Theatre
Rachel Halliburton
Shakespeare’s Prince Hal may have rejected Sir John Falstaff as a symbol of his misspent youth, but the real-life monarch Queen Elizabeth I couldn’t get enough of him. Accounts vary of who precisely commissioned The Merry Wives of Windsor – or as some might call it, Falstaff III – but a key factor was known to be Elizabeth’s desire to see him in love.Shakespeare’s response to the commission was as fresh and frothy as a tankard of ale on a summer’s evening, short on soul and heavy on slapstick. Director Sean Holmes – who rousingly kicked off the Globe’s summer season with his Wild West-style Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Near the start of Chloë Moss’s latest play, Run Sister Run, one character tells his wife to “Calm your nerves”. A classic moment of emotional illiteracy perhaps, but given the heightened nature of the drama’s opening scene, it does also seem like an instance of unconscious self-reflection.For this is a story that starts off with high intensity and never really relaxes, one that dashes, stumbles and leaps through a variety of profound psychological states. And one that also has a troubled past. Originally opening in Sheffield in March 2020, with a different director and a different cast, its Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The corset is an unlikely star of the latest Lynn Nottage play to arrive at the Donmar Warehouse, 2003’s Intimate Apparel. After the more male-dominated Sweat and Clyde’s at the same address, this is a personal piece about the lot of Black women, inspired by Nottage’s discovery of an old photo of her great-grandmother Ethel.She set about excavating all she could about Ethel, but there wasn’t much in print about Black women of the time. She knew Ethel was born in Barbados in 1870, arrived, alone, in New York City at 18 and married a man she had corresponded with while he laboured on the Panama Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Many years ago, reviewing pantomime for the first time, I recall looking around in the stalls. My brain was saying, “This is terrible, the jokes are lame, the acting execrable and the set garish.” My eyes were saying, “These kids are loving it, their parents are liking it enough, and the cast are having a great time.” There was joy everywhere in the house, so who was I to play The Grinch?That memory went through my mind standing at the box office 90 minutes before the curtain, surrounded by merch aimed at the coach parties being disgorged outside. An American family from central casting – Read more ...
Gary Naylor
I think my problem is that when I should have been listening in school assemblies or RE lessons, I had the Tom Tom Club’s joyous “Wordy Rappinghood” buzzing through my mind. That experience has given me a lifelong aversion to phrases like “The Word was made flesh”, the gospel of St John proving somewhat less than indispensable for me so far. Curiously, that quote, coming very early, marked a high point for two reasons: the novelty of the lip-synch approach had yet to wear off and genuinely interesting insights into the origins, power and unique qualities of speech communication were offered. Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Sarah Kane is the most celebrated new writer of the 1990s. Her work is provocative and innovative. So it seems oddly unimaginative to mark the 25th anniversary of her final play, 4.48 Psychosis, by simply recreating the original production, with the original actors and the original production team in a joint Royal Court and Royal Shakespeare Company venture. Sadly this is typical of our reboot culture, which prefers the old to the new, nostalgia over experiment, but it does feel like a wasted opportunity. After all, when David Byrne, artistic director of this venue, was head of the Read more ...
David Nice
It amuses me that Dubliners dress up in Edwardian finery on 16 June. After all, this was the date in 1904 when James Joyce first walked out with Nora Barnacle and, putting her hand inside his trousers, she “made me a man”. So it’s National Handjob Day. But Bloomsday too, celebrating the jaunts of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom over 24 hours around Dublin, the song of a great city in Ulysses.This year, four adaptations proved how Joyce is to be heard and acted out, perhaps creating an even more vivid impression than simply reading him. The little company of actors with big ambitions called Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The tag “the most Tony-nominated play of all time” may mean less to London theatregoers than it does to New Yorkers, but Stereophonic, newly arrived at the Duke of York’s, deserves the accolade wherever it plays.It has nothing to do with the Welsh band Stereophonics, though everything to do with typical rock band behaviour. Playwright David Adjmi hasn’t named the one we are watching, a band recording an album in 1976 that will make them megastars, as Rumours did for Fleetwood Mac, a band notoriously riven with breakdowns and divorces. But the internecine spats Adjmi’s group members engage in Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Older readers may recall the cobbled together, ramshackle play, a staple of the Golden Age of Light Entertainment that would close out The Morecambe and Wise Show and The Generation Game. Mercifully, we don’t have grandmothers from Slough squinting as they read lines off the back of a teapot in this show, but there are still too many callbacks to those long-forgotten set pieces of Saturday night telly.There’s a lot of effort put into creating a 1950s Cold War vibe in Emma Rice’s adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, but that jokey 1970s tone overpowers set design, costuming, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The safe transfer of power in post-war Western democracies was once a given. The homely Pickfords Removals van outside Number Ten, a crestfallen now ex-PM and family mooching about, for once trying not to be on camera, it's a tabloid front page cliché. Or the pomp and circumstance on Capitol Hill, cold, crowded and celebratory, a rebuke to the slab-faced gerontocracy, back yet again to survey Moscow’s Red Square parade.Shakespeare knew that such displays concealed dramas both political and personal and poured that knowledge (and a whole lot more) into Hamlet, state and court disintegrating Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There’s an old theatre joke. “The electric chair is too good for a monster like that. They should send him out of town with a new musical”. The UK equivalent of touring a nascent production in Albany and Ithaca in the hope of a Broadway transfer, is to to play one of London’s fringe venues. Few come with the pedigree of The King’s Head, now fully established in its new, only marginally less cramped, basement accommodation off Upper Street. Can Martin Storrow’s very personal, American developed, six-years-in-the-making musical find a crock of gold at the end of its rainbow at its Read more ...
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Bridge Theatre review - Nick Hytner's hit gender-bender returns refreshed
Helen Hawkins
It’s a sign of the inroads that the term “immersive” has made in theatreland that it now gets jokily namedropped at the Bridge inside Shakespeare’s actual text, when Duke Theseus tells his new bride Hippolyta not to flinch when the Rude Mechanical playing Moon shines a bright light in her eyes: “It’s immersive.”Is it? I prefer the traditional term for this production’s technique of having a “pit” full of standing audience members who are relentlessly shepherded from raised platform to raised platform. Which is “promenade”. It’s as old as the medieval Mystery plays. But predictably, younger Read more ...