Theatre
Gary Naylor
Tom Littler opens his account as artistic director of the Orange Tree Theatre with one of the more radical choices one can make in 2023 – directing a 102 year-old play pretty much how it would have been done in 1921.It’s all very period (beautifully designed with superb attention to detail in props and costumes by Louie Whitemore) and trusts its audience to peel back the onion layers of subtext carefully concealed by Somerset Maugham. And, yes, it might make you cry as you do so.We’re in Blandings Castle territory (or would be if PG Wodehouse had allowed himself a whiff of Evelyn Waugh’s Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It’s back yet again, Operation Mincemeat, a gift of a story that goes on giving. It surfaced as the 1956 film The Man Who Never Was, based on a 1953 book by Ewen Montagu, one of the MI5 types who came up with the 1943 plan of that name. Its latest run was kicked off by a 2010 book by Ben Macintyre, a play by Cardboard Citizens, a second film version, with Matthew Macfadyen and Colin Firth, in 2021 and a long-aborning musical by the SpitLip company. Somehow audiences never tire of hearing how MI5 turned a corpse into a vital red herring, complete with a briefcase of faked secret documents Read more ...
David Nice
Church and law are enemies of promise in Ibsen’s tragedy-without-catharis. You can see why this devastating attack on, among other things, the syphilitic sins of the fathers being visited on the hopeful young created a ruckus in the 1880s. It’s still potent thanks to the characters’ complex reactions to social constraints. Mark O’Rowe’s new version for Landmark Productons at the Abbey is faithful to the essence, while sets and costumes only reinforce modernity in period dress.Francis O'Connor's set is a crucial, at times crushing, participant in the slow-burn revelation of past sins wreaking Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
With acrobatics at this level, they make it all look so easy, it’s possible for an audience to become complacent. By the time the show Out of Chaos, by the troupe Gravity & Other Myths, from Adelaide, Australia, has finished, the Brighton Dome crowd is so used to the quiet fluidity of humans swiftly leaping onto each other’s shoulders, standing there, walking around, and so on, that it seems quite normal and do-able. Fortunately, there’s a boisterous crowd in, keen to whoop, shriek and offer loud praise for such effortlessly delivered gruelling physicality.The stage is plain, a circuit of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Plays about the theatre are many and varied, from Gypsy and Noises Off to the numerous Shakespeare works that absorb theatrical performance into their very fabric.Jack Thorne's The Motive the Cue immediately takes pole position amongst recent entries in this genre in telling of a onetime Broadway venture – Richard Burton's career-defining Hamlet in 1964, directed by John Gielgud – that surely is itself in time destined for Broadway. By the point, look for various performances, and Sam Mendes' direction, to have been laurelled along the way: the National Theatre hasn't hosted so purely Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Reggae hits are already playing over the speaker system at the Bush when the audience enters, some jigging to the sounds as they find their seats. The set before us is a living room with a bright orange carpet, a squidgy tan faux leather armchair and a cocktail trolley.The party atmosphere continues when August Henderson comes on, aka a trim and grinning Lenny Henry in a suit, collar and tie and soft tweed cap. And there’s more jollity as August starts handing out tots of rum from his little cocktails trolley and swings into the terrain that made Henry’s name in the early days of his career, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Sometimes I go outside and look at our kitchen drain. Where there should be a vortex there’s a largely static pool. Tree roots have recently grown through the old pipes, their clumps colonised with fat, dog hair and coleslaw bits, and though a bit of handpumping will shift some of the stale water for a while, it really needs systemic attention from Dyno-rod. A good Dyno-rodding is what Chichester’s new production of Noel Coward’s The Vortex needs too.The catchline for the staging is that a real-life mother and son play the sex-mad mother and drug-addicted son of the drama, the subtle and Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Just when you’ve relaxed a little, privilege duly checked and confident that you won’t be guilt-tripped for nipping into that disabled loo a few years ago at the National (c’mon, the interval was nearly over and needs must), FlawBored drop a bomb into the narrative. The temperature in the room plummets, a real coup de théâtre is effected and I'm still processing it. Yep, they went there. After garnering awards at the Vaults Festival (that’s not research, they tell you and they tell you why too), Aarian Mehrabani, Chloe Palmer and Samuel Brewer (pictured below) bring their meta- Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There was a jolting eco-themed work onstage in London recently, but sadly A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction, a Headlong company collaboration with director Katie Mitchell and a number of international producing houses, wasn’t it. The performance that jolted all who saw it was by Nederlands Dans Theater, whose NDT1 group brought to Sadler’s Wells Figures in Extinction [1.0], a powerful piece by Complicite’s Simon McBurney and the choreographer Crystal Pite. The dancers twisted their limbs and torsos into imitations of 12 of the now-lost species McBurney selected to read out Read more ...
Gary Naylor
It’s apt that this new play, with characters moving in and out of Paris either side of World War I, is staged at this intimate theatre, one that always has the ambience of a below-ground oubliette. These bohemians are not penniless and cold as were Puccini’s, but they still wrestle with the bittersweet complexities of a love that burns too brightly, one that fuels a ménage à trois that does not end well.Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play takes us back to Henri-Pierre Roché’s 1953 novel, best known as the source for François Truffaut’s celebrated 1962 movie, a staple of Best Film lists for half a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Men are bastards. Okay, not all of us, but enough to make the lives of millions of women a misery. This we know, but anyone who has any doubts might be educated by some of the horrific statistics of sexual assault and domestic violence in the programme of Deborah Bruce’s Dixon and Daughters, a new play at the Dorfman space of the National Theatre. It is produced by Clean Break, which works with women who’ve experienced the criminal justice system, so it has its own agenda about women and criminalisation. But for a drama to be worth seeing it surely needs to go beyond a programme and an agenda Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The cast of The Secret Life of Bees first parade onto the Almeida stage hefting big glass storage jars full of a golden substance: honey. The jars glow as if they are beacons, lights that guide. Which they turn out to be.Most of the people in this parade are the Black women who tend the bees that produced this honey, creatures with a covetable sense of community, ready to unite against danger to the hive. Along with them are white folk with a different idea of a model community, a white supremacist one where Blacks can’t vote.It’s 1964, as a timeline running throughout reminds us, Read more ...