National Theatre
The Other Place, National Theatre review - searing family tragedyWednesday, 09 October 2024
Contemporary reworkings of Greek tragedy run a very particular risk, that out of context the heightened actions of the original plays – the woefully poor judgement, the copious bloodletting, the rush to disproportionate vengeance and suicide – can... Read more... |
A Tupperware of Ashes, National Theatre review - family and food, love and lossFriday, 04 October 2024
Queenie is in trouble. Bad trouble. For about a year now, this 68-year-old Indian woman has been forgetful. Losing her car keys; burning rice in the pan; mixing up memories; just plain blank episodes. At various times, she relives distant moments in... Read more... |
Coriolanus, Olivier/National Theatre review - ambitious staging but the tragedy goes missingFriday, 27 September 2024
The National’s new production of Coriolanus has to be one of the most handsome to appear on the Olivier stage. But it has arrived minus a key item: a hero whose end is tragic.Maybe director Lyndsey Turner wasn’t aiming for that. Her protagonist,... Read more... |
Death of England: Michael / Death of England: Delroy, Soho Place review - thrilling portraits, brilliantly performed, of rebels without a causeThursday, 15 August 2024
Two boys in east London, one Black, one white, grow up together, play pranks at school, then decades later have a tempestuous falling out. That’s the main narrative arc of these twin plays, but it accounts for none of their extraordinary richness... Read more... |
The Grapes of Wrath, NT Lyttelton review - a bleak journey into migrant purgatoryFriday, 09 August 2024
It’s a brave company that embarks on a staging of John Steinbeck’s award-winning 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. A grim study of human goodness in an unrelentingly cruel universe, it’s a long slog for both cast and audience.Steinbeck based his novel... Read more... |
The Hot Wing King, National Theatre review - high kitchen-stove comedy, with sides of dramaSaturday, 20 July 2024
There’s an exuberant comedy from the start in Katori Hall’s The Hot Wing King, which comes to London after an initial Covid-truncated Off Broadway run which brought her a Pulitzer prize in 2021. Roy Alexander Weise’s production puts in all the... Read more... |
Boys from the Blackstuff, National Theatre review - a lyrical, funny, affecting variation on a television classicThursday, 30 May 2024
Prolific playwright James Graham was born in 1982, the year Alan Bleasdale's unforgettable series was televised. From Nottingham rather than Liverpool, Graham recognised in his own surroundings the predicaments of the main characters, the bonds... Read more... |
London Tide, National Theatre review - haunting moody river bluesSaturday, 20 April 2024
“He do the police in different voices.” If ever one phrase summed up a work of fiction, and the art of its writer, then surely it is this description, by Charles Dickens in his 1865 novel, Our Mutual Friend, of his character Sloppy’s ability to read... Read more... |
Standing at the Sky's Edge, Gillian Lynne Theatre review - heartwarming Sheffield musical arrives in the West EndFriday, 01 March 2024
Can there be anyone from Sheffield who has not seen Standing at the Sky’s Edge, possibly several times? This is the once local show, opening at the Sheffield Crucible in 2019, playing at the National Theatre's Olivier in 2023, and now bringing a... Read more... |
Hadestown, Lyric Theatre review - soul-stirring musical gloriously revamps classical mythsThursday, 22 February 2024
Doom and gloom, we are told, may have abounded in the classical underworld, but Hadestown suggests otherwise. Returning to London five years after its run at the National Theatre, this time with a slew of Tony Awards, this bracing musical... Read more... |
Dear Octopus, National Theatre - period rarity is a real pleasureFriday, 16 February 2024
Sisters are doing it for themselves, just as families as a whole are, too, on the London stage these days. Dear Octopus follows Till the Stars Come Down and The Hills of California as the third domestic drama I've seen in the last 10 days and... Read more... |
Till the Stars Come Down, National Theatre review - exuberant comedy with a dark edgeSaturday, 03 February 2024
The National Theatre is meant to represent the whole nation – and not just the metropolitan middle classes. So it’s really good to see that Beth Steel – who comes from an East Midlands working-class background and was once writer in... Read more... |
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