medical
Gary Naylor
There are many women whose outstanding science was attributed to men or simply devalued to the point of obscurity, but recent interest in the likes of DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin and NASA’s Katherine Johnson has given credit where credit is due. Marie Curie was never diminished, the woman with two Nobel prizes and the discoveries of radium and polonium on her CV needs no such championing, a figure known by schoolchildren the world over. And yet there’s something that stirs in the back of the mind, something that complicates a story of stunning success often against the odds. When the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We open on one of those grim, grim training rooms that all offices have – the apologetic sofa, the single electric kettle, the instant coffee. The lighting is too harsh, the chairs too hard, the atmosphere already post-lunch on Wednesday and it’s only 10am on Monday. We’ve all been there – designer, Rosie Elnile certainly has. Where we haven’t been is a war zone which is where our keen, but wary trio, marshalled by a slightly on-edge facilitator are heading. It’s a Médecins Sans Frontières type NGO doing good work within a White Saviour framework, somewhere in the Arabic- Read more ...
Paul Jesson
In September 2022 I had an email from my American friend Richard Nelson: "Would you like me to write you a play?" Such an offer probably comes the way of very few actors and I was bowled over by it. My astonished and grateful response was tempered with a little uncertainty.I didn't want it to be too much about my illness, and Richard assured me it would also be about many other things. He said, "I'll send you something." Two days later an attachment arrived which I thought would be a couple of pages of ideas or an outline. It was a 42-page script.Richard and I first met in 1990 at the RSC in Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It takes a talented comic to turn a horrible life experience into comedy, but Miles Jupp is nothing if not talented. Add in a bit of self-depreciation, a smidgen of philosophical musing and a dollop of ruderies about bodily functions and you have On I Bang, which charts the comic's diagnosis with – and, thankfully, recovery from – a benign brain tumour.Jupp starts at the beginning: August 2021 and the Jupp family are on holiday. As with much of the comic's material, it anecdotally describes the everydayness of most people's lives, and, more specifically, the daily frustrations of being Miles Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Real life is a helluva lot scarier right now than you might guess from the performative theatrics on display in the new West End version of An Enemy of the People, which updates Ibsen's 1882 play to our vexatious modern day.Matt Smith is in fine, furious form as the crusading Thomas Stockmann, but the combative landscape is here so predictably writ large - its emotions so preordained - that Thomas Ostermeier's production feels as if it's running in place: an opinion piece online would have made the same points far more quickly. Ostermeier, the German director/adaptor working on this Read more ...
Pandemonium, Soho Theatre review - satire needs a shot of Pfizer's finest to revive tired storylines
Gary Naylor
In 2020, throughout the country, many people’s lives were affected adversely by an ever-present threat to our already fragile society. Though most got over it, many people still bear the cost every day, sapping them of energy, making them cough and splutter frequently, instilling a longing that it would just go away and stay away. Like many, I have been suffering from “Long Boris”, the affliction reactivated last week with his appearance as the Covid Inquiry Variant spread far and wide. And such topicality ought to work in favour of Armando Iannucci’s first venture on to the stage, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There’s an old-fashioned feel to the story at its outset: Young woman, guitar in hand, Northern accent announcing as much as it always did, who makes a new life in London, all the money going on a room in Camden. One recalls Georgy Girl or Darling, films that were very much of their time. But it's safe to say that, even if you missed the extensive trigger warnings on the way into the Southwark Playhouse auditorium, a volume of swear words to give a Tory backbencher pause is enough to tell you that this show is very much 2023. Maimuna Memon’s song cycle is a deeply personal story of Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The Royal Court’s collaboration with Access All Areas (AAA) may not be theatre’s first explicit embrace of the neurodiverse community on stage: Chickenshed has five decades of extraordinary inclusive work behind them and Jellyfish, starring Sarah Gordy at the National Theatre, was one of my highlights of 2019.But Molly Davies's play, directed by Hamish Pirie, may be the most ambitious. Developed by AAA’s seven learning disabled and autistic Associate Artists, the five-year long project addresses many issues but sinks into a convoluted narrative that never quite resolves itself into plain Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is possibly not ideal viewing for a spell of sunny weather in June, but Jack Thorne’s drama about a family trying to cope with a terminally ill child is as compelling as it’s painful. Sharon Horgan and Michael Sheen star as parents Andrew and Nicci, and Best Interests probes their private agony in piercingly intimate detail, but the focus also pulls out to encompass prickly issues of ethics, morality and the labyrinthine innards of the NHS.It might have ended up as a preachy, finger-pointing litany of sclerotic bureaucracy and entrenched attitudes, but Thorne’s writing and an excellent Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The family pet dies. It’s a problem many parents face, and when Gracie learns from her evasive father that her dog isn’t just gone, but gone forever, her five-year-old brain cannot process it and so begins a lifelong relationship with deaths, funerals and grief. It’s something we all experience but seldom talk about and, as such, it’s fertile ground for theatre. So Jacob Marx Rice’s new play is a worthy addition to the Finborough Theatre’s fine record of staging interesting work in its intimate space, all the more laudable as, on the face of it, this production is a tough sell in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This skilfully-woven drama about an NHS doctor being battered by professional and personal pressures is undoubtedly timely, and benefits greatly from being written by Grace Ofori-Attah, a former NHS doctor herself. Her inside knowledge lends weight and verisimilitude to scenes depicting admission procedures or the way the treacherous politics of NHS hierarchies work, and perhaps most significantly, how internal investigations are conducted.And she couldn’t have asked for a finer or more harrowing performance than Niamh Algar delivers in the lead role of Dr Lucinda Edwards. She works in an A Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Lisa has lost an hour in a (somewhat contrived) temporal glitch. As a consequence, her world is always sliding off-kilter, not quite making sense, things floating in and out of memory. A watchmaker (himself somewhat loosely tethered to reality) tells her that she needs to get it back as a lost hour wields great power and can fall into the wrong hands. Lisa embraces her quest and travels to the strange land of Dissocia.It’s a convoluted framing device, but it gets Anthony Neilson to where he wants to go in his cult hit of 2004, given a timely revival by Emma Baggott at the Theatre Royal Read more ...