Theatre
Demetrios Matheou
A leftfield, Tony-winning phenomenon on Broadway, Cole Escola’s comedy comes to London very much living up to the hype. This is a gloriously eccentric, rude, riotous marvel – laugh-out loud and daft as a brush.While many regard the current White House as a mad house, Escola’s naughty revisionism goes back in time to debunk one of the country’s most genuinely revered presidents. But the chief focus of this breezy 80-minute play is the first lady, Mary Todd Lincoln. History has been unkind to Mary, often highlighting her extravagant spending, dark moods and institutionalisation. Cole Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
If your heart sinks every time a Shakespeare funny-man enters, here comes the RSC to put an unforced grin on your face. Its latest Feste is the real deal: an emcee with true comedic chops, abetted by a rising-star director who understands exactly how to exploit the innate comedy of both the play and its most anarchic spirit.The actor playing Feste is sweet-voiced Michael Grady-Hall (pictured below, left), whom we first see descending from the flies on a wire, crooning into a microphone. His vertical shock of hair is by way of Eraserhead; his specs and facial gestures recall the much missed Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
JB Priestley’s glorious pot shot at marital complacency in pre-First World War Bradford proves to be a tonic at a time of year where, for better or for worse, many people are forced to play happy families. Written in 1938 – seven years before his markedly different An Inspector Calls – it was so successful that it went on to be the first play ever broadcast live on television. Though you couldn’t imagine it appealing to broadcasting bosses today, that doesn’t detract from Tim Sheader’s assured, mischievous production, which transports us to a confidently hideous drawing room with mustard Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In a warehouse, Tube trains rumbling below, Noah, his sister Tamara and his (Gentile) girlfriend Maud, live in a disused warehouse space, a North London simulacrum of a kibbutz, but with drug dealers at the door, unhinged co-tenants wandering in and out and a Christmas tree in the corner.Their father, Elliot, is visiting this kinda home for a kinda Christmas dinner which is also to be attended by Jack (now calling himself Aaron), Tamara’s kinda ex-bf, who moved to Tel Aviv for its skinny dipping and various other ‘Berlin of the East’ attractions. He brings a suitcase, but he and Tam have far Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
With teasing timing, the latest revival of a Tom Stoppard play at the Hampstead Theatre arrived just hours after his funeral, a weird echo of his maxim, “Every exit is an entry somewhere else.” As at its debut in 1995, Indian Ink features a luminous Felicity Kendal, but this time not as perky young poet Flora but in the role of her older sister Eleanor, 65 years on,The plot follows a favourite Stoppard trajectory, of seeing the past as a puzzle demanding investigation. It’s a strategy he used to best effect in the earlier Arcadia (1993); the resolution of the puzzle here is less enigmatic, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Bat away your lurgy, stop that coffin’ and get up to Finsbury Park for a laugh laden, ballad blitzing, sensational spoof starring the toothsome Transylvanian. If that sentence is boiling your blood with its rich vein of bad humour, you’ll be spitting bile in the house; if not, you’ll be so relaxed at the end of the evening, you shan’t be needing your statins before bedtime.Because there’s little we need more right now than laughter, the best medicine, natch and that’s what we get - liberally laced with groans, because no joke is too daddish for Dan Patterson and Jez Bond - with a smattering Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Wonder is a word that is used too often in theatre, somewhat emptied of meaning by marketing’s emasculating of language. It’s used even less honestly by critics - we’ve seen too much to really feel wonder. But, for the first time since seeing the RSC’s magnificent My Neighbour Totoro, I’m here to tell you I was as wide-eyed as the Sophies sitting transfixed in my row as this lovely show unfolded before us. The story, beautifully, and, one trusts, uncontroversially, adapted by Tom Wells, will be familiar to many (but was not to me) begins in an orphanage where Sophie and Kimberley bicker Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Ask many a boomer about their scariest childhood memory, and they may very well cite the extraordinary 1957 East German production, The Singing Ringing Tree, shown regularly on the BBC before, one presumes, an adult saw it and thought, “Uh oh…” It was a kind of anti-Disney (well, the saccharine commercialised studio that emerged after World War II at any rate) that pitched us kids into a Mitteleuropa world of magical threat and fractured families, the grotesque far outweighing the fair in the narrative.At about the same time (the mid-80s) that a collective unease started to censor or, at Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The National Theatre has a long record of starry revivals so this version of John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, with a cast led by Nicola Coughlan (yes, from Derry Girls and Bridgerton), quickens the heartbeats of anticipation, although audience reaction won’t be anything like that of the play’s 1907 premiere. That Dublin production caused nationalist protests from a riotous public who felt insulted by the playwright’s realistic portrayal of the Irish peasantry as lonely drunks, and by its theme of patricide and its image of female underwear. Sinn Féin founder Arthur Read more ...
Gary Naylor
That young person sitting next to you on the bus, earbuds wedged in, an enigmatic, Mona Lisa-ish smile on their face - are they listening to a podcast? If so, is it one of many, many such concerning True Crime, a genre that has moved out of the WH Smith’s magazine shelf with the National Enquirer and the large print section of the library, and into a much more youthful market in the 2020s? Chances are that it is.I can’t be too precious about it, numbering Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon books amongst my favourites about showbiz and sneaking a peek, as a very guilty pleasure, at Wikipedia’s Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
As reports come in of theatre audiences behaving badly, slumped drunkenly in the aisles, gorging on noisy food and wrestling with their latest smartphones, it’s refreshing to see that kind of behaviour safely onstage, and played for big laughs. Surprisingly, perhaps, this mayhem comes courtesy of Noel Coward.The redoutable Menier has found another gem to polish after Nancy Carroll’s superb revival of Pinero’s The Cabinet Minister and its exuberant The Producers: a 100th birthday edition of Noel Coward’s Fallen Angels. Roundly denounced for its vulgarity and loose morals at its debut, the Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Puck is an assassin in a tutu and Theseus is a murderous thug. In Headlong's deliciously macabre dramatisation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for midwinter audiences, director Holly Race Roughan extracts all the menace from Shakespeare’s “fairy play”, deftly chopping up and juggling the text to underscore the violence that frames the woodland escapism. When we enter the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, we are lulled into a false sense of ease as the music director and pianist, Richie Hart, plays Christmas carols as meditatively as if he were performing the Goldberg Variations. Then a Read more ...