Subtitled The Tension Between Art and Politics, this collection of eight short plays on the subject of censorship was prompted by the boycott of an Israeli hip hop troupe at this venue last year. Do we have the right to stop art happening if we are offended by the artist or the content of their work, or where their funding comes from? Or is freedom of expression an absolute right?
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has not been very prominent in the news recently, but that doesn’t mean that it has gone away. As Julia Pascal’s 2003 play reminds us, religious and cultural tensions can go deep. Very deep. At the centre of her intense story, which is set over about 24 hours during the second intifada, is Jerusalem, a divided city, a contested territory, a place which is dangerous to cross. As bombs explode in cafés and on buses, the events of the drama illustrate the tight embrace of the personal and the political.
Never in a million years would you guess that Grand Hotel – the 1989 New York hit now brilliantly revived at Southwark Playhouse – is one of Broadway's great rescue jobs. That something seemingly so organic, so cohesive, so intricate could have reached the final stages of production in such trouble that even a force of nature like Tony-winner Maury Yeston (Nine) must have wondered it if were salvageable simply beggars belief.
Helen Edmundson’s The Heresy of Love may be set in 17th century Mexico and follow the conflict between strict religion and personal development, but its theme of a woman denied her voice by a surrounding male hierarchy retains real contemporary relevance. First staged at the RSC three years ago, the dramatic strengths of the work shine through in this new Globe production, which reminds us most of all of Edmundson’s confident craft and limberness of language.
On contemporary stages, absence is a constant presence. This is very odd if you consider how corporeal and concrete theatre is. Unlike film, which is just light shining on a screen, or books, which are just letters on the page, theatre is live performance that is irreducibly there in the same space as you are, breathing the same air. Yet many playwrights – led of course by Samuel Beckett, Caryl Churchill and Martin Crimp – have explored the notion of absence on stage.
A sterling case is made for the lost art of letter-writing in Michael Simkins’ dramatisation of Roger Mortimer’s missives to his wayward son. Mortimer’s inimitable turn of phrase, preserved in epistolary form, is the highlight of a genial show notable more for its casting of a real father and son than provision of gripping drama. It’s cosy as a pair of bedroom slippers, best enjoyed with a glass of Mortimer-approved sherry, but hasn’t entirely transitioned from one medium to another.
This is the real Greek, bloody-fantastical thing. After the fascinating but flawed attempt to bring Aeschylus’s Oresteia into the 21st century, the Almeida has turned to a more tradition-conscious kind of experiment with Euripides’ last and greatest masterpiece.
Satire may famously be what on Broadway closes Saturday night, but last night's concert performance of the Gershwin brothers' Of Thee I Sing found many patrons fleeing the Festival Hall at the interval. The culprit lay in sound issues that took the aural equivalent of a pneumatic drill to a featherweight piece that needs tender treatment if it is to flourish as the original did against the odds. Rarely performed today (New York did a concert version of its own in 2006), this was in fact the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize.
The trouble with the classics is that they are long, complex and difficult. But today’s sensibility favours the quick, simple and easy. So it is no surprise that the National Theatre have opened its doors to Patrick Marber, who has taken Ivan Turgenev’s 1850s play, A Month in the Country, and given it a makeover. After all, in its uncut original version it runs for four hours. The result is what the Amazon website calls an “unfaithful version”, which is shorter and simpler than the original. Turgenev’s month of rural love, lust and despair has been distilled down to some 72 hours.
Stop miking Bryn Terfel. Stop over-miking musicals; the show voices in a hybrid cast don’t need much. Too much ruined English National Opera’s recent Sweeney Todd, and in this Proms adaptation of Grange Park Opera’s summer crowd-pleaser it sent the voices ricocheting around the Albert Hall, making mush of the words and stridency of the few belt-it-out moments.