Theatre
Gary Naylor
Returning to the West End to celebrate two decades since those strange muppetty posters went up on London buses, I’m still laughing along with “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist”.Back then, the London Olympics Opening Ceremony, surely the high watermark for progressive optimism in the public domain, was still six years in the future. We could scoff at the swivel-eyed backwoodsmen of UKIP and the likes, immigration barely registering as an issue of concern to voters. It was our world and those obsessives were, as the magnificent finale tells us, only here “For Now”.
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aleks.sierz
Wars in the Middle East provoke furious arguments. Red hot. So why is British theatre so cool, distinctly chilly, about staging new work about these controversial issues? If any proof is needed that current new writing is meek and mild then it must surely be this. Even the exceptions are not exceptional: written by Yousef Sweid and Isabella Sedlak, Between the River and the Sea, first seen at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin last year and now comes to the Royal Court via Edinburgh, is a likeable autobiographical one-man show about Middle-Eastern identity which insistently avoids the Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
This new play, In The Print – by Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky – gives a pacy account of the seminal moment when Rupert Murdoch moved News International to Wapping. Over the last decade and a half the playwriting duo have rolled up their sleeves to tackle political subjects including Brexit and the fight to succeed Labour PM Harold Wilson – and here they put the lens on the moment that changed the newspaper industry for ever.It's a spiky depiction of the struggle between trade union leader Brenda Dean and Murdoch that doesn’t sugar coat events, but nor does it resort to demonisation. Instead Read more ...
aleks.sierz
One of the most resonant contemporary slogans is “Build bridges not walls”. Because it applies to the personal as well the political, it has the force of simplicity and directness. The way that building walls can be psychologically destructive, cutting a person off from emotional connection, is exemplified in Mancunian playwright Kit Withington’s new family play, Heart Wall, currently on the main stage at the Bush Theatre. Once part of this venue’s Emerging Writers’ Group, Withington now returns with a distinctly Northern voice – and a work which has power and subtlety, but also some problems Read more ...
Gary Naylor
As a reviewer, if you’re lucky, you get a tingle down the spine – rarely, but you know it when you feel it. It’s the sensation of seeing theatre anew, not just something good or something innovative, but something you just haven’t seen before at all.Then, you line up the pieces and, though they still don’t fit snugly into the expected picture on the jigsaw puzzle box, you find comparators, parallels, signposts to help navigate this unfamiliar landscape. Often that tempers your initial reaction, the nuts and bolts reveal themselves and you fit it the production into a matrix of shows past and Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The new version of Ibsen’s classic by Anya Reiss at the Almeida prompted me to wonder at times whether wrenching a play out of its era and transposing it to a contemporary setting is worth doing.The Almeida has fielded a strong cast for this updating, directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins, in a set by Hyemi Shin that cleverly uses the theatre’s unadorned brick walls as a contemporary design feature, along with a giant square skylight overhead like a James Turrell light sculpture. The place reeks of an empty kind of affluence – partly because the Helmers have just moved in and haven’t finished Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It feels fitting that this latest revival of Copenhagen should open so soon after Arcadia at the Old Vic. These masterworks by, respectively, Michael Frayn and Tom Stoppard have much in common, as highly sophisticated marriages of ideas, moral inquiry and human drama, wrapped in mystery.With wars currently waging around the globe, and the threat of greater escalation, this production of the nuclear-themed Copenhagen, which plays around the decisions and tricks of the mind that can determine mass destruction, or not, is an apt reminder of the play’s calibre and resonance. It really is a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Stories about slavery tend to be simplistic: white perpetrators are bad, black victims good. One of the more striking features of Winsome Pinnock’s new play, The Authenticator, is her insistence that reality is always more complicated. Staged in the Dorfman space of the National Theatre, this production signals the playwright’s return here after her success with Rockets and Blue Lights in 2021, and reunites her with its director Miranda Cromwell. But does the complexity of real life undermine the inherent drama of this fictional tale?Well, the situation is simple: Fenella Harford is an Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Time is a terrifying force in Romeo & Juliet, and Robert Icke's headlong production never lets playgoers forget that fact. Returning to a tragedy he first directed for Headlong touring company 14 years ago, Icke reprises many of the conceits deployed first time round, this time wedded to a starry company headed by Sadie Sink and Noah Jupe that, in the first act at least, gives pride of place to his supporting players.Some may resist the apparent tricksiness of devices that include repetitions or reprises of scenes, as often as not accompanied by searing flashes of light separating out Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Science on stage is quite the thing at the moment with a revival of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen opening at Hampstead Theatre next week and Lifeline, a British musical, injected into Southwark Playhouse for a six-week residency.It’ll be interesting to track the difference between the reactions of audiences and the critics as too many journalists dismiss anything beyond a bunsen burner or a percentage calculation as a matter reserved for boffins. Being proudly ignorant of such subjects appears to be on the person spec for a job at the BBC, but the explosion of science-based podcasts and YouTube Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
If ever there was a piece that epitomised the view that villains are infinitely more fun than heroes, it would be Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses and its subsequent adaptations. The amorality at play is positively delicious, not least when the culprits feast on each other. But how does that appeal work, as entertainment, at a time when real-life morality is under more constant, and more rigid scrutiny? Will Christopher Hampton’s celebrated stage adaptation become darker, more powerful, or simply leave a bad taste? I’m not suggesting that this latest Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
After Barber Shop Chronicles comes a female slice of pan-African life, set in Harlem in July 2019, at the fag end of Donald J Trump’s first presidency. Playwright Jocelyn Bioh never mentions him by name, but his shadow looms over the lives of the braiders, all aiming to become US citizens.At least, his shadow looms over them now. Bioh’s tweaking of the text for the London run has added topical plot points from the second Trump presidency to give this bouncy Tony-nominated comedy a real sting in its tail.For most of its 90 minutes, though, it’s a fast-talking joy. We spend a 12-hour working Read more ...