Theatre
aleks.sierz
Is this an angry island? Although the British national character (if there is such a thing) has traditionally been one of reserve, repression and restraint, more recently it has become increasing passionate and full of anger. More a clenched fist shaken in loud defiance, than a teacup raised in mild annoyance. Brexit hasn't helped. It really hasn't. In this new monologue, co-written by Roy Williams and Clint Dyer, the fury of the white working-class man is articulated in rare blaze of insight – like a bulldog caught in oncoming headlights. Staged at the National Theatre, drama's central forum Read more ...
Marianka Swain
With counter-terrorism an urgent concern – and specifically how best to find, track and use the data of suspected threats, without sacrificing our privacy and civil liberties – it’s excellent timing for a meaty drama about the surveillance state. And the second half of this debut full-length stage work from Al Blyth, helmed by Hampstead AD Roxanna Silbert, comes excitingly close to being that play for today.However, you do have to wade through an overlong first half which, unfortunately, trips into every genre cliché going. The GCHQ computer whizzes who supply the security services with Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's not been three years since Albion premiered at the Almeida Theatre, since which time Brexit has happened and, not without coincidence, Mike Bartlett's time-specific play is beginning to look like one for the ages. Set amongst a community in physical and psychic limbo, Bartlett takes the pulse of a people, and a nation, at odds with themselves. But whereas a lesser writer might opt for a harangue, Bartlett's tone (and the play's four-act structure, too) owes not a little to Chekhov, albeit here inflected with occasional dollops of Arcadia as befits a play set in a vast expanse Read more ...
Guy Oddy
In a world where the contentious report of a young English woman gang raped by teenage boys in Cyprus last year continues to make headlines, Asking For It is more than relevant. Such scenarios are by no means new but are once again making news. The play itself is an adaptation by Meadhbh McHugh of Irish writer Louise O’Neill’s young adult novel from 2015, and tackles issues of sexual consent in the social media era head-on, in a way that has no truck with the usual, tired stereotypes that usually frame such tales. That the UK debut of this breath-taking and award-winning piece Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” Director Richard Jones has certainly taken Beckett’s words to heart in this vividly comic, star-cast Old Vic double bill, pairing Endgame with a lesser-known short play – which acts as a sort of stylistic and thematic amuse bouche. The result is a richly engaging evening, though one that skirts real profundity.We open with Beckett’s Rough for Theatre II, a half-hour vaudevillian sketch in which two dark-suited, bureaucratic colleagues (Alan Cumming and Daniel Radcliffe, pictured below) discuss whether or not a man will commit suicide; echoes here of both Read more ...
David Nice
A work of genius isn't sacred, copyrighted territory. A great film may become a play, a novel a film; the adaptation shouldn't be about fidelity, as Elena Ferrante has written about the latter case, but down to to the director "to find...the language with which to get to the truth of his film from that of the book, to put them together without one ruining the other and dissipating its force". Stage genius Ivo van Hove managed it by pairing Ingmar Bergman's most talked-about film masterpiece, Persona, with a side-work, After the Rehearsal. Paul Schoolman kills it by being both too faithful and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
John Kani’s Kunene and the King is history in microcosm. Its premiere at the RSC last year, in this co-production with Cape Town’s Fugard Theatre, coincided with the 25th anniversary of the end of apartheid, offering a chance to assess the momentous changes in South African society over that time. But if that makes you expect any sort of public action on a grand scale, think again: this two-hander is a character study of two men, one white, one black, both in their own ways alone and pondering death, the details of whose lives gradually come to speak something, sotto-voce, about where Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Your sweet tooth can get you into trouble. Lots of trouble. In this revival of Lucy Prebble's provocative debut, first staged at the Royal Court in 2003, the metaphor of sugar, and of the powerful attractions of this drug-like substance – bad for you, but providing an instant hit – is explored through a disturbing story about paedophilia and the internet. Since writing this play, Prebble has gone on to create large-scale contemporary classics such as Enron and A Very Expensive Poison, but, with the exception of The Effect, none of her later plays match her first one for sheer emotional Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Changing the gender of the title character “highlights the way in which women still operate in a world designed by and for men,” argues Chris Bush, whose reimagining of Marlowe’s play premieres at the Lyric ahead of a UK tour. It’s certainly a compelling idea – albeit one already explored in previous productions like Pauline Randall’s 2018 gender-swapped Faustus at the Globe – but the resulting piece, though impassioned, is unfortunately rather a muddle.Johanna Faustus (Jodie McNee) is the epitome of powerless: a low-born, 17th-century woman whose apothecary father (Barnaby Power) crushes her Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Uncle Vanya must surely be the closest, the most essential of Chekhov’s plays, its cast – just four main players who are caught up in the drama's fraught emotional action, and four who are essentially supporting – a concentrated unit even by the playwright's lean standards. Its overlapping strands of unrequited love and desperate loneliness are tightly wound, so organically so that any single false note risks throwing the whole off balance. That’s never the case in director Ian Rickson’s exquisite production of this new adaptation by Conor McPherson, one which stretches the original in Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Cormac McCarthy’s two-hander, premiered at Chicago's mighty Steppenwolf Theatre in 2006, has by this point been everything short of an ice ballet: a self-described “novel in dramatic form”, as one might expect from the American author of such titles as All the Pretty Horses and The Road, followed by a film made for TV directed by, and starring, Tommy Lee Jones, opposite Samuel L Jackson.Its British premiere at the fledgling Boulevard Theatre represents a further audacious programming move by this new arrival to London’s array of venues but looks unlikely to reap the plaudits of its Read more ...
aleks.sierz
History plays should perform a delicate balancing act: they have to tell us something worth knowing about the past, that foreign country where they do things differently, and also something about our current preoccupations. Otherwise, what's the point? So the fact that playwright Lucy Kirkwood, whose Chimerica was a brilliant rocket that lit up the sky in 2013, has set her feminist play about women's bodies and experiences in the mid 18th century raises expectations that it will also say something about the #MeToo movement and our contemporary anxieties about gender issues. At first the Read more ...