Yo, I'll tell you what I want, what I really, really want. Er… another nostalgic play about growing up in a Yorkshire post-industrial city?
Hard on the heels of John Godber’s Leeds-set Do I Love You? running last week at Wilton’s and Kat Rose Martin’s marvellous Bradford-set £1 Thursdays at the Finborough (my best new play of 2023), we take a 30-mile trip south to Doncaster (Donny to friends) for Children of the Night. Is it something in the air? Besides the coal dust of course.
The Middle East is on fire – again. So Ryan Craig’s brilliantly provocative play, The Holy Rosenbergs, is more relevant than ever. Near the start, a rabbi says, “Everyone feels strongly about what’s happening out there”, and since he’s referring to tensions between pro-Israel and anti-Israel Jews, he’s definitely touching a nerve, both in the play and in the audience.
Arthur Miller is constantly being revived on London stages, and constantly remains relevant. However, his most popular plays are those from early in his career – All My Sons, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, The Price even – but what about his later flowering? To fill this gap, the Young Vic is now staging Broken Glass, the playwright’s 1994 drama about Jewish identity, marriage and psychology.
The indomitable Nicolas Kent has devised a new theatre piece to prick our consciences and refocus our minds, after his sterling work on the ugly underbelly of the Afghan wars and the Grenfell inquiry, inter alia. This one is less polished though not lacking in grit.
Backstories of famous writers are fascinating: where did they come from? What were their inspirations? What obstacles did they overcome? Alexi Kaye Campbell’s new historical family drama, Bird Grove, looks at the early years of Mary Ann Evans, long before she became a novelist who published under the name of George Eliot. Yes, time to dust down your copies of Middlemarch, Mill on the Floss, Daniel Deronda and so on.
Settling into my seat in this most intimate of houses, I realised that I had never seen a play written by Nobel Laureate and Academy Award winner, George Bernard Shaw. Nor did I know what his very own adjective, Shavian, connoted with any certainty. Nor did I know why an actress chose to go by the distracting stage name, Mrs Patrick Campbell.
If heart were art, there would be no stopping The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, the 2012 Rachel Joyce novel that became a film and then a stage musical, seen first at Chichester last summer before arriving on the West End. As it is, I'm afraid I stumbled at the first hurdle of plausibility. Let's just say that if I had someone important in my life dying of cancer - as in fact has happened - I would do everything I could to get there as fast as I can.
To watch Deep Azure is to feel a double loss. The death of Prince Jones, the black student who was shot dead by a police officer in a case of mistaken identity, and the death of his friend, Chadwick Boseman, who wrote the play to commemorate him. Boseman, of course, would become world-famous as Marvel’s first black superhero, Black Panther’s King T’Challa, before dying of colon cancer aged 43.
It's nearly eight years since Kåre Conradi first appeared at the Coronet in a revelatory, visceral Norwegian production of Ibsen's Little Eyolf. He's in his middle years, like Peer the temporarily successful entrepreneur of Ibsen's tricky middle act, and in a good position to run the gamut from youthful tale-teller to old man in search of salvation for his ill-tended soul, too weak to go to heaven or hell.
To watch Cynthia Erivo delivering her stunning, technically complex one-woman performance of Dracula is not unlike watching a top athlete gunning for gold at the Winter Olympics – with the exception that this is infinitely more exciting. Over the last week, dissatisfied audience whispers led to headlines that the Oscar-nominated actress was struggling with the lines needed to play the 23 characters. Yet in a virtuoso press night performance she slayed doubters like a vampire hunter administering a stake to the heart.