About a year ago, director Rebecca Frecknall electrified this venue with an award-winning revival of Tennessee Williams's Summer and Smoke, rescuing the play from obscurity and showcasing the star qualities of actor Patsy Ferran. Now Frecknall and Ferran take on a much less obscure drama, Anton Chekhov's 1901 classic Three Sisters, which has been newly adapted by Cordelia Lynn, a young Royal Court playwright whose previous work includes the very impressive Lela & Co and One for Sorrow. But can this dream team adequately reveal the psychological richness of Chekhov’s masterpiece?Having Read more ...

Just when you think you may have heard (and seen) enough of Donald J Trump to last a lifetime, along comes Anne Washburn's ceaselessly smart and tantalising Shipwreck to focus renewed attention on the psychic fallout left by 45. How did we get here from there? Washburn certainly brushes up against the topic that animated a recent, similarly Trump-inflected play, Sweat. But Washburn's purposefully baggy, shape-shifting play resists categorisation at every turn: equal measures history play, polemic, and generational saga, Shipwreck confounds expectation and may at times confound an Read more ...

Will pride of place amongst theatre productions every year go in perpetuity to the work of Stephen Sondheim? One might be tempted to think so given the preeminence during 2017 of Dominic Cooke's breathtaking revival of Follies (due back in the National Theatre repertoire from February) and the equal strength of this year's musical theatre reclamation of choice, Company, the Sondheim title that immediately preceded Follies on Broadway. The chance before long to see these two stagings back-to-back is enough to make any theatre lover's heart skip a beat even as a glance back at 2018 finds Read more ...

Joe Hill-Gibbins’ uncompromising production of The Tragedy of Richard II hurtles through Shakespeare’s original text, stripping and flaying it so it is revealed in a new shuddering light. Narcissistic, petulant and indecisive, Simon Russell Beale’s Richard stumbles towards his downfall in a prison cell in which it is never clear what’s a figment of his paranoid imagination and what’s reality. Under Rupert Goold’s artistic directorship the Almeida has become renowned as a theatre where classical texts are given the equivalent of ECT, and Hill-Gibbins quickly sets out his intentions Read more ...

Beware the smile that Edward Hogg wears like a shield in the opening scenes of The Wild Duck, the Ibsen play refashioned into the most scalding production in many a year by Robert Icke, here in career-surpassing form. Playing James Ekdal, the photographer previously known as Hjalmar, Hogg disarms you from the outset with a bonhomie just waiting to snap. By the play's end, there's precious little evidence of mirth given the cumulative wreckage on view: building upon his forays into Shakespeare, Schiller, Chekhov, and the Greeks, Icke propels Ibsen's 1884 text straight into the heart of Read more ...

Lycra, jealousy and pubescent ambition are put under the spotlight in Clare Barron’s provocative probe into the American competitive dancing scene. Dance Nation is a tarantella through the convulsions of the teen psyche as its characters respond to the psychological and physical pressures of ambitious parents circling like piranhas, and a dance teacher (Pat) with a dictator complex."This is the future! I am making the future!! We’re gonna make those judges feel something in their cold, dead, pernicious hearts!" Pat bellows early on. Like brainwashed cult devotees his 13-year-old pupils jerk Read more ...

Theatre critics tend not to experience an 140 percent increase in their financial assets within 21 minutes. So on that remarkable front alone, the London premiere of the Belgian £¥€$ (LIES) is giddily immersive fun, at least up until such time as the Ontroerend Goed production shifts gears and sends the financial world, and our momentary prosperity, crashing down. Staged within an Almeida Theatre transformed for the occasion to accommodate gambling tables instead of rows of seats, the show is certainly cheaper than a trip to Vegas and contains a lot more cautionary oomph. By their Read more ...

The American playwright/journalist Sophie Treadwell's 1928 expressionist drama crops up every so often in order to allow a director to leave his or her signature upon it, so the first thing to be said about Natalie Abrahami's Almeida Theatre revival of Machinal is that it puts the play and not the production first.Whether that is entirely beneficial is open for debate, given the jagged, staccato nature of writing that amounts to a sequence of extended snapshots from an Everywoman's descent into a gathering darkness that by play's end has all but swallowed her whole. Viewed up close, as it Read more ...

Forget write what you know: writing what you feel would seem to be the impetus driving Ella Hickson's often-startling The Writer, a broadside from the trenches that takes no prisoners, least of all the audience. Demanding and sometimes irritating, the play exerts a brute force across nearly two hours (no interval) thanks to a galvanic performance from Romola Garai and an impassioned production from Blanche McIntyre that powers through remarks like "you are not skewed toward a systemic awareness" (!). If comparable talk of "intersectionality and voicelessness" leaves you numb, The Read more ...

That this 1948 Tennessee Williams play is rarely performed seems nothing short of a travesty, thanks to the awe-inspiring case made for it by Rebecca Frecknall’s exquisite Almeida production. Aided by the skyrocketing Patsy Ferran, it also makes a case for director Frecknall as a luminous rising talent in British theatre.During a long, hot summer in early 20th century, small-town Mississippi, minister’s daughter Alma (Patsy Ferran, pictured below) – whose name means “soul” in Spanish – yearns hopelessly for the boy next door: dissolute doctor’s son John (Matthew Needham), who believes Read more ...

Year-end wrap-ups function as both remembrances of things past and time capsules, attempts to preserve an experience to which audiences, for the most part, have said farewell. (It's different, of course, for films, which remain available to us forever.) How fitting, then, that pride of place for the year just gone should be saved for the National Theatre's shimmering revival of Follies, the 1971 Stephen Sondheim/James Goldman musical about the very act of letting go, served up in a production from the astonishing Dominic Cooke, whose 2016 NT revival of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom led my line-up Read more ...

Director Richard Jones watched all 156 episodes of The Twilight Zone as research for this Almeida production. I've never seen a single one, to the amazement of the American fan on the tube home who saw me reading the programme and, having grown up with the TV series in the early 1960s, told me a lot more about the skill of creator/scriptwriter Rod Serling and which instalments I should seek out. I shall now.The question why may trouble all but diehard enthusiasts as the opening actions unfold and intertwine, but by the end of this giddying evening Twilight Zone virgins may feel they've been Read more ...