Theatre
Feast, Young VicSaturday, 02 February 2013
Feast aims high. Very, very high. Steered by experienced and much-lauded director Rufus Norris, five playwrights and one choreographer seek to make a fusion of physical theatre, dance, onstage music, straight drama, abstract poetic dialogue,... Read more... |
Old Times, Harold Pinter TheatreFriday, 01 February 2013
This production of Old Times is a big deal. It’s the first of Harold Pinter’s plays to be performed in the theatre renamed after him; it marks the reunion of director Ian Rickson and Kristin Scott Thomas, after their exhilarating Betrayal; and it... Read more... |
Anjin: The Shogun and the English Samurai, Sadler's WellsFriday, 01 February 2013
There is never a dull moment in this three-hour historical epic, even if it is not always clear what is going on. Directed by Gregory Doran, of the RSC, Anjin follows the 17th-century story of William Adams, the first Englishman to land in... Read more... |
Quartermaine's Terms, Wyndham's TheatreWednesday, 30 January 2013
A wise man once said of Simon Gray's plays - and he wrote a lot of them - that they often have a lot of talk and very little action. And so it is with his 1981 tragi-comedy, set in the staff room of a language school for foreign students in... Read more... |
Port, National TheatreTuesday, 29 January 2013
Over the past decade or so, Simon Stephens has emerged as one of Britain’s premier playwrights. As well as being a prolific penman, with three volumes of collected plays already in print, he has been tutor on the Royal Court’s Young Writers course... Read more... |
Gruesome Playground Injuries, Gate TheatreTuesday, 29 January 2013
Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo put him in the running for a Pulitzer in 2010. Deservedly so. Set during the Iraq war and featuring a talking tiger (played with verve on Broadway by Robin Williams), it was inventive, funny and... Read more... |
Mare Rider, Arcola TheatreMonday, 28 January 2013
It’s like waiting for a number 19 bus. You hang around for half an hour then two come along at once. So it is just now with plays either written by women or featuring women’s lives. While Amelia Bullimore’s sparky three-hander Di and Viv and Rose is... Read more... |
The Turn of the Screw, Almeida TheatreSaturday, 26 January 2013
There are quite a few laughs in this new adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, Henry James’s chilling and ambiguous novella, written in 1897 after he was told a tale of children possessed by their deceased household servants. As a result I found... Read more... |
Di and Viv and Rose, Hampstead TheatreThursday, 24 January 2013
When feminism was really cool, female playwrights would write flatshare dramas about a group of women, each of whom was representative of a certain way of life. The play title would just be a list of their names. The classic example is Pam Gems’s... Read more... |
The Accrington Pals, Royal Exchange, ManchesterThursday, 24 January 2013
On 1 July 1916, the battalion of Lancashire volunteers recruited from Accrington was all but wiped out in about 20 minutes as they took on the task of attacking the village of Serre on the opening day of the Battle of the Somme. Out of 700 men, 235... Read more... |
Metamorphosis, Lyric HammersmithTuesday, 22 January 2013
While Kafka specifically declined to indicate exactly what kind of creature Gregor Samsa becomes in his horrific overnight transformation, translators of the novella have gone for a variety of options: bug, beetle, cockroach or vermin. In this stage... Read more... |
The Judas Kiss, Duke of York's TheatreTuesday, 22 January 2013
David Hare's 1998 play wasn't terribly well received when it was first produced by the Almeida; several critics regarded it as a thin work, weakly directed by Richard Eyre, and opined that Liam Neeson was miscast in the role of Oscar Wilde. Now... Read more... |
