Theatre
Rachel Halliburton
Puck is an assassin in a tutu and Theseus is a murderous thug. In Headlong's deliciously macabre dramatisation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for midwinter audiences, director Holly Race Roughan extracts all the menace from Shakespeare’s “fairy play”, deftly chopping up and juggling the text to underscore the violence that frames the woodland escapism. When we enter the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, we are lulled into a false sense of ease as the music director and pianist, Richie Hart, plays Christmas carols as meditatively as if he were performing the Goldberg Variations. Then a Read more ...
Gary Naylor
You can add to “Would The Taming of the Shrew still be staged, were it not written by William Shakespeare?” the question, “Would My Fair Lady still be staged were it not for those timeless songs?” Such conjectures are but sophistry, but they do present a dilemma to a director, and it’s always interesting to see how each new production deals with the issues the book throws up.It’s 1912 and the Suffragettes are demanding the vote, the mores and fashions of a still new century are asserting themselves and the carnage of Flanders is not yet visible on the horizon. A phonetics professor, Henry Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Spies are basically actors. They create fake personas in order to achieve their ends. But the difference is that they do this 24/7. All the time. Especially during a secret operation. So the first thing to say about David Eldridge’s adaptation of John Le Carré’s 1963 classic, which first opened at the Chichester Festival Theatre last year, is that it offers the strange joy of watching actors playing characters who are themselves acting a role. The second thing to say about The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is that this is first of Le Carré’s novels to be put on stage – and in some respects Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The battle of the Scrooges is fast becoming an unofficial London theatrical tradition, as – for the third year – audiences must choose between the mince-pie-laden delights at the Old Vic and the atmospheric ghostliness of Ally Pally. Jack Thorne’s spikily imaginative, sumptuously staged version has been winning hearts and minds since 2017, but in 2021 Mark Gatiss, king of the ghost story, began his bid for Dickens devotees with an adaptation that’s Christmassy and crepuscular in equal measure. Since Gatiss’s deliciously ectoplasmic take is – comparatively – the newest kid on Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Don't be fooled by the shambling geniality which first defines Bryan Cranston's Joe Keller at the start of the Belgian director Ivo van Hove's scorching revival of All My Sons. By the time we get to the interval-free finish, some 2-1/4 hours later, this seemingly affable chap will be as done in as the tree we see toppled in the production's wordless prologue. As Joe goes down for the count, so too does the America of which he forms an all-too-ruthless part. Written in 1947, Arthur Miller's breakout play depicts a nation given over to deception and rapacity that responds only to one God Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Obsession makes for good drama. Looking back over 30 years of in-yer-face theatre in general and female monologues in particular – anything from Fleabag to Superhoe – I’m struck by the power of the individual voice to take us on journeys into the underworlds of extreme feelings. Dark places; dark thoughts; darkness visible. So Tanya-Loretta Dee’s debut play, Loop, which she performs herself, starts with a very promising premise. Described as a “surreal one-woman fever dream”, it plunges us into the mind of a young woman whose infatuation with a man rapidly becomes obsessive and self- Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
As a proposition, this production raises the immediate questions how, and why? While Suzanne Collins’s young adult series of books were logically and successfully adapted for the screen, a futuristic tale involving glittering cities and gladiatorial battles across vast natural terrain hardly seems possible, or even necessary for theatre.
Director Matthew Dunster and his superb production team answer the "how" with dazzling aplomb. Utilising the new, purpose-built Troubadour Canary Wharf Theatre to excellent effect, they have created a show that is a marvel of set and lighting design, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Here comes Dad – and he’s muttering a mantra: “My name is Winston Smith and only good things happen to me.” With a name shared with the everyman protagonist of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and a compulsive intoning of this self-affirmation, the start of Nancy Farino’s Fatherland signals the fact that family stuff, and daddy issues, will dominate its emotional landscape. As a graduate of Hampstead Theatre’s Inspire writers programme, the actor-playwright enjoys not only an entertaining production of her 100-minute debut piece in this venue’s studio space, but also plays one of the two Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
On paper, this RSC revival of Ella Hickson’s 2013 adaptation sounds just the ticket: a feminist spin on the familiar JM Barrie story, with a gorgeous set, lots of wire work and all graced with the orotund tones of Toby Stephens as Captain Hook. In action, this mix doesn’t work as well as you want it to.I decided fairly quickly that I didn’t really know who the piece was for. The RSC gave us Matilda so it has previous in devising superior entertainment that older children can enjoy, their accompanying adults too. But here the younger part of the audience seem to be the prime concern, with a Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Ask many a boomer about their scariest childhood memory, and they may very well cite the extraordinary 1957 East German production, The Singing Ringing Tree, shown regularly on the BBC before, one presumes, an adult saw it and thought, “Uh oh…” It was a kind of anti-Disney (well, the saccharine commercialised studio that emerged after World War II at any rate) that pitched us kids into a Mitteleuropa world of magical threat and fractured families, the grotesque far outweighing the fair in the narrative.At about the same time (the mid-80s) that a collective unease started to censor or, at Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The National Theatre has a long record of starry revivals so this version of John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, with a cast led by Nicola Coughlan (yes, from Derry Girls and Bridgerton), quickens the heartbeats of anticipation, although audience reaction won’t be anything like that of the play’s 1907 premiere. That Dublin production caused nationalist protests from a riotous public who felt insulted by the playwright’s realistic portrayal of the Irish peasantry as lonely drunks, and by its theme of patricide and its image of female underwear. Sinn Féin founder Arthur Read more ...
Gary Naylor
That young person sitting next to you on the bus, earbuds wedged in, an enigmatic, Mona Lisa-ish smile on their face - are they listening to a podcast? If so, is it one of many, many such concerning True Crime, a genre that has moved out of the WH Smith’s magazine shelf with the National Enquirer and the large print section of the library, and into a much more youthful market in the 2020s? Chances are that it is.I can’t be too precious about it, numbering Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon books amongst my favourites about showbiz and sneaking a peek, as a very guilty pleasure, at Wikipedia’s Read more ...