Theatre
Helen Hawkins
As reports come in of theatre audiences behaving badly, slumped drunkenly in the aisles, gorging on noisy food and wrestling with their latest smartphones, it’s refreshing to see that kind of behaviour safely onstage, and played for big laughs. Surprisingly, perhaps, this mayhem comes courtesy of Noel Coward.The redoutable Menier has found another gem to polish after Nancy Carroll’s superb revival of Pinero’s The Cabinet Minister and its exuberant The Producers: a 100th birthday edition of Noel Coward’s Fallen Angels. Roundly denounced for its vulgarity and loose morals at its debut, the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Hail the spirit of the dance. And of acting. And of driving and flying. At a time when new writing is clearly in decline, and the most successful shows are adaptations or revivals of the classics, the National Theatre returns to one of its big hits from a year ago, thrillingly recast. Unsurprisingly, it’s an adaptation of a popular book of yesteryear: Kendall Feaver’s version of Ballet Shoes, Noel Streatfeild’s classic 1936 coming-of-age novel about three adopted sisters who go to drama school. Set in a fossil-filled crumbling house in Cromwell Road, the plot is about the absent-minded Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Over the past few years, the National Theatre has specialised in trilogies. End is the final play in both playwright David Eldridge’s outstanding trilogy and in this venue’s former director Rufus Norris’s Dorfman programme. Like Roy Williams and Clint Dyer’s Death of England trilogy, Eldridge’s cycle – Beginning (2017) and Middle (2022) – says as much about the state of the nation as it does about the personal lives of its characters. Starring Saskia Reeves (familiar from Slow Horses) and Clive Owen, this two-hander explores the emotional landscape of a couple making plays for a final parting Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Did you know that women watch porn? That they wank? Shock. Horror. Dismay. If you really are surprised by this non-revelation then maybe you need to get a ticket to see Sophia Chetin-Leuner’s Porn Play at the Royal Court’s studio space. But, wait a minute, it’s sold out already. Maybe because it stars Ambika Mod (remember her from Every Brilliant Thing @Sohoplace, or Netflix’s One Day?). Anyway, this show is West End bound so you’ll definitely get a chance to see it – its in-the-round staging would work well @Sohoplace. But while Mod is the draw, what’s the play about?
Mod plays Ani Read more ...
aleks.sierz
New writing for the theatre is good at taking us into the darkest of places – and there are few more painful environments than prisons and mental institutions. Places where agony radiates off the walls, and anguish is in the air we breathe. So it’s a real challenge for Sophia Griffin, in her debut play, After Sunday, at the Bush theatre, to takes us on just such a journey into an unforgiving world of distress, disappointment and despair. If the result is not completely successful, it does have an excellent cast who deliver some powerfully moving moments.
Set in a secure unit, basically a Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Hamilton may have helped the West End recover from The Covid Years, but it carries its share of blame too. Perhaps that’s not strictly fair on some of its spawn, but do we get Coven without that musical behemoth? If not, this one’s on you Lin-Manuel.
We’re back in the early 1600s, though not in music and speech, natch. Shakespeare had written the (literally) bewitching A Midsummer Night’s Dream 15 years earlier and The Tempest, with a necromancer as its protagonist, two years prior, but, in 1612 and again in 1633, children were denouncing their families for witchcraft. Of course, as is the Read more ...
Heather Neill
Perspectives on Shakespeare's tragedy have changed over the decades. As Nonso Anozie said when playing the title role for Cheek by Jowl in 2004, white actors once "concentrated on their perception of what a black man is". Laurence Olivier, whose 1964 performance in polished ebony make-up was once the gold standard for the part, famously observed black dock workers to learn their gait and mannerisms.Since the 1980s, as numerous actors of colour have tackled the role, the importance of Othello's race has shifted further from the centre of productions. At the National Theatre in 2013, Adrian Read more ...
Gary Naylor
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what’s so very different about Belfast and Glasgow, both of which I have visited in the last few weeks, compared to, say, Manchester or Birmingham. Sure, there’s the architecture and the accents, but it’s more than that. To find Glasgow's Citizen’s Theatre, I typed "Gorbals Street" into Google Maps. I looked down for a minute on a bus in Belfast, and when I looked up, the Falls Road had become the Shankhill Road, the (in)famous murals rather contrasting. For an Englishman, these places come freighted with a history of transgression, even insurrection, and, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Alan Hollinghurst's 2004 novel The Line of Beauty finds a distinct beauty all its own in this long-awaited Almeida Theatre premiere, the play's linearity a decided jolt after the more jagged new writing in which this venue has specialised of late.Returning to the Almeida for the first time in over 25 years, the director Michael Grandage brings a shimmering melancholy to a theatrical bildungsroman that plunges us headlong into the often terrifying hedonism of the 1980s. Jack Holden's astute adaptation keeps pace with the societal savagery of the novel, but not before reminding us that Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Hedda Gabler is a Hollywood star of The Golden Age – or rather, she was. She walked off the set of two movies into a five-film deal and didn’t come back. Millions watched her, but only a very select few saw her, and that paradox became insupportable. Those in the know were privy to a secret that would, in 1948 under the USA's racist Hays Code and its British mimicking, ruin her, professionally and personally. She knows that her Sword of Damocles swung closer every day, even behind drawn curtains.Tanika Gupta’s spectacularly successful reimagining of Ibsen’s classic is more than an "After…" Read more ...
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 ...