religion
Adam Sweeting
Journalist Sunny Hundal has a long track record as a writer and blogger concerned with issues of race, politics and ethnicity. He’s also the brother of the late Jagraj Singh, an influential preacher who encouraged a dramatic upsurge of interest in the Sikh faith among young people, not least through his hugely successful YouTube channel. The determinedly non-religious Sunny used to argue bitterly with his brother, so much so that they didn’t speak to each other for years.Perhaps they would eventually have come to a reconciliation had Jagrav not died of cancer (aged 38) in 2017, but Sunny will 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 ...
Marianka Swain
“Take our country back!” is the rallying cry of the self-identified “real” Americans gathered to protest the arrival of immigrants. It could be a contemporary Trump rally – or, indeed, the nastier side of current British political discourse – but in fact this scene is from a 1986 musical, set in 1910, from an all-star creative team: book by Joseph Stein (Fiddler on the Roof), score by Charles Strouse (Annie) and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz (Wicked). Despite that pedigree, it bombed on Broadway, but this opportune revival, transferred from Manchester’s Hope Mill Theatre, gains potency by Read more ...
Heather Neill
This is the third Emlyn Williams piece to be presented here in a decade: The Druid's Rest in 2009 was followed by the enormous success of Accolade, directed by Blanche McIntyre, two years later.If it's a truism that neglected plays may well have been neglected for good reason, it is also true that forgotten work can chime unexpectedly with current taste or reveal new elements in the output of a writer previously dismissed as out-of-date. Terence Rattigan's reinstatement in the canon is the most obvious example, but the Finborough has made a reputation for rediscovering the work of writers no Read more ...
Veronica Lee
David Baddiel is a very fine comic, and over the past few years has become an acclaimed author of children's books. So I'm genuinely sad to say that his debut play at Soho Theatre really isn't very good. God's Dice does have its moments, for sure, and some laughs, but at two hours, 15 minutes it's massively overlong and over blown.Baddiel has set himself a big task by tackling a big issue – the interface of science and religion. Alan Davies plays Henry, a quantum physicist teaching at a provincial university, whose certainty about the world is shaken when Edie (Leila Mimmack), a young Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This is a departure in every sense for François Ozon. The prolific French director has established himself as a master of ludic style in past dramas played out by predominantly female casts, the exceptions, among them his sad black-and-white period romance Frantz from two years ago, largely proving the rule. In By the Grace of God – its French title, Grâce à Dieu, is drawn directly from the story and freighted with a macabre irony revealed in a late scene – he achieves something very different: male roles dominate in a film that follows documentary lines in its investigation of a real-life Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
You seldom expect to feel the breath of apocalypse and the terror of the grave amid the modestly rationalist architecture and passion-killer acoustics of the Royal Festival Hall. In fact, before Edward Gardner and the London Philharmonic Orchestra set to work on the Verdi Requiem, I wondered whether – on a gloomy, rain-swept autumn night – any echoey, cobwebby, run-down Victorian church in south London might have suited the spirit of the piece better than this antiseptically clean, well-lighted place. By the time, though, that a lighting malfunction in the gantries above made the stage Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The American dramatist Katori Hall has created a work of rare accomplishment in Our Lady of Kibeho, a play that combines a beautifully established picture of a particular world – a church school in rural Rwanda, in the early 1980s – with profound themes such as faith and belief.That she brings her story, one that indirectly references the genocide that the country would experience a decade later, together with some choice character comedy is further testimony to her skill in combining the sacred and the secular. Premiered in New York in 2014, it reaches Theatre Royal Stratford East in James Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
As Penny Lane’s documentary shows, America and Satanism have a long history. From the Salem Witch trials to the moral panic triggered by the Manson murders and films like William Friedkin’s The Exorcist in the 1970s, mass panic in America of the occult is nothing new. But, as Hail Satan? demonstrates, today’s worshippers of Lucifer are closer to being humanist activists involved in performance art and fighting for religious pluralism than they are the black robed, goat sacrificing clichés that are populated in the media. At the not-so-black heart of the documentary is Lucien Greeves, who Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s 1970 musical had a heavenly resurrection at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre three years ago, with an encore run the following summer. It’s soon heading off on a US tour, but first there’s another chance for British audiences to catch this miraculous stripped-down revival at the Barbican.Director Timothy Sheader blasts the cobwebs off this sung-through rock opera by making it a pertinent portrait of celebrity and fanatical fandom, while nodding to its concert origins via a gig-like setting. Strumming an acoustic guitar, Jesus (Robert Tripolino) has the Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Humans have been consuming mescaline for millennia. The hallucinogenic alkaloid occurs naturally in a variety of cacti native to South America and the southern United States, the most well known of which are the diminutive peyote and the distinctively tubular San Pedro. Dried peyote “buttons” found alongside rock art in the Shumla Caves in Texas have been carbon dated to 4000BCE, rolled cactus skins (believed to be San Pedro) have been found at the sprawling ancient littoral civilisation of Las Aldas in Peru, and a frieze from the mysterious temple complex of Chavín de Huántar depicts a part- Read more ...
Heather Neill
It is 30 years since Shadowlands, William Nicholson's much-loved play about CS Lewis's unexpected love affair with Joy Gresham, an American poet, was first seen on stage. The famous academic and author of the Narnia books, apparently content in his male world of Oxford high tables and intellectual cut-and-thrust, was transformed by his meeting with Joy, a clever, outspoken fan of his theological writing. Their idyll was short-lived; within a few years she succumbed to cancer and Lewis was overwhelmed with grief. Originally written for television and subsequently filmed (with Anthony Hopkins Read more ...