergman’s 1955 film Smiles of a Summer Night, is about the pain, ecstasy and killing disappointments of life, love and desire.Set in Sweden around 1900 and composed largely in waltz time, it’s ravishing and cruel, hearts breaking beneath starched shirt fronts, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Ever since I heard the quintessential prog rock group The Nice do a psychedelic instrumental version of “America” in 1968, I have loved this song. Later on, I was better able to appreciate Sondheim’s lyrics, whose satirical sharpness and superb inventiveness make this the definitive song about migration. Written for Leonard Bernstein’s musical West Side Story (1957), at a time when Sondheim had never written a Broadway show of his own, it was, lyrically speaking, a fabulous debut. Robert Wise’s 1961 film version, currently available on Netflix, is likewise a great revision of the original. ( Read more ...
graham.rickson
Along with many others, my first exposure to Stephen Sondheim’s art was through watching the film of Bernstein’s West Side Story as a child. The song which still floors me is the Quintet near the end of Act 1. Bernstein’s ecstatic, dynamic music is splendid in itself, but the number’s perfection is sealed by Sondheim’s lyrics, each character distinctly voiced, the rhythms and rhymes flawless. “Sperm to worm,” still makes me grin. That ability to articulate different voices, to overlay disparate musical styles is a trademark. Think of the long opening sequence from Into the Woods, Read more ...