Theatre
The Invisible, Bush TheatreThursday, 09 July 2015
In the age of austerity, it’s getting harder and harder to avoid cliché. Especially well-meaning cliché. For example, all cuts to welfare are bad; we must defend government support of the needy at all costs. But clichéd ideas rarely make good drama... Read more... |
A Number, Young Vic TheatreWednesday, 08 July 2015
The reason that Caryl Churchill is Britain’s best living playwright is that her work is endlessly enquiring and peerlessly intelligent. When she wrote this play about the subject of human cloning – which had its premiere at the Royal Court 2002 with... Read more... |
Sinatras on Sinatra: 'He was a lonely soul'Wednesday, 08 July 2015
Frank Sinatra is back in London in the centenary of his birth. His disembodied voice is returning in a show called Sinatra: The Man & His Music. At the London Palladium, where he made his British debut 65 years ago, there’s to be a 24-piece... Read more... |
Orson's Shadow, Southwark PlayhouseTuesday, 07 July 2015
The latest transatlantic transfer is curiously esoteric, concerning as it does an obscure period in the lives of two great men: Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles. The centenary of the latter’s birth makes this an apt moment for the European premiere... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Director Michael LonghurstMonday, 06 July 2015
Is there more than one Michael Longhurst? As sometimes happens in theatre, a rising young director seems to be everywhere at once. His calling card is the modestly universal Constellations. Directed with clarity and simplicity, Nick Payne’s romantic... Read more... |
Measure for Measure, Shakespeare's GlobeFriday, 03 July 2015
If Simon McBurney’s Measure for Measure for the National Theatre and Declan Donnellan’s recent Cheek By Jowl production mined deep for darkness, Dominic Dromgoole’s for the Globe is content to skim the play’s sunny surface – the comedy manqué that... Read more... |
The Importance of Being Earnest, Vaudeville TheatreThursday, 02 July 2015
Geoffrey Rush has done it, Gyles Brandreth has done it, Stephen Fry came close to doing it, and now David Suchet is giving it a go – donning drag and a perpetually disgusted expression to play everyone’s favourite drawing-room gorgon, Lady Bracknell... Read more... |
{150}, National Theatre Wales/Theatr Genedlaethol CymruWednesday, 01 July 2015
The brackets around {150} are ambiguous, almost apologetic. The 150th anniversary of Y Wladfa (The Colony), the semi-legendary "oasis of Welshness" in the Patagonian wilderness has given occasion in Wales for the celebration of a most unlikely story... Read more... |
Positive: Introducing a comedy about HIV/AIDSMonday, 29 June 2015
Of all the art forms, theatre has been most attentive to the story of HIV/AIDS. Leading the way in America there was Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985) and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1991). In the UK the most resonant exploration of the... Read more... |
The Trial, Young VicSaturday, 27 June 2015
Kafka and Jones, the names above this little shop of horrors, would be a marriage made in off-kilter theatreland had the Czech genius written any plays. He didn’t, so Nick Gill has made a well-shaped drama out of the assembled fragments of which The... Read more... |
Keeping up with the JonesesThursday, 25 June 2015
Gruff Rhys has called it the Great Welsh Media Gang-Bang. This year everyone who is anyone (who can get funding) has hopped on a plane for Argentina to follow in the footsteps of the 150 Welsh men, women and children who emigrated to Patagonia 150... Read more... |
The Seagull, Regent's Park Open Air TheatreThursday, 25 June 2015
Hamlet instructs his players to "hold...the mirror up to nature”, advice taken literally in this arresting 120-year anniversary staging of Chekhov’s homage to the Bard. Jon Bausor’s set is dominated by a vast angled mirror, offering an appropriately... Read more... |
