Theatre
aleks.sierz
Following the huge success of Benedict Lombe’s Shifters, which transfers soon to the West End, the Bush Theatre is riding high. Now this venue’s latest exploration of the Black-British experience tells a really lively and emotionally deep story about Nigerians in London.Faith Omole, whose first and as yet unperformed play, Kaleidoscope, won the prestigious Alfred Fagon Award last year, arrives with bang with My Father’s Fable. Since Omole is also an actor, and has appeared in the Channel 4 comedy, We Are Lady Parts, it’s no surprise that her debut is both a comedy and an acute look at the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Every day this week I’m watching a football match, and now – after April’s production of Lydia Higman, Julia Grogan and Rachel Lemon’s Gunter – comes another football stage drama to tear up the turf at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs.This time it’s the turn of Stewart Pringle’s The Bounds, which opened at Live Theatre in Newcastle in May and has now arrived in London. Set in 1553 in Northumbria, during the Whitsun football game which can last for days and has a pitch that is many miles long, this is a play with a high metaphorical content which not only articulates a distinctly northern Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Lincoln Center’s Bartlett Sher is back in town to direct the Barbican’s latest summer blockbuster, Cole Porter’s classic Kiss Me, Kate. It’s an energetic, largely intelligent production of what is at base a screwball comedy with great songs. With a book by Samuel and Bella Spewack, the main focus of this 1948 piece is a backstage will-they-won’t-they?, as a one-year-divorced couple, company boss / male lead Fred Graham (Adrian Dunbar, pictured below with Block) and his leading lady, Lilli Vanessi (Stephanie J Block), confront each other in a musical version of The Taming of the Shrew. Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
A recent Crime Survey for England and Wales estimated that 2.1 million people in the UK had been victims of domestic abuse in the year ending March 2023. So it makes sense that director Jude Christian has addressed this tricky, troubling Shakespeare play by amplifying the genuine trauma caused by Petruchio’s “taming” of his wife Katharina.What makes less sense is her simultaneous playing up of the script’s pantomime aspects, so that the stage is filled with everything from a giant teddy bear to a costume that makes Petruchio look like the Cookie Monster (pictured below). Often The Taming of Read more ...
Gary Naylor
You have to tiptoe around the edge of the set just to take your seat in the Park’s studio space for Lidless Theatre’s Miss Julie. There’s a plain wooden table, a few utensils on it, wooden chairs and a small cabinet – not much, but, we’re smack inside this 19th century country house kitchen, uncomfortably close to discomfiting passions. It may be the longest day outside, but we're in a dark, claustrophobic space in more senses than one.The cook, Christine, hair tied back ferociously, is cooking up poison to effect an abortion for the house dog, but there are sounds of revelry in the Read more ...
Heather Neill
It is a truth universally acknowledged that an actor tends to take a sympathetic view of the character he inhabits, however morally questionable. Adrian Lukis, who played the handsome, roguish militiaman, George Wickham, in Andrew Davies's (still delightful) 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen's most popular novel, is no exception.Looking back 30 years later at how Wickham was treated in Pemberley and Longbourn, Lukis allows him to put his own spin on events then and to give a glimpse of what he has made of life subsequently.Jane Austen's characters are so vivid they frequently jump off the page Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There are many women whose outstanding science was attributed to men or simply devalued to the point of obscurity, but recent interest in the likes of DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin and NASA’s Katherine Johnson has given credit where credit is due. Marie Curie was never diminished, the woman with two Nobel prizes and the discoveries of radium and polonium on her CV needs no such championing, a figure known by schoolchildren the world over. And yet there’s something that stirs in the back of the mind, something that complicates a story of stunning success often against the odds. When the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Alice Childress’s Wedding Band has arrived at the Lyric Hammersmith like an incendiary bomb, a weapon that casts a bright light over its target even as it ferociously burns it. It’s a piece about conflict – between racial groups, but also within them. The date is 1918, as the US is settling into its role as a combatant in the First World War. But it’s also the story of other wars hotting up in the year the play was written, 1962, a violent decade for Americans both in southeast Asia and, increasingly, on the home front. In both arenas, Blacks will be disproportionate participants, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Times change, people don't. Does a knighthood sit well on a man who shags anonymous strangers in the Blue Lion out of hours? Emlyn Williams played his own fruity lead when his play Accolade premiered in 1950 - Bill Trenting, a hugely successful writer of seamy bestsellers who (improbably) is about to be knighted and (still more improbably) won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but who will be publicly exposed for his double life enjoying promiscuous stranger-sex in Rotherhithe bars, if he doesn't pay his blackmailer. Sir William, as everyone must now get used to calling him, is on arguably Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Faye is okay. Or, at least she says she’s okay. But is she really? And, if she really is, like really okay, why is she seeking help for her insomnia?As Irish playwright Ciara Elizabeth Smyth brings her ward-winning Fringe Festival play, Lie Low, to the Royal Court as part of a nationwide tour, audiences will have a chance to see for themselves what the matter with Faye is. And something definitely is. In an early scene of this intense 70-minute psychological thriller, the thirtysomething woman is asking a doctor for help: she can’t sleep and we soon discover why.About a year ago, Faye came Read more ...
Heather Neill
Prolific playwright James Graham was born in 1982, the year Alan Bleasdale's unforgettable series was televised. From Nottingham rather than Liverpool, Graham recognised in his own surroundings the predicaments of the main characters, the bonds between them and the importance to them of place and of shared stories. An admirer of Bleasdale's work, he had already acknowledged the older writer's influence on Sherwood, his television crime drama pulsating with continuing divisions caused by the miners' strike.Billed as "Alan Bleasdale's Boys from the Blackstuff by James Graham", and arriving on Read more ...
Kris Nelson
LIFT 2024 is nearly here. It’s a festival that will take you on deep and personal journeys. We’ve got shows that will catch your breath, spark your mind and rev up your imagination. There’s adrenaline too. It’s international theatre for your gut. With three world premieres and a host of London debuts, this year’s LIFT takes on two themes. The Personal is Epic explores deeply personal stories of justice, migration, and protest, amplifying them to mythic proportions. Meanwhile Play the Future, Play the Past is a strand of shows that reframe history and imagine the future. We start the Read more ...