London
Laura de Lisle
It’s been five years since 72 people died in the Grenfell Tower fire in West London. Five years and no arrests, as countless placards and posters around the neighbourhood point out.The Grenfell Tower Inquiry into how the tragedy occurred – why it was allowed to occur by hundreds of people – concluded in November 2022, with enough material that Richard Norton-Taylor and Nicolas Kent have been able to construct another devastating verbatim play. Where Grenfell: Value Engineering (2021) left us speechless, System Failure makes us rage.The Playground Theatre is about 10 minutes’ walk from Read more ...
Gary Naylor
For many years, I would ask groups of students to vote in elections because “it’s important to honour those who gave up so much to ensure that the likes of us can”. Some would nod, others would shrug, a few might have inwardly scoffed – too cool for school, innit? Kate Prince’s long-aborning musical Sylvia illustrates how our (near) universal franchise was won and the emotional and physical cost levied on the pioneers who won the argument in Parliament and on the streets.Ben Stones’ set doesn’t give us much to work with – the dark greys on even darker greys suggesting the bleak Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is new writing becoming increasingly literary? Recently, some of the language being used by younger playwrights seems to me to be becoming too subtle, something to be savoured on the page rather than strongly felt in live performance. Certainly, this is true of Ava Wong Davies’s Graceland, which was a winner of the 2022 Ambassador Theatre Group Playwright’s Prize, having been developed as part of an Introduction to Playwriting group at the Royal Court, where it gets a studio production. Although this 75-minute monologue has moments of perception and beauty, it is more writerly than raw.The Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I once gave Peter Doig a tutorial, when he was a student at Chelsea College of Art. He had little to say about his strange images and I came away feeling I’d seen something unique, but was unable to tell if he was a very good painter or a very bad one. He now enjoys international success and his paintings sell for millions of pounds yet, judging by his Courtauld Gallery exhibition, my ambivalence was well founded. The show contains a sublimely beautiful painting and two very bad ones. The Alpinist 2019-22 (pictured right) is Doig at his very best. A lone skier trudges up a snow covered Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The raid on the Brink’s-Mat warehouse at Heathrow in November 1983 has entered the folklore of British crime and criminology. The gang of six armed robbers had expected to find £3m in cash, but instead got away with £26m worth of gold bullion. The story of what happened to the loot, the thieves and their associates remains at least partially swathed in mystery to this day.There has been a variety of dramas and documentaries made about the case, but The Gold, a six-part drama authored by Neil Forsyth, uses the story to create a fascinating, interlocking mesh of characters and motivations. Top Read more ...
aleks.sierz
How can old texts speak to us now? The point is not just to adapt classics, but to reimagine them – and that’s exactly what hotshot Australian director Simon Stone does. Having brilliantly staged Lorca’s Yerma with Billie Piper, he now turns his attention to Phaedra, creating an amazing and thrilling mash up of the myth as told by Euripides, Seneca and Racine.Using the full resources of the National to great effect, and bringing Janet McTeer of Ozark fame back to the London stage, his superb reimagining also stars Assaad Bouab, who played Hicham Janowski in the original French series of Call Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Magic Mike began as a cautionary tale rooted in Channing Tatum’s spell as a teenage stripper, then morphed into a franchise of reality and theatre shows. Now this second sequel brings original director Steven Soderbergh back, and leaps into pure fantasy.We find Tatum’s super-stripper Mike washed up at 40, with his much touted furniture business killed by Covid. “Alone and adrift in an ocean of failed relationships and unrealised dreams,” as the initially mysterious female narrator noir-ishly puts it, his stripping days are done. Until, that is, he’s recognised while bartending for unhappy Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A play’s title can be an almost arbitrary matter – there’s no streetcar but plenty of desire in that one for example – and it might have crossed Kim Davies’ mind to call her play Ms Julie, since it is a reimagining of August Strindberg’s 1888 masterpiece, Miss Julie. Thankfully, that title was spiked and not just because it’s trite. Smoke gives us a key to unlock a complicated, clever and challenging play unafraid to treat its audience as grown-ups and all the more rewarding for that.Sami Fendall’s set comprises a square shallow pit filled with black sand with an upturned Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida have earned the sobriquet "‘problem plays", what price Titus Andronicus? Does a director seek out a Saw vibe for the horror? Do they go for a deadpan Spinal Tap’s disappearing drummers for the demises? Do you go hard and locate the murders within the atrocities being committed on European soil right now? In her radical interpretation, Jude Christian never quite finds the consistency of tone that the three-hour long evening requires – we get the discomfort intended, but it’s distracting not disturbing.We open on Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Culture which arrives from the margins to the mainstream is a classic phenomenon. In the case of Sam Steiner’s Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons it has taken almost a decade for this two-hander to make the journey from a student production at Warwick University, via the Warwick Arts Centre in 2015 – plus outings to the National Student Drama Festival and Edinburgh Festival – to the West End. Since he first wrote it, the play has been a fringe favourite with several revivals, but this time the two-hander boasts a star cast familiar from TV: Aidan Turner (Poldark) and Jenna Coleman ( Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Ever been to a queer club? You know, drag cabaret night at Madame Jojo’s, or the Black Cap or Her Upstairs. No? Well, not to worry – the Royal Court’s latest provides a fabulously extravagant simulation of the experience with its staging of Sound of the Underground, a play written by Travis Alabanza – whose classic Burgerz is coming to the Purcell Room in March – and directed by his co-creator Debbie Hannan.Billed as having “haze, strobe, flashing lights, sudden light changes, sudden and loud noise, strong language, nudity and audience interaction”, so we certainly know what to expect. And Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There’s a chance – a slim one – that you haven’t seen Noises Off, Michael Frayn’s farce about a farce that, as legend has it with The Rocky Horror Show, must surely be going up somewhere in the world every day.If you’re in that minority, its origin story tells of Frayn observing the chaos backstage at one of his shows in 1970 and realising that things were a lot funnier there as actors desperately worked to get every entrance just right, than it was sitting in the stalls watching the shiny professionalism that emerged for the audience's amusement. The challenge for director, Read more ...