Theatre
Matt Wolf
A 35-year-old gay man has to figure out which way to turn in GHBoy, the Paul Harvard play whose connection to the chemsex world is embedded in its title. Will Robert (Jimmy Essex) settle into a relationship with Catalan university student Sergi (Marc Bosch) 15 years his junior, or will he succumb to the frequently unclad presence of Sylvester Akinrolabu, who plays the various tempters he meets along the way? What about the undertow of danger that has seen numerous men in Robert's stimulant-ready East London midst murdered of late? The grim spectre of serial killer Stephen Port has been Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
One of Marc Chagall’s last commissions was for a stained-glass window in Chichester Cathedral, which channelled his characteristically exuberant spirituality into a response to the verse from Psalm 150, “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord”. One of my earliest cultural memories is going as a schoolgirl to attend the window’s unveiling and seeing for the first time the clashing colours and fusing of folk and experimental art that made him one of the twentieth century’s most distinctive artists.Emma Rice’s ravishing, colour-saturated production of The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk takes Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Classical murder mysteries end with a neat solution — and with the arrest of the perpetrator. Postmodern murder mysteries play games with the genre, turning it upside down and inside out. This film adaptation of What a Carve Up!, Jonathan Coe’s 1994 bestselling novel, is a postmodern crime story — and then some. And then some more. And yet more of more. To say that it’s complicated is probably an understatement (it really is!), but it also has more than a few pleasurable elements, notably the cast: although we only hear their voices, director Tamara Harvey has persuaded Derek Jacobi, Stephen Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Women have an awful time of it in the Greek myths. Raped, abandoned, blamed for murdering people, blamed for not murdering people – you name it, it’s happened to an Ancient Greek woman, and they didn’t even get to talk about it themselves. Ovid picked up on this discrepancy, and, in a rare flash of wokeness, wrote The Heroines, 18 letter-poems from the neglected women of the myths. 15 Heroines, an epic new series of monologues commissioned by Jermyn Street Theatre and streaming this week, is a tricksy, playful adaptation of those letters, written, acted, and (mostly) directed by women. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Broadway tends to be the Darwinian environment where a show's opening night can also mark its closing. But such has been the Covid-prompted fate of the National Theatre's fiery return to the fray that Death of England: Delroy managed 11 performances before shuddering to a lockdown-induced halt following its Nov 4th opening night. The good news is that Clint Dyer and Roy Williams' sequel to last winter's National entry, Death of England, was filmed at that decisive performance for tranmission in due course. The even better news is that the play, and co-author Dyer's direction of it, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Feuds make good theatre. I mean, look at the furious 1970s spat between playwright Lillian Hellman and critic Mary McCarthy. Yikes. So far, I’ve counted three recent stage versions: in 2002 there was Nora Ephron’s Imaginary Friends, followed in 2014 by both Brian Richard Mori’s Hellman v McCarthy and Steven Carl McCasland’s Little Wars, which addresses this feud obliquely and got an Off-Broadway workshop production by Beautiful Soup Theater. It’s now streaming in a new rehearsed reading with a starry all-woman cast led by Juliet Stevenson and Linda Bassett.A bit of background always helps, so Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Call him Ishmael, and the Zimbabwe-born, UK-based writer Zodwa Nyoni has done just that. That's the name of the solo character in Nyoni's slight but undeniably affecting 50-minute solo play Nine Lives, which caps a season of monologues at the Bridge Theatre that has functioned as so much cultural balm in these parched times. First seen in Glasgow in 2014 and later at London's Arcola, Alex Chisholm's production serves as a de facto companion to the Bridge season's similarly themed An Evening with an Immigrant, since that is precisely what Nine Lives offers, as well. "It is traumatic to be Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The Prohibition-era setting of The Great Gatsby brings an appropriately illicit feel to this bold decision to stage an immersive theatre event in the age of Covid. Where, in 1922, champagne was the essential liquid to get any evening going, here it’s hand sanitiser fluid, before you’re led – hopefully wearing a suitably decadent facemask – to a socially-distanced place in the speakeasy where the action will unfold. In a bold opening, the script swoops straight from the novel’s beginning to its end, so that the narrator, Nick Carraway, flags up Gatsby’s death before we meet him Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Success smells sweet. The Bridge Theatre’s pioneering season of one-person plays continues with sell-out performances of David Hare’s Beat the Devil and Fuel’s production of Inua Ellams’s An Evening with an Immigrant, with both having their runs extended. And, next month, this venue is also venturing out beyond the M25: two of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads – Imelda Staunton in A Lady of Letters and Maxine Peake in Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet – will visit Sheffield Theatres and Leeds Playhouse (where Rochenda Sandall will also perform Bennett’s Outside Dog). Meanwhile, back at base, last week Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"The older he got, the less he cared about self-concealment," or so it is said of Sir Tom Stoppard, somewhere deep into the 865 pages of Tom Stoppard: A Life, Hermione Lee's capacious (to put it mildly) biography of the British theatre's leading wordsmith. As a literary artefact, Lee's exhaustive chronicle is a lot of words, and it's tempting to see her achievement as the non-fiction equivalent of, say, The Coast of Utopia, Stoppard's grandly conceived, three-part epic about political and intellectual life in 19th-century Russia.The difference here is that Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Stillness works like a stealth bomb in Nights in the Garden of Spain, in which Tamsin Greig further confirms her status as one of this country's finest actresses. Kicking off the final pairing in an indispensable series of Alan Bennett double bills at the Bridge Theatre that will be greatly missed once they depart our midst at the end of this month, Greig reprises the role of the softly spoken Rosemary that she first performed on the BBC this summer; her stage successor on this occasion is Maxine Peake's boisterous Miss Fozzard. But such was the mesmeric effect of Greig, hands clasped Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Getting dark," or so comments Irene Ruddock (a pitch-perfect Imelda Staunton) in passing midway through A Lady of Letters, and, boy, ain't that the truth? Both this monologue, and the one that precedes it (Playing Sandwiches, featuring the mighty Lucian Msamati), find Alan Bennett in fearlessly penetrating, ever-darkening mode. The Bridge Theatre's invaluable series of Talking Heads double bills enters its final phase of openings this week (the closing pair with Tamsin Greig and Maxine Peake has its press night this evening), and no praise is too high for the astonishing array of actors Read more ...