Southwark Playhouse
Laura de Lisle
Bodies is the latest in Two's Company's series of what they deem "forgotten masterworks", this one making a less-than-triumphant return to the London stage after almost 40 years away. Written by James Saunders in 1977, it opened at the Orange Tree in Richmond before transferring to the Hampstead Theatre and then on to the West End. It's now been revived by the director Tricia Thorns at Southwark Playhouse.Husband and wife Anne (Annabel Mullion) and Mervyn (Tim Welton) invite their old friends David (Peter Prentice) and Helen (Alix Dunmore), back in Blighty after a spell in the States, round Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Time once again to roll out that line about the road to hell being paved with good intentions. The creators of All in a Row, a new play at Southwark Playhouse about the last evening at home for an autistic non-verbal 11-year-old before his despairing parents send him away to residential school, was doubtless conceived with the dramatists’ belief that they were shining a light on a dark place. But the result is a grim 90-minute shouting match of bitter mutual recriminations and self-lacerating jokes which only reinforces every stigmatising cliché about the torment of having a child with Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“Love Changes Everything”, as immortalised by Michael Ball, is the most enduring feature of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Don Black and Charles Hart’s 1989 musical – a moderate West End success, and a Broadway flop. Jonathan O’Boyle’s production, seen last year at Manchester’s Hope Mill Theatre, follows the trend for stripping back big shows to get at the heart of them; a good tactic on the whole, though challenged by a work that’s ultimately more interested in dissecting love than sharing it.An adaptation of Bloomsbury Group member David Garnett’s 1955 novella, the convoluted story runs from 1947 to Read more ...
aleks.sierz
There are not that many plays about sport, but, whether you gamble on results or not, you can bet that most of them are about boxing. And often set in the past. Joy Wilkinson's superb new drama, The Sweet Science of Bruising, comes to the Southwark Playhouse, a venue which regularly punches above its weight (sorry!), armed with a beautifully evocative title and plenty of theatrical energy. It is also tells a story that is both original and affecting, about the Victorian subculture of female boxing. So hold tight, leave your squeamish side at home, and roll up to the ring to watch the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Two dynamite lead performances and the chance to savour an underappreciated score give genuine charge to The Rink, a decades-old Broadway flop that feels reborn for Southwark Playhouse. A short-lived star vehicle for Chita Rivera (who won a 1984 Tony for it) and Liza Minnelli, the musical more than survives the scaled-back if entirely impassioned approach of director Adam Lenson. It's also a great showcase for an inspired creative team - choreographer Fabian Aloise and a punchy powerhouse of a band led by musical director Joe Bunker. Stripped ot its starry sheen, one Read more ...
Heather Neill
Even in its successful early days Wycherley’s 1675 comedy was notorious, but it was considered too lewd to be staged at all between the mid-Eighteenth Century and 1924. Although the play has found an affectionate place in the canon in more recent times, it makes a kind of sense to transpose the goings on of louche Restoration aristocrats to the era of the Bright Young Things, the time of its rediscovery. And the theme of the role of women, their desires and frustrations, has a continuing up-to-date resonance which adaptors Morphic Graffiti (director Luke Fredericks and designer Stewart Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Monologues are very much the flavour of the start of this theatrical year. At the Royal Court, we have Carey Mulligan in Dennis Kelly’s brilliant Girls & Boys, coming hot on the tottering heels of Anoushka Warden’s My Mum’s a Twat, while at the Bush a season of solo plays is currently disturbing psyches with Monica Dolan’s B*easts. Now the Southwark Playhouse is staging Angry, a series of six gender-neutral monologues by Philip Ridley, a master penman who has made the solo piece very much his own. And this show stars new talents Georgie Henley (The Chronicles of Narnia) and Tyrone Huntley Read more ...
Katherine Waters
“Pussy is pussy” and “bitches are bitches” but Jen Silverman’s Collective Rage at Southwark Playhouse smashes tautologies with roguish comedy in a tight five-hander smartly directed by Charlie Parham.The play is set in New York and follows the ad hoc and long-standing relationships that develop between five women (two of whom are queer) called Betty over the course of a series of rehearsals for a skew-whiff rendition of the play-within-a-play Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that Betty 3 (Beatriz Romilly) decides to put on after going on a date to “The Thea-tah” with a posh Read more ...
Heather Neill
Confused people, some of whom may have made the wrong choices in life and love, find themselves in an enchanted wood at Midsummer. Dear Brutus has long been seen to echo Shakespeare’s comedy of metamorphosis, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A huge success in 1917, it is rarely performed now, and Barrie’s fantasy for grown-ups is probably more of a challenge to the modern director than its Elizabethan precursor. The language is frequently arch, there is a tendency to whimsy, and many of the characters are so spoilt and self-regarding that, on paper, it is difficult to care about their redemption or Read more ...
Katherine Waters
One of the questions that can be asked of Brecht is whether for a modern audience his Verfremdungseffekt — or alienation effect — still works as intended, provoking genuine reflections on justice by distancing audiences from emotional entanglement with the characters. At a time when verbatim and community theatre is accomplishing just that with exactitude and force, it appears that inducing audiences to think morally is most effective when delivered in unexpected ways. Deeply though Brecht’s work may have influenced these pieces, audiences’ capacity for surprise remains a good Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"What is this, Saving Private Ryan?" a character randomly queries well into the actor Oliver Cotton's new play, Dessert. Well, more like a modern-day An Inspector Calls on steroids, with the volume turned up so high in Trevor Nunn's production that you don't half believe the questioner's wife when she talks about a state of affairs that could be heard all the way to France. After a promising and prickly start, Cotton's hectoring satire of our recklessly self-absorbed, increasingly divisive age devolves into implausibility and hysteria in equal measure. The result is less enlightenment Read more ...
Will Rathbone
James Shirley is a rarely performed 17th-century playwright whose oeuvre has generally been consigned to theatrical study and research. Written for King Charles I at a time of great political upheaval and with the English Civil War looming, not to mention the shutdown of London theatres, his 1641 play The Cardinal represents Shirley's self-confessed masterpiece. It's an all-but-forgotten work that emerges with renewed clarity and pace thanks to the director Justin Audibert, whose gift for period classics dates back to the RSC's recent The Jew of Malta and well beyond. The revenge drama Read more ...