Theatre
aleks.sierz
OMG! I mean OMG doubled!! This is amazing! Or is it? Can Alice Birch’s Romans: A Novel at the Almeida Theatre really be the best play on the London stage, or is it not? Can it be both brilliant and exasperating? At one and the same time? Probably. Maybe. Okay, now you’re in the zone.What’s instantly compelling is the sheer ambition of this dream-like family epic. And I mean epic. Across something like a century and more, Birch shows us what happens to the three sons of Henry Roman, a Victorian gentleman whose brother John is a high-ranking soldier, and whose family live in an English Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Unexpectedly, there’s a sly reference to James Joyce’s Ulysses interpolated into Act One (in case we hadn’t caught the not so sly one, naming a leading character Leopold Bloom). While that’s a nice callback from brash commercial Hollywood to the high art salons of Paris, it also links the works. If Ulysses is the book whose legend persists despite so few people having read it, is The Producers its cinematic equivalent? No matter. Like the chorus of “Yellow Submarine” it’s so embedded in popular culture that it feels like we’re born knowing it. There’s Bloom and Bialystock Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The Bush is likely to continue its fine recent run of hit plays, with this funny, poignant, culturally authentic and beautifully acted two-hander, about an estranged mother and daughter struggling to heal old wounds. Bridgerton’s Golda Rosheuvel and Black Panther/Marvel alumnus Letitia Wright showcase their stage chops, as Joyce and Erica, who come together to honour their dead matriarch by taking her ashes back to her homeland in Guyana. The journey challenges them not only to repair their own relationship, but break a cycle of compromised parenthood. Writer Emma Dennis- Read more ...
aleks.sierz
I love irony. Especially beautiful irony. So I’m very excited about the ironic gesture of staging a show with no words at the Royal Court, a venue which boasts of being the country’s premier new writing theatre. Billed as “a new experiment in performance”. Cow | Deer uses only sound to evoke the lives of two animals, one domesticated, the other wild.Created by director Katie Mitchell, writer Nina Segal and sound artist Melanie Wilson, the piece is performed using the talents of a quartet of performers and Foley artists (Foley being sound effects usually added post-production to films, and so Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The Ukraine war is not the only place of horror in the world, but it does present a challenge to theatre makers who want to respond to events that dominate the news. And which make us all feel powerless, including our leaders. Instead of staging a play such as Bad Roads, Ukrainian playwright Natal’ya Vorozhbit’s savage 2017 account of the conflict, the Royal Court has chosen a meta-theatrical and metaphorical response. Adapted from the 2019 book of poems by Ukrainian-American author Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic is a contemporary fable of war, atrocity and resistance. A collaboration Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Laura Benanti has been enchanting Broadway audiences for several decades now, and London has this week been let in on the secret that recently charmed playgoers at this summer's Edinburgh Festival: the comedienne perhaps best known in some circles for her wicked impersonations of Melania Trump can hold her own in a solo show that mixes self-deprecation and determination in equal measure.The first quality is there in the show's faintly damning subtitle, Nobody Cares, which was offered up by one of Benanti's two young daughters - her children so clearly the apple of their mother's eye that you Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Ever wondered if there was one moment when in-yer-face theatre started? Well, yes there was; there was one play that kicked off that whole 1990s sensibility, a drama that had a direct influence on Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill and Jez Butterworth, and an ongoing inspiration for countless others. That moment was January 1991, and the play was Philip Ridley’s The Pitchfork Disney.Now revived in the suitably claustrophobic subterranean space of the King’s Head Theatre, the legendary 90-minute real-time story is set in an East End flat where Presley and Haley Stray, 28-year-old “shut in” twins, are Read more ...
Heather Neill
The title refers to a line in Henry VI, Part III: the future Richard III boasts that midwives cried, "Oh Jesus bless us, he is born with teeth", a sign of both his monstrosity and his readiness to snarl and bite.Modern technological analysis suggests that the three Henry VI plays might well have been written by Shakespeare in collaboration with Marlowe, an idea which started American playwright Liz Duffy Adams on an imaginary journey into their possible relationship, set against the dangerous world of Elizabethan politics. "Born with teeth" is both a phrase the collaborators might have Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The cult film that director Theo van Gogh left behind when he was killed in 2004, Interview, has already been remade twice; now it’s back as a stage play, adapted and directed by Teunkie Van Der Sluijs. It’s a modern Oleanna, but with less savagery and more slink: the instructive clashing of two different generations.It opens with a monologue by Pierre (Robert Sean Leonard), addressed to an unseen friend called Theo who is a resident of a “nuthouse”. With grim irony, Pierre tells Theo to stop his incessant talking: Theo is mute. Pierre apparently uses him as a sounding board for all his Read more ...
Gary Naylor
$8.2B. That’s what can happen when you re-imagine Hamlet.I doubt that writer, James Ijames, had The Lion King’s box office in mind when he set out to create a Deep South, black and contemporary version of Shakespeare’s drama of familial dysfunction, but he’s got a Pulitzer on the mantelpiece at home and now a run at the RSC. I suspect he’d have settled for that.We open on a barbecue to celebrate the marriage of Juicy’s mother, Tedra, to her husband’s brother, Rev, after the murder, in prison, of Juicy’s father, Pap. Juicy’s friend, Tio, is larking about, but sees the ghost of Pap and, soon, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Mike Bartlett is, like many writers, a chronicler of both contemporary manners and of the state of the nation. In his latest domestic drama, which premieres at the Donmar Warehouse, he examines our anxieties about food, farming and the environment in a play of ideas that, despite its energy, is more cerebral than emotional.Set in Juniper Rise, a north-west Oxfordshire farm, the story concerns Ruth, a middle-class 40-something who now owns the land together with Lip, a dope smoking radical whose family has farmed in this area for generations. At the start of the action we are Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The Gathered Leaves is set on the tectonic plates of a middle-class family menu reunion, in which three generations grapple with the shifting values of an indifferent world. Adrian Noble’s sensitively observed production investigates what happens when a tyrannical patriarch starts to succumb to dementia, making disorientating demands on a family that till this point has been more concerned with protecting a son suffering from autism.Ten years ago, The Gathered Leaves played at this same venue with a cast that included Jane Asher and her real life daughter Katie Scarfe and Alexander Read more ...