Theatre
aleks.sierz
Is the theatre of the absurd dead? In today’s world, when cruel and crazy events happen almost daily, the idea that you can satirize daily life by exaggerating its latent irrationalities seems redundant. For this reason, perhaps, revivals of plays by Eugène Ionesco have been rather infrequent in recent years.His masterpiece, Rhinoceros, which was first staged in 1959 and is now revived at the Almeida Theatre, does present a challenge. Its central point is simple: conformity results in monstrous dictatorship. So how do you make this interesting for an audience today? Director and translator Read more ...
Gary Naylor
It’s a greater accolade than a Nobel Prize for Literature – one’s very own adjective. There’s a select few: Shakespearean; Dickensian and Pinteresque. Add to that list, Wildean. That’s all the more remarkable in the light of Oscar Wilde’s personal ruin in the years leading up to his death, aged 46, ostracised from London, self-exiled in Paris. And that reputational recovery is no recent occurrence, no reclaiming of a martyred icon in these more enlightened times (though it is), but predates the remarkable social changes of the last two decades. Wilde’s rehabilitation rested solely on the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
That friend you have who hates musicals – probably male, probably straight, probably not seen one since The Sound of Music on BBC 1 after the Queen’s Speech in 1978 – well, don’t send them to Charing Cross Theatre for this show. But that other friend you have – enjoyed Hamilton, likes a bit of Sondheim, seen a couple of operas – do send them. They’re not guaranteed to like Stiletto, but they’ll find it interesting at worst and, whisper it because it's a new musical, they might actually thank you! We’re in 18th century Venice, pleasingly evoked by Ceri Calf's atmospheric set design and Anna Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Motherhood is a high stress job. Ask any woman and they will tell you the same: sleepless nights, feeding problems and worry. Lots of worry. Lots and lots. Writer John Donnelly, who has also experienced the stresses of parenthood, devotes his new play, Apex Predator, to turning this everyday event into a vampire story.Staged at the Hampstead Theatre, the play is original and initially appealing, and stars Sophie Melville and Laura Whitmore in the main roles, but soon loses its gloss. It’s his first stage play for 12 years and, because I have liked his previous work such as The Pass and The Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In Italy, they did it differently. Their pulp fiction tales of suburban transgression appeared between yellow covers on new stands and spawned the influential Giallo movies of the Sixties and Seventies, gory exercises in an offbeat, highly stylised film language – cult movies indeed.The USA took its transgressive tales of domestic non-bliss and drew upon the language of Hollywood film noir to make short television plays, often lacing the arsenic in the tea with a soupçon of black comedy. They branded it with the master of suspense, the man who could delve into psychologies that other Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Resurrecting the origins of old rock stars is becoming quite the thing, After cinema’s Elton John, Freddie Mercury, Bob Dylan and upcoming Bruce Springsteen films, theatreland has staged Tina, A Night with Janis Joplin and MJ, and the Kinks musical Sunny Afternoon is touring again soon. On a more intimate scale, now there's Wilko: Love and Death and Rock’n'Roll, about the Dr Feelgood co-founder and rock guitarist extraordinaire who outflanked cancer and became a star of Game of Thrones.Wilko comes with a script full of Wilko zingers by Jonathan Maitland and a star turn from the actor/musician Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Creatives – or creatures? In the 1660s, women – having been banned from working as actors in previously more puritanical decades – finally arrived on the stage in London theatres. Although they were sometimes scorned as “playhouse creatures”, often condemned as monsters and whores, they were also seen as demi-goddesses, capable of enchanting their audiences.Their multi-faceted world is well evoked in April De Angelis’s 1993 play, now revived at the Orange Tree Theatre, which gives a robustly feminist account of thespians in the Restoration reign of the Merry Monarch, Charles II Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
With qualifying about to begin for the soccer World Cup, and England sporting a brand new manager, it’s fitting that James Graham’s Olivier-winning celebration of the previous boss returns to the National. Unusually for a play, Dear England comes with a new ending, one that wraps up Gareth Southgate’s eight-year tenure, to now include the fourth major tournament in which his team competed – and the final near-miss in an accomplished, laudable, but for many frustrating period. I didn’t see the first iteration, but it appears that this fictionalised account of the Southgate Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Can Francesca Moody do it again? Fleabag’s producer has brought Weather Girl to London, after a successful run at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, mirroring the path taken by Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s creation. But the new show is a much tougher assault on modern mores.Comparisons will be inevitable, though, as both shows are comic monologues, delivered in that conspiratorial way to the audience that became a Fleabag staple. And Stacey, immaculately portrayed by Julia McDermott, is equally personable, though even more out of control. She’s a weather girl for a Fresno TV station, a superslim blonde Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Before there was Barbie: The Movie, before there was Legally Blonde, there was Clueless, the Valley Girl movie that measured out life in designer handbags at the same time as signalling the grit behind the glitter. A pert and pampered response to Jane Austen’s Emma, the 1995 film defiantly whooshed to the top of film charts and launched the sale of millions of tartan miniskirts, breathing new life into the teen movie as it did so.So it’s not hard to see why, 250 years after Jane Austen’s birth, producers have decided to pep up the West End with this musical version of Clueless, complete with Read more ...
aleks.sierz
“The exercise of fantasy is to imagine other ways of life,” says one of the role-players during a Dungeons & Dragons marathon, because “without understanding how others might live, I ask you, how will we ever understand ourselves?” It’s a good question, and writer and director Jack Bradfield, in his enchanting new play The Habits, has a good stab at answering it.Staged in the Hampstead Theatre’s suitably eerie underground studio space, on an in-the-round stage above which hovers a scary flying dragon, the play explores human subjects such as grief and desire in a game-playing context Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
When Yasmina Reza’s cerebral play Art arrived in London in 1996, we applauded it as a comedy. Now another French hit, Jean-Philippe Daguerre’s Adieu Monsieur Haffmann, has landed, and the genre confusions could start all over again.This is a story set in Occupied Paris, from May 1942 to VE Day in 1945. In the exodus of French Jews, Joseph Haffmann’s wife and children have reached Geneva. But he has stayed put to wind up his jewellery business and hatch his own escape plan: which is to sign over his shop to his trusted assistant, Pierre (Michael Fox), while he hides in the cellar. Pierre Read more ...