Theatre
alexandra.coghlan
“Tragedy reminds us how to live,” declares Moira Buffini’s democratically elected heroine, Eurydice. It’s a reminder the playwright herself and her latest work, Welcome to Thebes, is eager to provide. Following on the well-worn heels of last season’s Mother Courage at the National comes a new play that once again places women in the front line. Leaving to Brecht the barren fields of Western Europe, Buffini sets up her stall in the fertile dramatic ground of contemporary Africa – a place where gang-rape and murder are just the prologue.Within this political reaction chamber Buffini collides Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The poster for Sucker Punch, Roy Williams's ambitious new play about boxing and race during the schism-prone age of Margaret Thatcher, promises a sort of black British Raging Bull: There in one graphic image are the blood and sweat, the bravado and the pain, of a sport that for self-evident reasons makes it to the stage relatively rarely. How do you set actors' juices flowing eight times a week (and risk their jawbones dislocating) in a way that the cinema can manage with comparative ease? One answer arrived at by the director Sacha Wares is to ramp up the atmosphere, in conjunction with a Read more ...
james.woodall
What kind of play is Frank Wedekind's Lulu? The answer is a very odd one, with a fractured writing history. Wedekind subtitled his original five-act exploration of raw femininity, in 1894, "A Monster Tragedy", then divided it into two: Earth Spirit and Pandora's Box. As becomes clear in Headlong Theatre's fresh, winning version of the whole thing, it really is two plays - the first about sexual adventure and rebellion, the second about commerce and corruption; yet staging it over one evening is quite logical, even if its brutal ending is peculiar and resolves nothing (no spoiler here - oh all Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Perhaps it's because the Almeida had a major hit with Festen (well, everywhere but Broadway) that the Scandinavian back catalogue of movies seems every bit as ripe for plunder as is mainstream Hollywood when it comes to feeding musicals on Broadway and the West End. But a high-toned source doesn't begin to make a satisfying evening out of this stage premiere of Through a Glass Darkly, a harrowing film shot in an emotionally devouring black and white that in the theatre, shorn of Ingmar Bergman's cinematic chiaroscuro, comes across as hollow and banal.You can imagine the appeal of the material Read more ...
aleks.sierz
One of the many absent friends in contemporary British drama is the play that tackles questions of religious belief. At a time when more and more people take their faith more and more seriously, this lacuna at the heart — or should that be soul? — of new work is surely regrettable. But perhaps the tide is now turning: in May, Drew Pautz’s Love the Sinner at the National examined belief and sexuality; now Australian playwright Anthony Weigh, whose new play opened last night, wrestles with death and memory.The set-up is simple. Following a horrific massacre at a quiet infant school, somewhere Read more ...
mike.poulton
The RSC’s Morte d’Arthur is not what you’d call a rushed job. John Barton, the company’s advisory director, has been on a mission to see the work performed for at least 50 years. The director Greg Doran had also been wanting to stage Malory’s epic for many years. He asked me to produce a version when we were working together on the York Mystery Plays in the Minster, to mark the Millennium. We’ve been putting it together ever since, and now it's finally opening.All things Arthurian are very popular in this country. The myth of Arthur has a potency. This is, after all, the epic of England. It Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the musical theatre (Paradise Found, anyone?), along comes The Fantasticks, and we are returned to square one. How can this be, I hear you asking, given the record book entries clocked up by a Tom Jones/ Harvey Schmidt confection that ran Off Broadway continuously for over four decades before closing in 2002? (It then reopened at a midtown Manhattan venue in 2006.) Well, what may seem charming and whimsical in one context can be wince-inducing in another. Let's just say that I arrived at The Fantasticks infinitely willing to surrender to its Read more ...
David Nice
A pall of ennui hangs over the 1930s drawing room of the National’s latest Rattigan revival, as deadly as the boredom its burnt-out party people all dread. The trouble is, I’m not sure to what extent the playwright intended it.To write about the etiolated and the unfocused, the lost souls of the inter-war years, needs energy and clarity. Here, though, some of us went away feeling muddy-headed irritation rather than sympathy at the end of a long evening. That might partly be ascribed to a script that thrusts forward melodrama when it needs truth, but a less than perfect Lyttelton ensemble didn Read more ...
David Nice
Angela Lansbury is the wittiest, least self-regarding and most articulate octogenarian actress I've ever come across. That much seems clear from her half-hour interview with Mark Coles on the estimable, if sometimes rather narrow-agenda-ed BBC World Service arts programme The Strand. At 84, Lansbury has been having a whale of a time venting the laid-back disapproval of old Madame Armfeldt in Sondheim's A Little Night Music. The run at Broadway's Walter Kerr Theatre with this cast, which of course also features Catherine Zeta-Jones as her actress daughter, comes to an end on 20 June and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Usually a seasonal home for the pastel-coloured delights of drawing-room farce, musical comedy and the odd Shakespeare pastoral, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre is this year offering a programme of rather darker hue. With Macbeth to follow later in the season (not to mention Stephen Sondheim’s deliciously off-white fairytale musical Into the Woods) it was with a new production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible that things kicked off last night. The post-interval nightfall – so perfectly timed for the Act Two tribulations of a comedy – became the stifling moral blackness of a benighted Salem Read more ...
mick.gordon
The central character in Shakespeare's final play, The Tempest, is a betrayed Duke called Prospero. Prospero means omniscient panic: an apt name for an all-powerful creator of tempests and general wreaker of revenge. However, the profound appeal of this 400-year-old play, which I am directing in the Oxford Shakespeare Company's site-specific open-air touring production this summer, lies not in the narratives of malignant magi and lustful monsters, power-craving lords and their wine-craving servants. Rather it resides in the force of the external stories and characters as metaphor.All theatre Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The late Simon Gray, who died in 2008, lived a ragged, bruised and battering life. I usually think of him as the John Prescott of playwrights, except that he was miles more articulate, and eventually rewarded by a CBE rather than a peerage. Anyway, he was pugnacious and out of step with playwriting trends. In an age of lefty state-of-the-nation dramas, Gray explored the emotions of upper-middle-class characters and their difficulties with communication. Although he could be irascible, and his published diaries are scorchingly rude, the default position of his plays is an ironic melancholy, as Read more ...