Theatre
Helen Hawkins
There’s a line in the late Richard Greenberg’s 2013 play that refers to a recently elected showbiz type turned politician who sports puffed up hair – but it’s not the current incumbent of what’s left of the White House but Ronald Reagan. For the first half of this well-made play, we are in 1980, the election has just returned the former governor of California, and the Bascov tribe is gathering for Christmas lunch (these are liberal Jews) at the vast Upper West Side apartment of Ben (Daniel Abelson) and Julie (American actress Jennifer Westveldt, in her UK debut). An outsize Christmas Read more ...
Matt Wolf
I came late to the Old Vic's shimmering production of Mary Page Marlowe, Tracy Letts's Off Broadway play from 2018 which has arrived in London with Andrea Riseborough and Susan Sarandon leading a sizable and uniformly excellent cast. And I hope theatregoers will catch this too-short run while they can. Amidst ongoing chat – sometimes justified – about screen stars not being able to hold their own stage, Matthew Warchus's keenly attuned staging proves that just as often they very much can.Sarandon (pictured below with Hugh Quarshie), the Oscar winner an agelessly commanding 79, has Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Niall is unwell. Very unwell. Very, very. There’s a lot going on in his head. He can’t really hold things together. Evidence? Well, he’s lost his job and his girlfriend Natalie has left him. So, as desperation increases, he decides to phone his big sister Brigid – the trouble is, it’s 3 o’clock in the morning.When he wakes her up he’s a bit tongue-tied, and things go badly. Very badly. He’s not very good at small talk and she’s upset about being disturbed (someone is staying the night with her). They hang up, and the next thing he does is set fire to his hand. The consequences of this Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Change, we're often told, is the engine of drama: people end up somewhere markedly different from where they began. So the first thing to be said about Nick Payne's blistering new play The Unbelievers is that its concept is as brave as leading lady Nicola Walker's take-no-prisoners performance. Playing a mum who can't stop obsessing about the disappearance of her son (as who could given such a situation), Walker makes something ferocious out of human fixation, grabbing Payne's narrative by the throat and allowing Marianne Elliott's correspondingly unflinching production to strike boldly at Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Jean Genet’s 1947 play has been quite a clothes-horse over the years, at times a glamorous confection dressed by designers, and regularly shape-shifting and gender-fluid. Cards on the table: I have disliked most productions of it for this odd vacuity, which allows it to become unmoored so radically from its source, the real-life case of a mistress and her daughter murdered by their two maids.It pokes at you from the off with its sense of itself as an anti-play; it's more an arch ritual, there to provoke and mystify its audience, especially the average bourgeois. Its latest incarnation Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Oh yes, I actually do remember Patty Hearst. She was the American publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst’s granddaughter, who, at the age of 19, was kidnapped by the ultra-left Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974. Some months after her abduction, a bank’s surveillance video showed her participating in a robbery.She seemed to have embraced the urban terror group, and was eventually captured and sentenced to jail. But what really happened to her in captivity? This is the question and the story which has inspired Katherine Moar’s Ragdoll, the follow up to her very successful debut play, Farm Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The Globe’s authenticity is its USP, so don’t expect the air-conditioning, the plush seats and the expectant hush of the National Theatre some 20 minutes walk away along the Thames. There’s not quite Elizabethan levels of discomfort to endure, so no plague – well, not if you’ve had your jabs. It’s quite fun to roll with the open air vibe and wooden benches with poles in your eyeline like a Victorian football stadium or stand in the pit, looking up, like Baldrick in Season One. But does it need to be quite as much of an ordeal as my visit to the Troilus and Cressida Thursday matinee Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If you’re a Gen Zer, you’ve probably heard of Heartstopper’s Joe Locke. I’m pretty sure ATG’s Gen Xers in the back office had also heard of him, as tickets are priced up to and beyond £100 for a 100 minutes all-through, 10-years-old three-hander that would sit comfortably at the Arcola at less than half that price. It was telling that there were a fair few seats unoccupied at the matinee I attended.Rant over … but seriously guys, Theatre gets a bad rap on prices, often unfairly, and this doesn’t help. But if it definitely can’t justify £100 a pop, can it justify its lead-in price point, a Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In the framing device, a professor (Jonathan Guy Lewis) stands at a lectern and asks if anyone has had a supernatural experience. Somewhat to my suprise, up went my hand. In the cold winter of 1981/82, I lived in a house in Finchley. One morning, it had snowed overnight (I had barely seen a fall stick properly before) and, looking out of the French doors of the living room, I could see fresh human footprints leading from the tree at the bottom of the garden all the way up to those doors. There they stopped. Abruptly.The doors were locked off, ingress to the house impossible. So, too, Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The National’s latest production of Hamlet opens with a bang: a sureness of style, atmosphere and refreshing comedic effect, accompanied by a performer, Hiran Abeyeskera (The Father and the Assassin, Life of Pi), whose presence promises a night of sparky originality. What a pity, then, that this promise peters out, and an ambitious conceit ultimately fails to deliver. It’s one thing presenting Hamlet as an almost childlike clown, whose emotions are heightened even before he’s aware of the rot in Denmark, but to do so at the expense of the tragedy – of one of Shakespeare’s most Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It’s truly thrilling to see the Barbican embracing big concept long-form theatre again, seeking out productions that are as conceptually challenging as they are visually exhilarating. Last week, audiences were asked to understand the forces of globalisation that shaped a royal wedding dress in the Théâtre National de Strasbourg’s multimedia tour de force, Lacrima.This week the pioneering Polish director Łukasz Twarkoswki brings his much feted Rohtko (the misspelling is deliberate), to investigate a real-life forgery scandal in which New York gallery, Knoedler & Co, sold almost 40 faked Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Like fellow New Yorker, Lee Miller, Lee Krasner changed her given name, the better to be accepted into what she called "The Boys Club" of 20th century Modern Art. Like Miller, she was known more for her working and romantic partnership with a major artist – for Man Ray, read Jackson Pollock. And like Miller, Lee Krasner is now belatedly acknowledged as a major artist in her own right – though she does not have a solo Tate show, as Miller does this Autumn (at least not yet). We open on her working in her Long Island studio, surrounded by her paintings, canvases that you can’t quite place – Read more ...