Theatre
David Nice
Virtuosity and a wildly beating heart are compatible in Richard Jones’s finely calibrated production of Renaissance woman Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal. It hits hard as a 1920s mechanical symphony with a lyrical slow movement and words/cliches used like musical refrains. There’s an army of generals at work in the team of 16 actors, led by fearless Rosie Sheehy, and in the genius lighting, movement, sound, design. You rarely see such meticulous, detailed work in the theatre.The polar opposite in scale to Stephen Daldry's 1993 National Theatre production with Fiona Shaw, this one started life in Read more ...
An Actor Convalescing in Devon, Hampstead Theatre review - old school actor tells old school stories
Gary Naylor
One can often be made to feel old in the theatre. A hot take in a snappy 90 minutes (with video!) on the latest Gen Z obsession (is it even Gen Z, or were they last year, Daddio?) can leave one baffled or wondering whose gripe is it anyway. Sometimes the new blood feels like an exotic Type AB negative, when we’re boring old O positive and the transfusion is rejected.But, occasionally, we bus pass holders can be made to feel old in a nice, slippers and no pipe any more (doctor’s orders), way, the subjects familiar, the atmosphere warm, the themes washing over the fourth wall and not fired into Read more ...
aleks.sierz
I’ve never been one for school reunions, but even if I had kept in touch with former classmates I think that American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s The Comeuppance might, just might, lead me to reflect on the wisdom of revisiting the adolescent past.Originally staged Off-Broadway last summer, the play has been brought to Islington’s Almeida Theatre by its original director, Eric Ting, with a new and excellent British cast. As well as being a reunion play, it’s also a memory play with ghostly elements. Question is, does this mix work on stage?Set in Autumn 2022, the drama focuses on a Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
History is very present in Philippa Gregory’s new play about Richard III. Literally - History is a character, played by Tom Kanji. He strides around in a pale trenchcoat, at first rather too glib and pleased with himself, but quickly sucked into the action as Richard’s life plays out in front of him. If only Katie Posner’s production, which started at Shakespeare North Playhouse and is now at the Theatre Royal Bury St Edmund’s, could draw us in so powerfully.The blurb describes “an explosion of tarmac” as Richard III bursts into the modern day in a Leicester car park, but Kyle Rowe’s entrance Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Shakespeare’s plays have ever been meat for masher-uppers, from the bowdlerising Victorians to the modern filmed-theatre cycles of Ivo Van Hove. And Sir John Falstaff, as Orson Welles proved in Chimes at Midnight, can be the star of his very own remix, bestriding three plays and dying offstage in a fourth. Inventive director Robert Icke has now created Player Kings out of the two Henry IV plays for this indelible character. It showcases Falstaff’s relationship with Prince Hal but leaves intact the frame of the play – Hal’s relationship with his father, Henry Bolingbroke, now Read more ...
Gary Naylor
"In care". It’s a phrase that, if it penetrates our minds at all, usually leads to distressing tabloid stories of children losing their lives at the hands of abusive parents (“Why oh why wasn’t this child in care?”) or of loving parents separated from their sons and daughters by over-zealous bureaucrats (“Social workers tore our family apart”). It’s a difficult subject to address, which is one reason why it’s more often done in the abstract, the language administrative, quasi-legal or covered a radio phone-in in which we’re invited to sum anecdotes in order to produce data. Well meant Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Many an Edinburgh Fringe transfer has struggled when it moves to the big city, but the Dirty Hare company’s Gunter, sensibly embedded in the Royal Court’s intimate Upstairs space, has settled in nicely, thanks.Originally staged at the best Fringe venue for new theatre-making, Summerhall, where it won a Fringe First award last year, Gunter was devised by Lydia Higman (who also plays drums and Fender lead guitar and serves as narrator), Rachel Lemon (who directs) and Julia Grogan (who performs, main picture). Along with the other two women in the cast, Grogan plays the usual multiple roles Read more ...
Paul Jesson
In September 2022 I had an email from my American friend Richard Nelson: "Would you like me to write you a play?" Such an offer probably comes the way of very few actors and I was bowled over by it. My astonished and grateful response was tempered with a little uncertainty.I didn't want it to be too much about my illness, and Richard assured me it would also be about many other things. He said, "I'll send you something." Two days later an attachment arrived which I thought would be a couple of pages of ideas or an outline. It was a 42-page script.Richard and I first met in 1990 at the RSC in Read more ...
Heather Neill
The Brontë sisters and their ne'er-do-well brother will always make good copy. The brilliance of the women constrained by life in a Yorkshire parsonage contrasts dramatically with the wild moors around their home, while their early deaths lend romance and tragedy to their life stories. Mythologised they may be, but their strength and determination are indisputable; to be successfully published novelists, albeit to begin with under men's names, was a notable feat. Charlotte, Emily and Anne cannot but be feminist heroines.In her new play, which won the Nick Darke Award in 2020, Sarah Gordon Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Memory is a confounding thing. By way of proof, just ask the Mary Tyrone who is being given unforgettable life by Patricia Clarkson in London's latest version of Long Day's Journey into Night, which has arrived on the West End (and at the same theatre) a mere six years after the previous version of Eugene O'Neill's posthumously premiered masterwork; that one headlined a top-rank Lesley Manville in the same part.Arthritic and lonely, Mary looks towards a past where she was "so happy, for a time", away from the crushing realities of the present. Those include a consumptive young son, Edmund ( Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Is there a more purely likeable actress than Sheridan Smith, the performer who was still a teenager when she stole the show at the Donmar in Into the Woods and who managed, as Elle Woods in the West End premiere of Legally Blonde, to bring tears both to her eyes and ours?If so in the London theatre at the moment, I have yet to come across her, and the first thing to be said about the new Rufus Wainwright-Ivo Van Hove musical Opening Night is that it is jolly lucky to have Smith centre-stage. So engaging is this performer, so tirelessly focused and true even when the show she is fronting Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There are genres of theatre that demand buy-in from the audience – musicals, opera and the daddy of them all, pantomime. The usual entry price to the house, the suspension of disbelief, requires supplementing with an active desire to meet the production halfway. So it is with comedy. Crudely put, we could all sit there like Mount Rushmore if we wanted to, but what good would that do?April De Angelis’s new play makes that demand and rolls in another: that we civilians take an interest in the in-jokes and squabbling of actors (yes, the dread word "luvvie" hove into sight on a couple of Read more ...