Theatre
Hand to God, Vaudeville TheatreTuesday, 16 February 2016
There will be blood. And expletives. And puppet sex that makes Avenue Q look positively monastic. But perhaps most shocking of all is that beneath the eye-wateringly explicit surface of Robert Askins’ provocative farce, which began life Off-Off-... Read more... |
Uncle Vanya, Almeida TheatreMonday, 15 February 2016
Uncle Johnny instead of Vanya, a passing reference to sharia law, and nary a samovar in sight: surely this can't be the Uncle Vanya that has long been a cornerstone of the British theatre, especially in a new version from its take-no-prisoners... Read more... |
Nell Gwynn, Apollo TheatreFriday, 12 February 2016
As a subject for drama, theatre history is always popular in the West End. Between Mr Foote’s Other Leg, which has recently closed at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, and Mrs Henderson Presents, which opens soon at the Noël Coward Theatre, comes Nell... Read more... |
The End of Longing, Playhouse TheatreFriday, 12 February 2016
Jack is an alcoholic. Stephanie is a whore. Joseph is stupid. Stevie is a broody neurotic. These identifiers are proudly proclaimed in the first minute of Matthew Perry’s debut play, but if you weren’t paying attention, fear not: they will be... Read more... |
Toast, Rose Theatre, KingstonFriday, 12 February 2016
If one says, accurately, that Richard Bean’s Toast is a comedy about Hull’s lost bread industry, trade unions and the poor working man, you will possibly yawn and turn the page. But it is no more just about that than Henry IV, Part II is about Tudor... Read more... |
Battlefield, Young Vic TheatreSaturday, 06 February 2016
Legendary director Peter Brook makes theatre that teaches audiences to be human. Now 90 years old, he brings his latest project to London from Paris, where he has been based at the Bouffes du Nord since quitting the UK more than 40 years ago. Called... Read more... |
The Winter's Tale, Sam Wanamaker PlayhouseFriday, 05 February 2016
For a play about silence – its uncanny ability to tell the truth, to “persuade when speaking fails” – The Winter’s Tale is remarkably wordy. Of the sequence of late romances only Cymbeline comes close to the dense and elliptical verbal patterning we... Read more... |
Rabbit Hole, Hampstead TheatreFriday, 05 February 2016
The death of a child is an unnatural loss. There’s no reassurance that the departed lived a full life, rather the jagged edge of one cut short. In the case of Becca and Howie, it’s also nonsensical: their perfectly healthy four-year-old son struck... Read more... |
The Master Builder, Old VicThursday, 04 February 2016
Demons, trolls and dead souls have a habit of latching onto Ibsen's bourgeois Norwegians. Surely the best way for actors to handle them is to keep it natural, make them part of the furniture and, in Dostoyevsky's words, "render the supernatural so... Read more... |
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, National TheatreWednesday, 03 February 2016
"One... Two... You know what to do": that coolly delivered rehearsal intro from a trombonist called Cutler (Clint Dyer) could serve as a synoptic appraisal of the simply overwhelming National Theatre revival of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. The play in... Read more... |
Red Velvet, Garrick TheatreWednesday, 03 February 2016
Lolita Chakrabarti’s impassioned debut has only gained topicality since its 2012 Tricycle incarnation. Trevor Nunn’s all-white Wars of the Roses and #OscarsSoWhite, among others, have fanned its flames, while quips about a paranoid Russian regime... Read more... |
Jeepers Creepers, Leicester Square TheatreMonday, 01 February 2016
You might think that the combination of a play about one of the funniest comics of the second half of the 20th century, written by his biographer and directed by a member of Monty Python would be a winning one. But sadly Robert Ross's Jeepers... Read more... |
