Theatre
Gary Naylor
What a delight it is to see the director, the star, even the marketing manager these days FFS, get out of the way and let a really strong story stand on its own two feet. Like a late one at the Brixton Academy itself, this is a helluva night out.After a transgressive, life changing trip to London from school in Scotland to see Chuck Berry at The Rainbow, Simon Parkes wanted to be a rock’n’roll star. He was soon spitting out the silver spoon (but he never lost the easy charm and ironclad self-confidence that clings to the privately educated, a trait he cheerfully calls upon as and when) and Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Rosamund Pike is back. For her first stage appearance since 2010, when she played Hedda Gabler in Adrian Noble’s production for Bath Theatre Royal, the Hollywood superstar has chosen Inter-Alia, Suzie Miller’s follow up to her smash hit Prima Facie, which starred Jodie Cromer and whose London staging was at the Harold Pinter Theatre in 2022.With the same production team, but now at the National Theatre, Miller returns to her chosen milieu – English legal professionals – but now zooms in on the family scene of top judge Jessica Parks (Pike). As before, this is mainly a monologue, running at Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Michael Shannon's long legs reach to the stars – or perhaps one should say the moon – in the Almeida's hypnotic revival of A Moon for the Misbegotten, the late Eugene O'Neill play that hasn't been seen in London since Kevin Spacey and Eve Best led an Old Vic revival of it in 2006. And Shannon, seen in London early in his career Off West End in Tracy Letts's Bug, makes an occasion of a play that I, for one, am always happy to welcome back to the repertoire.Sure, there will always be those for whom O'Neill goes on too much, and for too long, and who resist the heightened tendency to Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"It all starts with a snap," or so we're told early in the decidedly un-snappy Burlesque, which spends three hours borrowing shamelessly and tediously from far-superior sources to arrive at an artistic dead end.Preceded by acres of press heralding the results as a train crash, this summer production at the Savoy (a place-holder for Paddington, due in the autumn) may please those astonished that Nate Bertone's set can make it through the evening without toppling over. But the overall effect of this adaptation of the 2010 film of the same name is wearying in the extreme and indicative of the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Now 45 years in the past, its dazzling star gone a decade or so, The Long Good Friday is a monument of British cinema. Its extraordinary locations, caught just before London’s Docklands were transformed forever, speaks to a past world. But the wheeler-dealer, Harold Shand, played by Bob Hoskins at the peak of his powers, left many ancestors, from his near contemporary, Arthur Daley, to a few who have ascended to the highest Offices of State.One such, conjured into life by Robin Hawdon in the early 90s, is Arthur Bullhead (of course, Arthur Bullhead) owner of The Bunty, moored on the Thames Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The first rule for brown people, says the main character – played by BAFTA-winner Adeel Akhtar – in this highly entertaining dramedy, is not to let white people know how badly non-whites treat each other. This provocative statement comes towards the end of Shaan Sahota’s debut, The Estate, and with hilarious irony it perfectly describes the main vibe of the family conflict at the heart of the play.Staged in the National Theatre’s Dorfman space, and one of the final productions programmed by former artistic director Rufus Norris, the play tells the story of a British Sikh politician whose Read more ...
Gary Naylor
What am I, a philosophical if not political Marxist whose hero is Antonio Gramsci, doing in Harvey Nichols buying Comme des Garçons linen jackets, Church brogues and Mulberry shades? It’s 1987 and I do wear it well though…Chiara Atik’s comedy crosses the Atlantic bearing prizes and venom and could hardly have fetched up anywhere more suited than leafy Richmond’s Orange Tree Theatre. A once Lib-Dem / Conservative marginal seat has swung decisively to the former and seems unlikely to swing back rightwards any time soon. In the programme, the playwright says she wants “to challenge us… to take a Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Before Luigi Illica wrote the libretti for Puccini’s Tosca and Madama Butterfly, he had joined the composer as the librettist in a race to stage the first production of La Bohème. The race was against Ruggero Leoncavallo, a composer Illica had once collaborated with on a libretto – for Puccini, his Manon Lescaut.In the snakepit of the Milanese opera business in the late 1800s, these tangled connections were standard, as dozens of young composers fought for prominence to be the new Verdi, whose portrait hangs on Leoncavallo's wall. That there would be rival productions based on Henri Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The 2024 play at the National Theatre that put writer Beth Steel squarely centre-stage has now received a West End transfer. Its title taken from an Auden poem urging people to dance till they drop, it’s probably the most passionate show in that locale, and definitely the lewdest.It opens with the female equivalent of locker-room talk as the women of an extended family in what was once Notts and Derby pit country bicker and banter while preparing for the wedding of young Sylvia (Sinead Matthews). Topics of conversation range from the naughtiness of next door’s "sex pond”, ie hot tub, to the Read more ...
Heather Neill
The National Health Service was established 77 years ago this month. Resident doctors are about to strike for more pay, long waiting lists for hospital treatment and the scarcity of GP appointments continue to dog political conversation, while the need for reform of the system provides a constant background hum. The idea for a national health service free at the point of need was always ambitious and remains challenging, but the NHS has become a cross between a religion and a beloved – if problematic – family. And it still deserves to be celebrated as it is here, even ending with Read more ...
David Nice
Anyone seeking local genius in an international festival should look no further than the annual Ravenna concerts from Riccardo Muti – Neapolitan by birth, Ravennate by adoption – with his Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra. Well, maybe a little further if you have basic Italian: 2025 sees the completion of a second walkabout theatre trilogy involving citizens of Ravenna and beyond, masterminded by two greats equal to Muti in their own unique ways, Ermanna Montanari and Marco Martinelli.The first, spellbinding adventure, a Dante triptych, I discovered in its second year, a reinvention of Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Well, I wasn’t expecting a Dylanesque take on "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'" as an opening number and I was right. But The Zim, Nobel Prize ‘n all, has always favoured The Grim American Songbook over The Great American Songbook and writer/director Conor McPherson’s hit "play with music" leans into the poet of protest’s unique canon with his international smash hit, now back where it all began eight years ago.It remains a curious and unique piece, at once overly familiar (take you pick from Williams, Steinbeck, Miller or even Chekhov as inspirations) but also continually surprising. The songs Read more ...