Southwark Playhouse
Will Rathbone
Hot on the heels of Katherine Soper's award-winning Wish List, about the UK benefits system in crisis, and John Godber's This Might Hurt, about an NHS in crisis, comes this play about our education system in crisis. One suspects there will be plenty more plays about comparable flashpoints to come, but the passionate arguments found within Alex MacKeith's somewhat over-zealous debut play definitely hit home. Set in the headteacher's office of a south London primary school on SAT results day, the play vividly outlines the dilemmas at its heart. Schools must adhere to rigid systems based on Read more ...
Simon Evans
Doctor Peter Raby (Emeritus Fellow at Cambridge University) was quick to pull me up on my first stab at A Midsummer Night's Dream – an indulgence-of-a-production played out in a university park to the sound of cucumber flirting with Pimm's. His grounds were that I had failed to acknowledge the mortal danger facing those errant elopers, Hermia and Lysander. He had, he said, expected better of me.Revisiting the play a decade on (I take criticism slowly) I see his point: in turning their backs on the ancient law of Athens and fleeing seven leagues, the pair openly defy the patriarchy of the Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Given that Edmond Rostand’s 1897 tragicomic verse play Cyrano de Bergerac gave the word "panache" to the English language, it’s an irony that panache is the quality most woefully lacking in Russell Bolam’s production of Glyn Maxwell’s adaptation. It ought not to be so. With its all-female cast and stripped-down staging, it ought to feel radical and fresh, stimulating new lines of enquiry into the nature of role-play and what constitutes maleness and male heroism, shedding new light on a familiar text.The story of Cyrano de Bergerac, the soldier-poet who selflessly uses his literary gift to Read more ...
Matt Wolf
One of the more unusual Broadway offerings of recent times crosses the Atlantic with considerable style in an Off West End premiere of 2006 New York entry Grey Gardens that punches well above its weight. As luxuriantly cast as it is elaborately (and carefully) designed, Thom Southerland's loving production honours a peculiar slab of Americana that clearly won't be to all tastes, and some won't see beyond the second-act camp to locate the symbiotic portrait of love and loss that underpins the material.But step back from designer Tom Rogers' cunning scrap heap of a set, and you'll find that Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The “femmepersonators” of Harvey Fierstein’s 1962-set drama would be flabbergasted by today’s level of trans visibility, from Grayson Perry and Caitlyn Jenner to Transparent and Eddie Redmayne’s new film The Danish Girl. Yet it’s the still pertinent issue of private experience versus public profile that sparks a schism in this idyllic community of closeted cross-dressers, along with thorny questions of how gender fluidity might correlate with a more flexible approach to identity and sexuality.Open-minded Rita (Tamsin Carroll, pictured below with Matthew Rixon) runs an escapist Catskills Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Polymath Philip Ridley is British theatre’s prince of imaginative writing. At the moment, he’s clearly on a roll, and this year his diary has been filing up fast. First, there was a majestic revival of his 1991 debut, The Pitchfork Disney, with a cast led by Chris New and the Channel 4 Misfits star Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, then there’s an upcoming London fringe revival of his 2005 shock-fest Mercury Fur and a national tour of Tender Napalm, his 2011 Southwark Playhouse hit, in May and June. And, glory of glories, last night saw the opening of a brand new play, Shivered.The story is set in the Read more ...