Theatre
theartsdesk
The premise of Jonathan Bate’s one-man play, directed by Tom Cairns, is simple but surprisingly effective: a trawl through the seven ages of Shakespeare, from babe to box, told through a mixture of biographical narrative illuminated by relevant scenes from Will’s work.Shakespeare – The Man From Stratford, Assembly Hall ****The aim is to fathom how a boy from an archetypal English market town became the world’s most celebrated wordsmith. We see how his life and work entwined; how the rhetoric and wordplay he learned in the schoolroom grounded him in the language of power and politics; how the Read more ...
David Nice
Sometimes people leave you halfway through the wood. Sondheim meant that in a life-and-death kind of way, but it applied literally to this ingenious show at the autumnal August preview I attended. Some folk thought Act One’s knitting-up of polyphonic fairy-tale lines really was the happy end. Others found unseasonable damp gnawing their bones and slunk off to comforting warmth. Don’t go, I pleaded, it gets deliciously darker. Yet given a production even the teensiest bit less incisive than Richard Jones’s 1990 London premiere staging, I found myself doubting both the quality of that darkness Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“It isn’t a surprise to me, but it is a surprise to him that it isn’t a surprise to me.” On a Monday morning in the rehearsal room at Shakespeare’s Globe, actors and actresses are getting into character. “You’re acting panic,” clarifies the director, “and when you hear his voice it’s real panic.” Exactly how funny is The Merry Wives of Windsor in the 21st century?On the evidence of the Shakespeare’s Globe production, which opened two summers ago to huge acclaim and audiences to match (pictured below), very funny indeed. It is now returning to the Globe before heading off around the globe in Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
For most people a 25th anniversary is cause for celebration – a party, a dinner, maybe a few speeches. If you are musical theatre phenomenon Les Misérables however, festivities operate on an entirely different scale. London struggles to support two opera houses, yet this anniversary year will be playing host to three separate (and briefly simultaneous) productions of Boublil and Schönberg’s classic show, including an all-star, cast-of-thousands spectacular at the O2.Skipping over what such excess says about the tastes of London’s theatre-goers, it also says much about the show itself. An all- Read more ...
Matt Wolf
You can't move in London for American performers, whether it's the Yankee contingent of The Bridge Project at the Old Vic, or the presence at various addresses of Mercedes Ruehl, Jeff Goldblum, Glee star (and erstwhile Tony nominee) Jonathan Groff, and, of course, pretty well the entire cast of Hair. But incomplete though that run-down is (one mustn't forget the silvery voiced Sierra Boggess in Love Never Dies or David Hyde Pierce's stern-faced mien in La Bête), few visitors have fired up the public as has Whoopi Goldberg, at the Palladium for three weeks to boost the musical, Sister Act Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A good ghost story never ends. Its twirling impetus sets a narrative top in motion that continues to spin indefinitely in the mind, propelled by the force of a listener’s imagination. As good ghost stories go, The Woman in Black is among the most insidious, having reduced audiences of metropolitan adults to whimpering, night-light clutching infants since 1987. With a young pretender – Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman’s Ghost Stories – now installed in the West End, it seems a good time to return to this dusty fixture of London theatre, and discover whether the sunken-eyed, white-faced woman in Read more ...
aleks.sierz
What sound does a screaming foetus make? It’s not the kind of question that most theatre plays provoke you to ask, but Mike Bartlett’s new piece about climate change is not a normal play. At the end of the first half of this rollercoasting epic, dazzlingly directed by Enron maestro Rupert Goold and which opened last night, the image of a foetus crying out in the womb seems perfectly reasonable. It’s that kind of show; fuelled by a wildly imaginative vision, when it ignites it burns like phosphorous. And, believe me, that changes your perceptions.The main theme is climate change, and Bartlett Read more ...
David Nice
Everybody in the business says don’t think Sondheim is easy. I’ve seen galas where big names stumbled in under-rehearsed numbers, and last night Bryn Terfel and Maria Friedman slipped and almost fell on the same banana skins that had done for them in a hastily semi-staged Sweeney Todd. Not enough to matter, though, and they rightly brought the house down. And the show as a whole? Not quite a so-great-you-want-to-get-up-and-join-in event like last year’s MGM Prom, but still a stylish and slick homage to the great man in his 80th birthday year.The rhythms, the patter, the pathos, the pace Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After a 20-year absence from British TV, Sir Tom Stoppard returns to the small screen next year with his five-part adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's novel, Parade's End, on BBC Two. When the BBC approached Stoppard (pictured) with the idea two years ago, he had never read the book, but says that it "has been my preoccupation since then. The title covers a quartet of books set among the upper class in Edwardian England, mostly from 1911 to the end of the Great War."Central to the story is the love triangle between the aristocratic Christopher Tietjens, his wife Sylvia and the young suffragette Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's very hard to ever know what to expect from Alan Moore, the Mage of Northampton. The author of era-defining comics like Watchmen, V For Vendetta and From Hell has long maintained that art and magic are one and the same, and since the mid-1990s his works have often tended to be long and complex explications of various occult principles, which while eye-opening can often lose readers in all their baroque unfoldings. However, his 1996 novel Voices of the Fire, showed his writing could work powerfully untethered from the panels of comics, so I was cautiously optimistic for his new prose-art- Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
With summer now fully upon us, and tourists flocking to the West End, it seems a good time to lift the bonnet on the tireless engine of London’s long-running hit shows. Over the next six weeks theartsdesk will be giving six of London’s hardest-working and longest-running classics – Les Miserables, The Lion King, Chicago, Billy Elliot, The Woman in Black, and of course The Phantom of the Opera – the once-over, checking to see whether all really is still running as smoothly and efficiently as it once was.There’s a country and western song (whether spoof or real it’s hard to tell) that goes by Read more ...
David Nice
Never have the Tudors seemed so real. After decades of TV and film characters keeping us at a teasing, ermined distance, Hilary Mantel's dazzling novel Wolf Hall brings it all to life as never before, and the Globe's still-running Henry VIII has vigorously built on that. But the Stuarts? You wouldn't expect James I to dominate in Howard Brenton's new play ostensibly about a tragic-heroic vision of the Tudor queen. Yet Brenton may have started something: the bisexual transvestite intellectual Scot with Tourette's and epilepsy, as spellbindingly played by James Garnon, could become the new Read more ...