Theatre
Gary Naylor
Pete Waterman, responsible (some might prefer the word guilty) for more than 100 Top 40 hits, said that a pop song is the hardest thing to write. Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl back – all wrapped up in three minutes. Benedict Lombe’s Shifters takes longer – 33 Kylies longer – but it pulls off the same devilishly difficult trick and, as with the best earworms of the 1980s, it’s likely to stay in your head for years. Dre(am) is at his Nana’s wake when, late and unannounced, Des(tiny) is suddenly in the room, the impact of her arrival akin to his being hit in Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Before the Plays That Went Wrong and the multi-role six-hander Operation Mincemeat, there was Patrick Barlow’s adaptation of The 39 Steps: four actors on a collision course with feasibility.Barlow is a comedy hero for creating the National Theatre of Brent in 1980, where as preening thesp Desmond Olivier Dingle he performed two-handers with a rotating door of partners that included Jim Broadbent. They considered no topic too epic, from the Zulu Wars to the Greatest Story Ever Told. Barlow’s 2005 version of John Buchan’s 1915 spy thriller, filtered via Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 film, Read more ...
David Kettle
REVENGE: After the Levoyah, Summerhall ★★★★★ The Jews have had enough. After decades – centuries, in fact – of suspicion, name-calling, finger-pointing and violent persecution, they can’t even leave their Gants Hill or Barkingside flats, where London smears into Essex, any more. In 2019, though, things have really come to a head thanks to one figure: Jeremy Corbyn. Something needs to be done.Step in twins Dan and Lauren, plus dodgy ex-gangster Malcolm Spivak, who steals the show with his wide-boy pronouncements at their granddad’s funeral. Have the unlikely siblings got the balls to act Read more ...
David Kettle
Òran, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★ Glasgow-based theatre company Wonder Fools are having a particularly busy Fringe. Alongside a revival of their excellent football drama Same Team at the Traverse Theatre, their far smaller, more intimate show Òran has company co-artistic director Robbie Gordon deliver a blistering solo performance inside a shipping container at the back of the Pleasance Courtyard. It’s far better than that probably sounds.And while Òran might open with smiles and camaraderie – with audience members greeted and assigned micro-roles, for example – things quickly get far Read more ...
Gary Naylor
On opening night, there’s always a little tension in the air. Tech rehearsals and previews can only go so far – this is the moment when an audience, some wielding pens like scalpels, sit in judgement. Having attended thousands on the critics’ side of the fourth wall, I can tell you that there’s plenty of crackling expectation and a touch of fear in the stalls, too. None more so than when the show is billed as a new musical.By the interval (much before that if it’s a hit), you’re locating the production on a multi-dimensional spectrum, assessing its component parts (acting, plot, design), its Read more ...
David Kettle
Ni Mi Madre, Pleasance Dome ★★★★ Philip Larkin offered a famously pithy assessment of parents’ impact on their offspring’s future lives. It’s one that Brazilian/Ecuadorian/Italian/Dominican writer and performer Arturo Luíz Soria would no doubt sympathise with – at least partly – in the solo show he’s built around memories of his mother. In fact, Ni Mi Madre is very much the older woman’s show: Soria transforms himself into Bete, the larger-than-life diva, harridan and force of nature who raised him, taking us through her three husbands and countless kids, her extravagant neediness and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
More surely than any other London stage, the Globe has opened up our theatrical perspective on different languages. Its triumphant “Globe to Globe” 2012 season presented the Shakespeare canon in 37 different linguistic interpretations.Among those varied treats from, literally, across the globe, the British Sign Language (BSL) production of Love’s Labour’s Lost, from London’s Deafinitely Theatre, was the only one that did not cross national borders; instead, it crossed the boundaries of theatre itself.It’s a direction that the Globe has continued to explore over the years, with the opening Read more ...
David Kettle
Bellringers, Roundabout @ Summerhall ★★★★ Dystopian climate-crisis dramas seemed ten-a-penny at the Fringe a few years back, but they’re far thinner on the ground in 2024. Which makes this deliciously elusive, oblique debut drama from Daisy Hall all the more intriguing, and valued.Clement and Aspinall appear in monk-like cassocks in a church belfry, apparently summoned by a fast-approaching storm. It’s their job to ring the tower’s bells, perhaps to alert residents of their Oxfordshire village to the impending deluge, or even act as some kind of community-protecting talisman simply by Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Before a word is spoken, a pause held, we hear the seagulls squawking outside, see the (let’s say brown) walls that remind you of the H-Block protests of the 1980s, witness the pitifully small portions for breakfast. If you were in any doubt that we were anywhere other than submerged beneath the fag end of the post-war years of austerity, the clothes confirm it. And a thought surfaces and will jab throughout the two hours runtime: “How different are things today in, say, Clacton?”But Ultz’s design work has grounded Harold Pinter’s second play firmly in pre-Beatles England, where even Elvis Read more ...
aleks.sierz
At one point, in John Fowles’s 1977 novel The Magus, the guru character in the story compares sexuality before and after the 1960s. He says that although “young people can lend your bodies now, play with them, give them as we could not”, there is also a loss – “a world rich in mystery and delicate emotion”.Sexual restraint has its own tender feelings. It is this emotional landscape that lies at the heart of Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan’s debut play, Peanut Butter & Blueberries, at the Kiln Theatre. It’s a contemporary Muslim love story in which the two lovers never even touch each other.Set in Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Two boys in east London, one Black, one white, grow up together, play pranks at school, then decades later have a tempestuous falling out. That’s the main narrative arc of these twin plays, but it accounts for none of their extraordinary richness and the superlative acting they entail. These are monologues, a genre where dramatic excellence is primed to go right off the scale: think the powerful solos of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, the haunted storytellers of Conor McPherson’s plays, Simon Stephens’s Sea Wall. Recast after their runs at the Dorfman, the trio of plays is directed by Clint Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Adam Riches: Jimmy, Summerhall ★★★Adam Riches has long been famed as a performer who throws himself into his physical comedy – so much so that during the Fringe run of a previous comedy show he broke his leg. And now, with this one-man play he is on stage in tennis whites, running around and slamming down imaginary balls to a percussive soundtrack as he tells the story of Jimmy Connors, the self-proclaimed world's greatest tennis player.It's a fascinating story that even some keen tennis fans might not know. Connors retired at the age of 43, playing on well past his best days. But during Read more ...