Reviews
aleks.sierz
Although some contemporary plays — notably Posh and 13 — have accurately taken the temperature of the times, what about the timeless classics? Does Sophocles’s Antigone (dated about 441BC) have anything to say to us today? How can it be of our time too? As the National Theatre wheels out this play, with a cast led by Christopher Eccleston and Jodie Whittaker, onto its main stage, such questions hang in the air like the smoke from an ancient funeral pyre.The third of the Theban plays, Antigone is a perfect tragedy: everyone behaves in the right way, but with fatal results. It's a true tragedy Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There’s no particular reason, beyond the herd instinct of producers, why films should enter the multiplex two by two. But such is the case with twin reimaginings of Snow White within a couple of months. First Mirror Mirror went all out for post-modern irony with Julia Roberts camping it up as the Wicked Queen. Now Snow White and the Huntsman imparts a heavy dose of post-feminist top spin with Charlize Theron vamping it up as the etc etc. The reboot is on the other foot.In both cases you have to ask who the films are aimed at, because it’s certainly not the same audience snared by the 1937 Read more ...
fisun.guner
As soon as the two leads entered you were left in no doubt that you were in the presence of stars, at least in their native Turkey: thunderous applause, cheers and whistles greeted Haluk Bilginer as Antony and Zerrin Tekindor as Cleopatra, as they stepped nimbly onto the stage to perform a coquettish little game of chase, thus setting the playful tone of this most seductive of Shakespearean tragedies.Bilginer, husky-voiced and grizzly-bearded, has many major stage and film roles under his belt in Turkey (in Hollywood, too, since he also starred alongside Clive Owen and Naomi Watts in the 2009 Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Co-directors Rupert Goold and Michael Fentiman have not taken an easy option here. Given the wintry setting and the cameo from Father Christmas, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe would have made a great posh panto in December. Instead this ambitious attempt at event theatre has opened in May, with London gently grilling in a heatwave. Luckily Threesixty Theatre's state-of-the-art circus-style tent stayed airily cool, although the production was a little tepid at times.Every well-read fantasy fan must surely know the CS Lewis tale of the four frightfully English Pevensie siblings, (pictured Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The last time racial stereotyping (or at least, its cross-species equivalent) could be passed off as shorthand for a certain kind of slapstick humour was probably back in 1962 - coincidentally, the year that the last of Hanna-Barbera’s 30 episodes of the original Top Cat cartoon ran. And yet you don’t have to be eight years old to laugh out loud at the spectacle of a red-eyed gorilla beating its chest and screaming for bananas. Bananas which, in a ridiculous subplot I won’t waste time going into, are strung around the waist of a chubby blue cat in the style of a Hawaiian skirt.Don’t even get Read more ...
josh.spero
There's a good deal of irony in the most controversial production of the Globe to Globe season turning out to be one of the least interesting. The Merchant of Venice was performed by Israel's Habima National Theatre, a company which has incurred the wrath of some for performing in the Occupied Territories, and there were protestors tonight, mainly of the flag-waving variety. The drama in the yard and the galleries was not matched on stage, I can unhappily report.Played as a straight period piece, with velvet and doublets and ruffles for miles, this Merchant gave us a rather listless Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The battle of the sexes took on a bright and breezy tone in Pakistan's contribution to the Globe's ongoing Bardathon, the Theatre Wallay-Kashf's rumbustious production of The Taming of the Shrew. It's been more customary of late to treat this most vexatious of comedies as sustainedly ironic or as a far-from-funny exercise in domestic degradation. But the director Hassaim Hussain and his agile company were having none of that. If anything their production in its tone often suggested a dry run for The Comedy of Errors, which the Globe will host later this week.Ed Hall and his all-male Propeller Read more ...
fisun.guner
“I realise how lucky I am coming from Margate. It’s a most romantic, sexy, fucking weird place to come from. I didn’t come from the suburbs.” Tracey Emin’s relationship to her hometown mirrors a familiar trajectory. Like all difficult relationships, it has chipped away at her psyche for years. Not surprisingly, we’ve sensed it played out in her work: first defiance and rejection, then a kind of ambivalent reconciliation, and finally a deep affection.What is arguably her best work, the 1995 video, Why I Never Became a Dancer, which must surely be read as a modern-day, cult-of-celebrity fairy Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Lord Bragg permitted himself a knowing chuckle as he introduced Sky Arts's resurrection of The South Bank Show from the South Bank. He was standing in front of the National Theatre, whose director Nicholas Hytner was this week's subject, though within seconds he had been teleported to the streets of Manhattan, to preview the opening of Hytner's production of One Man, Two Guvnors on Broadway. The message, from both Bragg and Hytner, was that the arts are vital, they can be massively popular, and they cross frontiers both imaginative and physical.Director Suzannah Wander had delivered a hugely Read more ...
james.woodall
Peter Brook is probably at his happiest in Africa. Through his Paris theatre, the Bouffes du Nord, he has long had access to gifted Francophone black African actors. They’ve always been a significant contingent of his troupe there, which has also included Maghrebis, Americans, Japanese, Germans, French and even, sometimes, Britons. Brook’s first focus of attention was West Africa, then South: in 1973 he was blown away at the Royal Court by township actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona, and set out on a project to inhabit and stage the black African soul which has lasted four decades.In this Read more ...
Steven Gambardella
In the cool, dim, municipal modernist interior of Hornsey Town Hall you’re confronted with a neon sign: And Europe Will be Stunned. It's the title of the trilogy of films at the heart of this Artangel-commissioned show by Israel-born Yael Bartana. The films are split in location around the building in an exhibition which includes neon slogans and posters which can be taken away, bearing manifestos in different languages.The first film, Mary Koszmary (Nightmares) (2007), sees a young politician walk into the derelict and virtually desolate Decennial Stadium to deliver a contentious speech Read more ...
mark.hudson
The Winter’s Tale may not be one of the best loved of Shakespeare’s plays – not quite a comedy, not quite a full-blown drama – but the Globe was packed on the hottest night of the year for this vibrant Yoruba version direct from Lagos. South-East London has the largest Yoruba population outside Nigeria. The audience was maybe 40 per cent Yoruba-speaking (my daughter thought 70 per cent), and their gusts of laughter and murmurs of affirmation set the tone for the rest of the crowd’s responses.Swinging drum rhythms and the sung narration of a majestic turbaned woman in the role of Time Read more ...