Theatre
Gary Naylor
Yo, I'll tell you what I want, what I really, really want. Er… another nostalgic play about growing up in a Yorkshire post-industrial city?Hard on the heels of John Godber’s Leeds-set Do I Love You? running last week at Wilton’s and Kat Rose Martin’s marvellous Bradford-set £1 Thursdays at the Finborough (my best new play of 2023), we take a 30-mile trip south to Doncaster (Donny to friends) for Children of the Night. Is it something in the air? Besides the coal dust of course.
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If those earlier productions traded primarily on the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Which crimes are the hardest to forgive? Violence; sexual assault; aggravated sexual assault? Yes, that kind of covers the territory. In Sarah Power’s new play, Welcome to Pemfort, currently playing at the Soho Theatre, this ethical and personal dilemma comes wrapped in an oddly discordant comedy about a countryside castle planning its first Living History event. You know the kind of thing: jousting, dressing up in medieval garb and serving olde English grub. But what about the crime? Set in the cluttered gift shop of Pemfort castle (actually just a fort with a bell tower), the play Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If you’ll forgive me the first of two tiptoes into Gonzo Journalism, a few weeks ago I found out that I have a faulty gene - not a romantically tragic Romanov one, but a defect on the double helix that had already manifested itself in a condition affecting my family and that I may have passed to my sons.That crucial medical knowledge leads to early diagnosis and allows for preventative treatment if required, but what if I had known about it 30 years ago, just before my DNA was shuffled at conception's roulette wheel? What if its impact were greater, life-altering, even life-threatening for Read more ...
Heather Neill
Gorky's satire is set in the summer of 1904, between the opening of The Cherry Orchard and Chekhov's death that year, and the first Russian Revolution early in 1905. Summerfolk has echoes of Chekhov, The Seagull as well as The Cherry Orchard, to which it could be a sequel. Gorky's folk, lazily holidaying in their summer dachas, might be inhabiting the new development which Lopakhin was to build in place of the cherry trees chopped down at the end of Chekhov's last play. The closeness of the relationship is explicit here: there is a reference to trees having been cut down to make space for the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The Middle East is on fire – again. So Ryan Craig’s brilliantly provocative play, The Holy Rosenbergs, is more relevant than ever. Near the start, a rabbi says, “Everyone feels strongly about what’s happening out there”, and since he’s referring to tensions between pro-Israel and anti-Israel Jews, he’s definitely touching a nerve, both in the play and in the audience. Yes, this revival of Craig’s family drama, originally staged at the National Theatre in 2011, and now with a cast that includes Adrian Lukis, Tracy-Ann Oberman and Nicholas Woodeson, retains all of its power to disturb.Set in Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Arthur Miller is constantly being revived on London stages, and constantly remains relevant. However, his most popular plays are those from early in his career – All My Sons, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, The Price even – but what about his later flowering? To fill this gap, the Young Vic is now staging Broken Glass, the playwright’s 1994 drama about Jewish identity, marriage and psychology. Directed by Fiddler on the Roof maestro Jordan Fein, this revival is more timely than ever, given the rising menace of anti-Semitism across the world. But is the show any good? Set in Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The indomitable Nicolas Kent has devised a new theatre piece to prick our consciences and refocus our minds, after his sterling work on the ugly underbelly of the Afghan wars and the Grenfell inquiry, inter alia. This one is less polished though not lacking in grit.Originally a project much like Kent’s The Great Game, a loose assemblage of full-length plays from leading writers about invasions of Afghanistan over the centuries, this has emerged as five much shorter plays about different aspects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The series has a chronological sweep, starting with Jonathan Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Backstories of famous writers are fascinating: where did they come from? What were their inspirations? What obstacles did they overcome? Alexi Kaye Campbell’s new historical family drama, Bird Grove, looks at the early years of Mary Ann Evans, long before she became a novelist who published under the name of George Eliot. Yes, time to dust down your copies of Middlemarch, Mill on the Floss, Daniel Deronda and so on. Produced on Hampstead Theatre’s main stage, the play stars Elizabeth Dulau, best known as Kleya Marki in the Disney+ Star Wars series Andor, alongside Owen Teale, Ser Alliser Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Settling into my seat in this most intimate of houses, I realised that I had never seen a play written by Nobel Laureate and Academy Award winner, George Bernard Shaw. Nor did I know what his very own adjective, Shavian, connoted with any certainty. Nor did I know why an actress chose to go by the distracting stage name, Mrs Patrick Campbell.Partly that speaks to the limitations of my own experience (though when lines were read from the proto-script of Pygmalion, I was word-perfect, albeit from My Fair Lady) but it also speaks to the fact that Shaw has long fallen out of favour. His outspoken Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If heart were art, there would be no stopping The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, the 2012 Rachel Joyce novel that became a film and then a stage musical, seen first at Chichester last summer before arriving on the West End. As it is, I'm afraid I stumbled at the first hurdle of plausibility. Let's just say that if I had someone important in my life dying of cancer - as in fact has happened - I would do everything I could to get there as fast as I can.That is decidedly not the route taken by Devon's own Harold Fry (Mark Addy, inheriting Jim Broadbent's screen role) who embarks upon the Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
To watch Deep Azure is to feel a double loss. The death of Prince Jones, the black student who was shot dead by a police officer in a case of mistaken identity, and the death of his friend, Chadwick Boseman, who wrote the play to commemorate him. Boseman, of course, would become world-famous as Marvel’s first black superhero, Black Panther’s King T’Challa, before dying of colon cancer aged 43. Yet the exuberance, inventiveness and giddy lyricism on display in this piece of hip-hop theatre – written by Boseman in his late twenties – is so bracingly original, it makes you grieve to wonder what Read more ...
David Nice
It's nearly eight years since Kåre Conradi first appeared at the Coronet in a revelatory, visceral Norwegian production of Ibsen's Little Eyolf. He's in his middle years, like Peer the temporarily successful entrepreneur of Ibsen's tricky middle act, and in a good position to run the gamut from youthful tale-teller to old man in search of salvation for his ill-tended soul, too weak to go to heaven or hell. These 70 minutes are no "lecture", as advertised, but a spellbinding summary, take, interpretation, as you like it, of the massive drama.True, we get some background right at the beginning Read more ...