Theatre
aleks.sierz
She’s the most famous young pout in Hollywood. And her first West End appearance has already sparked a media frenzy, making this contemporary version of Molière’s The Misanthrope the hottest ticket in town, with massive advance bookings already guaranteeing anyone associated with the show a credit-crunch-proof Christmas. Of course, I’m talking about Keira Knightley – I mean, who isn’t? But what about the play, which opened last night with a barrage of paparazzi flashbulbs? And how does La Knightley shape up?Written by Martin Crimp, this take on Molière’s 1666 tale about the sourpuss Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It is telling that there were drama critics at the Apollo to review Camille O’Sullivan’s show, The Dark Angel. The half-French, half-Irish woman is ostensibly a singer, but so unique is her delivery that each song is a piece of theatre in its own right. My companion confessed to being just a little scared of O’Sullivan, who has a distinctive look - part vamp, part cabariste, but wholly diva. She described the singer, with her raven hair and a gash of bright-red lipstick, as “a cross between Tracey Emin and Judy Garland”, but soon warmed to her. But then O’Sullivan is a pussy cat, as evidenced Read more ...
james.woodall
He was the biggest hitter in an A-team of mid-20th-century American painters: Jackson Pollock, Barnet Newman, Willem de Kooning. Mark Rothko, born Marcus Rothkovitz in what has become Latvia, was Abstract Expressionism's shaman, its restless thinker and febrile poet, an artist who fashioned from an investigation into the power of pure colour a philosophy of art as potent as Crick and Watson's contemporaneous unravelling of the double helix. Red, John Logan's new play about Rothko, directed by Michael Grandage, is both a tribute and an excoriation: a portrait of the artist as headstrong Read more ...
aleks.sierz
What’s the appeal of the traditional ghost story? Is it the knowledge that while the victims of the tale quake in their boots, you are perfectly safe and grinning like the Cheshire Cat? Or is it because the supernatural gives us a chance to journey into the weird and fearsome corners of our psyche, all the time kidding ourselves that we are just normal human beings? In Michael Punter’s new ghost story, Darker Shores, which opened last night at the Hampstead Theatre, all the rooms of the haunted house story get an airing.It is Christmas 1875, and the setting is Sea House, a suitably isolated Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Passion, pain and loss: they are companions in life more faithful than many a lover. This duo of solo dramas by Stefan Golaszewski, which opened last night in London after success in Edinburgh, turns its perceptive gaze upon them through the eyes of both eager youth and desolate old age. Poignantly, true emotional maturity remains elusive.In the first piece, titled with apt adolescent awkwardness Stefan Golaszewski Speaks About a Girl He Once Loved, it is 1999 and Stefan is an 18-year-old gap-year student doing work experience backstage at The Lion King. He’s hanging out in a pub with his Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Fun! Laughs! Good times!" Anyone remember them? That snatch of lyrics from Sweet Charity, the 1960s musical that lifted Broadway to newly brassy heights and has been frequently revived on both sides of the Atlantic, serves as an apt summation of the Menier Chocolate Factory's latest musical crowd-pleaser, which, like Sunday in the Park with George, A Little Night Music, and La Cage aux Folles before it, surely has the West End in its sights.Those expecting the stuff of revelation from Matthew White's slick staging, choreographed within an inch of its life by Stephen Mear, should think again Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The voice has landed, and what an astonishing sound it makes. I'm referring, of course, to the mighty roar unleashed by James Earl Jones's majestic Big Daddy in the new West End revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof over which this legendary actor rules, much as the Southern landowner he is playing speaks vaingloriously of his "kingdom". When Jones isn't on stage, Debbie Allen's production serves Tennessee Williams's dissection of Mississippi-style "mendacity" sensibly if not definitively. But come the second of the play's three acts, and Jones's roof-raising redefinition of a great role Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The plight of asylum-seekers is no laughing matter, but that doesn’t mean that dramas about the subject have to be worthy, or dull. In fact, young playwright Bola Agbaje’s Detaining Justice, which opened last night, is an exemplary mix of laughter and tears. As the final part of the Tricycle Theatre’s trilogy examining the state of the nation at the end of the new millennium’s first decade, this play confirms the feeling that much of the energy in new writing is coming from black writers.Earlier episodes in the trilogy were Roy Williams’s Category B, a powerful and realistic drama about life Read more ...
sheila.johnston
"I must apologise for talking ten to the dozen," begins Christian McKay with a confidential air. "I do it when I'm nervous. I'm a rookie - I've never done this before. The stars get media training, but I thought, ‘I'm a naturally gregarious person and I'd rather be an open book'." It can't last, one thinks ruefully. McKay has been clocking up column inches, airtime miles and acres of critical raves as a result of his turn in Me and Orson Welles, Richard Linklater's bittersweet romantic comedy set against the backdrop of Welles' revolutionary 1937 Broadway production of Julius Caesar."Me" is Read more ...
aleks.sierz
If it’s not quite the time of year to start making New Year resolutions, then it’s not far off. Everywhere, you can read the signs: bright lights on the main shopping streets, merry cash registers ringing and the sound of yule logs being felled in empty forests. Plus chronic gift anxieties and a grim foreboding about the coming Election Year. In Michael Wynne’s new comedy, The Priory, which opened last night at the Royal Court, a New Year’s Eve party gives us a taste of what’s to come. And that taste is pretty astringent, a bit like Bombay gin laced with cranberry juice and topped off with Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The habit of art - a favourite topic of late, or so it would seem - gets a pummelling in The Line, a sort of Several Decades in the Atelier with Edgar (as in Degas) that would defy even Stephen Sondheim to shake a wordy and dour play into impassioned life. Henry Goodman brings his customary fervour to an assignment whose published text is dedicated to him, but Timberlake Wertenbaker's bitty drama seems like a blueprint for the TV mini-series that in different televisual times would surely lie in wait.Until that happens, we have an Arcola Theatre premiere that is Read more ...
hilary.whitney
Tomorrow sees the opening night of Terry Pratchett’s Nation at the National Theatre. Adapted by Mark Ravenhill and directed by Melly Still, it is the latest in what has become a tradition of epic end-of-year family extravaganzas at the National such as Coram Boy, which Still also directed, and War Horse. But although Pratchett is one of UK’s top selling authors, neither Still nor Ravenhill were familiar with Pratchett’s books until recently. “I was always a bit put off by the covers,” confesses Still. “I’d heard a couple of radio adaptations,” says Ravenhill, “which I enjoyed, but Read more ...