Edwardian
Gary Naylor
We’re in (pretty much literally so in this most intimate of venues) an Edwardian sitting room, time hanging heavily in the air, gentility almost visibly fading before our eyes. Two sisters (young, educated, attractive) bicker with each other. But for the pre-World War One era, they are not young, educated or attractive enough to acquire a gentleman for a husband, their only route out of a long, slow future of the same day repeating for decades. Things might change if the flirtations of man-on-the-make, Mr Smythe, can be converted into something more substantive.Staged in London for the first Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
They say "never meet your heroes". That may be true, but it forms the premise of a new TV drama concerning two of the world’s most famous children’s authors – Beatrix Potter and Roald Dahl – who encounter each other at opposite ends of their life. Dahl has made headlines in recent weeks with his estate apologising for his antisemitic views, most famously, "there is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity”. The family have quietly expressed regret on their website. Like it or not, it casts a shadow over David Kerr’s drama which sees Dahl as a young boy (Harry Tayler) Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
With over one hundred books to her name and several hugely popular TV spin-offs, including the Tracy Beaker adventures, Jacqueline Wilson takes a no-nonsense approach to children’s fiction that reflects the realities of jigsaw families, mental and divorce. In 2012, in something of a detour from the rest of her work, she wrote a sequel of sorts to E. Nesbit’s beloved magical children’s classic, Five Children and It. Nesbit’s book has been adapted a myriad of times, including the charming 1990s BBC version and the less successful 2004 take with Eddie Izzard. It’s a familiar Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It’s been 15 years since Cameron Mackintosh’s stage musical version of P. L. Travers’ Mary Poppins made its West End debut. Now, the magical nanny returns to the Prince Edward Theatre, with Zizi Strallen (who also headlined the UK tour) succeeding her sister Scarlett in the title role – all set to capitalise on the recent Emily Blunt-starring film sequel renewing our interest in the adventures of the Banks family.“I fear what’s to happen all happened before,” muses Charlie Stemp’s Bert at the start of the show. Well, yes and no. Fans of the original movie should be warned that the Disney Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Githa Sowerby is the go-to playwright if you want a feminist slant on patriarchy in the industrial north in Edwardian times. Her 1912 classic, Rutherford and Son, has been regularly revived over the past 30 years, and now the National Theatreis staging it yet again, this time with the ever likeable Roger Allam in the title role. We know that he's a commanding actor and that this traditional three-act play has a lot to say about fathers and families, but can director Polly Findlay give this old tale of a domineering capitalist and rebellious children a contemporary twist? From the first, Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
If this play really were “A Debate in One Sitting” as its author called it in 1909, it would have sunk without trace. “Talk, talk, talk, talk”, complains Hypatia Tarleton (Marli Siu), daughter of an Edwardian underwear magnate. Sick to death of the menfolk talking at her and over her, she longs to be “an active verb”, and we sympathise. One expects loquacity in a Bernard Shaw play but in Misalliance the ideas tumble forth like a river breaking its banks: the evils of Empire and British class snobbery; the benefits of socialism, feminism, physical exercise, free libraries and frank Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Even by the standards of theatrical archaeology that the Finborough has made its own, The Passing of the Third Floor Back is a curiosity. Jerome K Jerome’s 1908 play was a long-running hit in the West End – with Johnston Forbes-Robertson, one of the leading English classical actors of his day, in the lead – before transferring to Broadway for a year. The author termed it an “idle fancy”, though there’s nothing at all here of the indolent comedy of the work for which he remains far and away best know, Three Men in a Boat.Instead Jerome charts a determined course from comedy of a rather bitter Read more ...
Jasper Rees
George Stiles and Anthony Drewe – Stiles and Drewe, as the songwriting partnership is universally known – are responsible for one of theatre’s most memorable acceptance speeches. Their show Honk!, staged at the National Theatre after an initial run in Scarborough, won the Olivier for best musical in 2000. Among the defeated musicals was Disney’s all-conquering juggernaut also featuring a menagerie of animals. A shocked Drewe said, “I guess the judges couldn’t get tickets for The Lion King.”Their extraordinarily prolific partnership has lasted nearly three and a half decades. It began when, as Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Graeme Murphy's 2002 Swan Lake for Australian Ballet stitches together plot elements from Swan Lake, Giselle and Lucia di Lammermoor, among other things. No bad thing, that; such mash-ups can work well (see Moulin Rouge), and Matthew Bourne proved way back in 1995 that Swan Lake's story can be totally reconfigured and still work gloriously (we do not talk about the 2011 film Black Swan). But last night's peformance at the Coliseum places Murphy's work for me in the category of might-have-been; lacking either Bourne's mastery of storytelling or Moulin Rouge's campy extravagance, his Swan Lake Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It has taken six years – and Michael Crawford – to bring Richard Taylor and David Wood’s poetic musicalisation of LP Hartley’s The Go-Between to the West End stage. And before the tired old debate begins as to what it is – opera? musical? play with music? – let it be said that what really counts for something here is the storytelling.Richard Taylor is a composer who loves the music of words almost as much as he loves music itself. He finds in them a songfulness, an expression, that is all about blurring the boundaries between speech and song. It isn’t important to him when someone sings but Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
It shows you just how much Kenneth MacMillan changed ballet in this country that 1960's The Invitation, with its onstage rape, sexual grooming and child abuse, can act as the reassuring classic at the heart of the new Royal Ballet triple bill which opened on Saturday. The Invitation should be – and is – a shocking piece, but when bracketed by Wayne McGregor's brand new Obsidian Tear and Christopher Wheeldon's 2012 Within the Golden Hour, two particularly vapid examples of contemporary ballet, MacMillan's ballet de moeurs, for all its darkness, has a comforting solidity. It reassures us that Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
When English National Ballet premiered Lest We Forget in April last year, to enthusiastic reviews, they were ahead of the pack with First World War commemoration, and the ambitious modern programme was the first sign of Tamara Rojo's determination to make the company's repertoire more contemporary. But in the intervening 18 months there have been war-themed ballet programmes aplenty, and we have all got used to the sense of dynamism that swirls around ENB under Rojo's leadership. Stripped of these mitigating factors, last night's revival at Sadler's Wells was a chance for the three pieces ( Read more ...