Theatre
aleks.sierz
Since when has new writing become so passionless? Mike Bartlett is one of the country’s premiere playwrights and his new play, Unicorn, is about radical sexuality and desire. It’s already made a big splash by being put straight on in the West End, yet the experience of watching it feels like a real turn off. It’s a masterclass of bad writing and unemotional acting.And this despite a star cast, led by Nicola Walker and Stephen Mangan, which means fans of Abi Morgan’s BBC series The Split are buying tickets in droves. They will be delighted by some of Bartlett’s spiky dialogues, although I Read more ...
aleks.sierz
I always advocate in favour of more sci-fi plays, and over the past decade there have been a gratifying number of them. But one essential element of any futuristic fantasy must be its power to convince. And it is precisely this that is missing from Lauren Mooney and James Yeatman’s More Life, currently in the studio space of the Royal Court.These two theatre-makers, who run the Kandinsky theatre company, have had a good light-bulb moment: how would you, and your nearest and dearest, cope with the reality of eternal life? Set in 2075, the play shows how Bridget – who was killed 50 years Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Russia.It’s impossible to be ambivalent towards that word, that country, indeed that idea, one so very similar to our own, yet so very different. You feel it in Moscow, where I spent a week exactly 40 years ago. Like London, it is a vast city, imperial in ambition, a true believer in its past and present, but then, as now, uncertain of its future. It is also not like London at all, crowded with strange buildings, cold beyond description, peopled by frightened men and women. There’s an irony in the fact that I learned more about my own home in seven days spent 1800 miles away than I did in Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwrights who work for decades often acquire a moniker. In the case of Howard Brenton, who began his career as a left-winger in the turbulent 1970s, the name is The History Man. Over the past decade, or so, he has written brilliantly about historical figures such as, among others, Anne Boleyn, Charles I, Lawrence of Arabia – and many more.Now it’s the turn of Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, two titans of the allied side in the second world war. Churchill in Moscow reunites Brenton with Tom Littler, the successful artistic director of the Orange Tree Theatre in their sixth Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Annie Ernaux’s semi-autobiographical book Les Années charts a woman’s life across time and space, history and memory, through what the author describes as a collective consciousness. Perhaps the most satisfying thing about Eline Arbo’s superb adaptation is that it projects this idea through, fittingly, one of the most truly collective performances London has seen in years. More than that, the communal embrace extends to the audience, in ways that are not always comfortable – the life portrayed, from 1941 to 2006, has its share of hardship – but add to the play’s resonance and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
We live in tragic times given over to cataclysmic events that require outsized emotions in return. That may be one reason to account for the uptick, therefore, in Greek drama, which includes not one but two Oedipi, various adaptations of Antigone, and the arrival on the commercial West End of the obvious companion piece to Oedipus, namely Elektra – the K in the title perhaps nodding to a landscape in which people exist to kill. The star attraction is Oscar winner Brie Larson, who certainly deserves credit for taking on this part in the harsh glare of the commercial theatre, not least in Read more ...
Lauren Mooney
It started with a Guardian long-read. I’m ashamed to admit it since so many shows could say the same, but that was the beginning.It was the summer of 2022, and James [Yeatman] and I had just finished making two shows back-to-back with our company, Kandinsky. It was a pretty brutal return to making work after the doldrums of lockdown, with first The Winston Machine at New Diorama Theatre (NDT), then SHTF at the Schauspielhaus in Vienna, beset by the Omicron wave of Covid. We’d had two rehearsal processes blown apart by illness, were totally exhausted, and felt like maybe we’d never have Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The opening scene of the Old Vic’s Oedipus is dominated by a giant backdrop of a skull-like face, eyes shut and rock-like. It belongs to the actor playing Oedipus, presumably, Rami Malek. This is as near to a close-up of the title character as we get.Co-directing, Matthew Warchus and choreographer Hofesh Shechter have created a claustrophobic Thebes, dazzled by the sun and water-less. Its only features are a microphone stand and a lit dais, both of which rise from the floor as needed. To begin with, the backdrop lighting turns a flaming tangerine, fading to a pallid lilac by the end. For long Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Your response to Barney Norris’s one-man play, based on David Foenkinos’s bestselling novel as translated by Megan Jones, probably depends on which of the Gens is yours. The Gen Zs might turn a nose up, Joanne Rowling something of a discredited figure in their eyes. Millennials will identify straight away with Martin, the protagonist, whose life is "stalked" by Harry Potter. Gen Xs will catch the peculiar and unexpected impact of parenthood on a complicated, if hitherto stable, middle-class life. And, Okay Boomers, what about us? I was reminded of Kenneth Williams, Bernard Cribbins and, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The phenomenal global success of Six began when two young writers decided to give voices to the wives of a powerful man, bringing them out of their silent tombs and energising them and, by extension, doing the same for the women of today. Its extraordinary popularity is a siren call to find forgotten women and reclaim their personalities, to give a theatrical second life to those to whom the historical record has denied a first. Indeed, Oh! Mary, also about President Lincoln's wife, is proving that point in New York now. Something of that desire lies behind painter, writer, playwright, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
In a world tainted with racism and homophobia, the Bush Theatre is something of a refuge from prejudice. As one of the most queer friendly venues in London, it’s no surprise that this theatre is now staging babirye bukilwa’s … Blackbird Hour, a play which explores the experiences of a black queer woman who finds herself on the edge.This is the playwright’s first play, and it was shortlisted for a number of prestigious prizes in 2019 and 2020, so its staging is long overdue. However, perhaps the fact that it’s a tough watch has something to do with this delay. With a running time of about 85 Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If you saw Upstart Crow on television or on stage in the West End, you’ll know the schtick of Sheldon Epps’ dazzling show Play On! Take a Shakespearean play’s underlying plot and characters and relocate them for wit and giggles. “Make it a musical“, you say? Okay, but who’s going to do the score, who’s going to dare to follow in the footsteps of Lenny and Steve, of Cole, of Elton (okay that one came a bit later)? “Duke Ellington!” Right. You’ve sold it.And away we go, the opener suggesting Twelfth Night on 42nd Street as a kid full of moxie and talent pitches up at The Cotton Club in the Read more ...