Theatre
Helen Hawkins
Keeley Hawes onstage is something to look forward to, so rare are her appearances there. In Lucy Kirkwood’s new play, The Human Body, we are given a double treat: Hawes, plus her black and white screen image, projected all over the Donmar’s back wall from cameras roaming around the action. Up there she really does look as if she has just stepped out of Brief Encounter.Kirkwood toys with that 1945 film, and the look and sound of late-1940s British cinema in general, for what is from one angle a romance, from another a plea for the NHS. It’s 1948 and free health care is in the final stages of Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If Mark Twain thought that a German joke was no laughing matter, what would he make of a German comedy? That quote came to mind more than once during Patrick Marber’s production of Marius von Mayenburg’s 2022 play, Nachtland. I know it’s supposed to be funny (and it often is), but should I really be giggling? That's hardly an uncommon feeling watching a black comedy, but there’s something in the rhythms of Maja Zade’s translation and the bleakness of the Berlin period, Bowie inflected soundtrack that undercuts the guilty pleasure with an insistent Teutonic froideur. With Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Hot on the heels of Brigid Larmour’s updating of The Merchant of Venice to the East End in 1936, a spirited new musical across town at Southwark Playhouse is tackling the same topic: the impact of rising British fascism in the same era, culminating in the clash between locals with Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) on the streets of Bethnal Green.What Larmour couldn’t do as thoroughly as Cable Street does is give a kaleidoscopic view of the terrain. The East End of the 1930s presented here is home to two waves of immigrants in particular: Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe’ Read more ...
aleks.sierz
One island off the coast of Spain has more cultural oomph than all the rest put together. I’m talking about Ibiza, the sun-soaked, music-happy and drug-friendly paradise for anyone in their roaring luved-up twenties who wants a break that will fry their minds – and imprinting them with memories of sun, sex and ecstasy for years to come.Fair enough, but what happens when a group of guys decide to recreate this experience in their fifties? Well, that’s the subject of actor Neil D’Souza’s new comedy, Out of Season, which is currently playing in the Hampstead Theatre’s Downstairs studio.Set in Read more ...
aleks.sierz
For the past ten years, Black-British playwrights have been in the vanguard of innovation in the form and content of new writing. I’m thinking not only of writers with longer careers such as Roy Williams and debbie tucker green, but also of Inua Ellams, Arinzé Kene, Nathaniel Martello-White, Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini and Tyrell Williams.And every year they are joined by other talents. One such is Benedict Lombe, who won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2022 for her debut monologue, Lava, and now returns to the Bush Theatre with her latest, a 100-minute two-hander which is exquisitely written Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It’s an unhappy time to be staging Shakespeare’s problematic play, given its antisemitic content, so hats off to adaptor-director Brigid Larmour and actor Tracy-Ann Oberman for persevering with this updated version, now in the West End. Their ambition to make Shylock a female anti-fascist has been hard won, though.The choice of location (not Venice) and date for the update is crucial here – the eruption of violence in the East End occasioned by the rise of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), led by Oswald Mosley. Oberman’s Shylock lives on this frontline, a gutsy widow running a moneylending Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Is there a healthier sound than that of laughter ringing round a theatre? There are plenty of opportunities to test that theory in Tinuke Craig’s riotous revival of The Big Life, two decades on from its first run at this very venue. Much has changed in that time, specifically the coming to light of the appalling mistreatment of the Windrush Generation at the hands of a callous, racist state. What might have felt then like an unnecessarily heavy-handed political undertow now feels, if anything, underplayed. If that’s the grit in the oyster, the substance of this feelgood musical is a Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In 2017, two years after Hir premiered, Taylor Mac was awarded a “Genius Grant” and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for drama. The new production of Hir at the Park demonstrates why. It’s a rich, provocative piece about the ideas that drive us now, thrown into a blender and blitzed.Mac is a Swiss Army knife of a creative force: performer, singer/songwriter, writer, performance artist, director, producer. His preferred pronouns are judy/judy’s – not a reference, he has insisted, to Judy Garland but to the custom of gay men to disguise their boyfriends by calling them Judy or Mary. (That said, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
You do not need to be Einstein to feel it. If the only dimension missing is time, 75% of a place’s identity can invade your very being, hollow you out, replace your soul with a void. It happened to me at Auschwitz and it’s happening to Samuel at Cape Coast Castle, Ghana.Not at first. We meet him as our host, full of bonhomie, not just reading his script, but revelling in communicating his love of history to the tourists who come to the last staging post for slaves before the dreadful Middle Passage to the Americas. Disillusion sets in. Some visitors are ticking off a bucket list, others Read more ...
Mert Dilek
Less than three years after her magnificent Macbeth, Yaël Farber returns to the Almeida with another Shakespeare tragedy. Her take on King Lear (main picture) offers a full-bodied, slow-burn version of this devastating drama, where Danny Sapani’s masterful performance as Lear sears the stage.While bringing a modern-dress aesthetic to Shakespeare’s play, Farber’s production sets great store by a poetic minimalism that foregrounds the expressive powers of her outstanding cast. On a stage surrounded by a string curtain and occasionally featuring only a few chairs, a piano, and a metal globe Read more ...
Mert Dilek
Doom and gloom, we are told, may have abounded in the classical underworld, but Hadestown suggests otherwise. Returning to London five years after its run at the National Theatre, this time with a slew of Tony Awards, this bracing musical proves its mettle as a heart-warming and atmospheric feast of deeply soulful tunes.With music, lyrics, and book by American singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell, Hadestown reimagines familiar tales from mythology through exquisite songs and eloquent stagecraft. The story centres on the tragic romance between the bard Orpheus and Eurydice, as king Hades and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Real life is a helluva lot scarier right now than you might guess from the performative theatrics on display in the new West End version of An Enemy of the People, which updates Ibsen's 1882 play to our vexatious modern day.Matt Smith is in fine, furious form as the crusading Thomas Stockmann, but the combative landscape is here so predictably writ large - its emotions so preordained - that Thomas Ostermeier's production feels as if it's running in place: an opinion piece online would have made the same points far more quickly. Ostermeier, the German director/adaptor working on this Read more ...