Theatre Reviews
Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Donmar WarehouseFriday, 18 December 2015
The last time I saw Janet McTeer, she was doing her best with the slightly underwritten role of sister to Glenn Close’s lethal Patty Hewes in Damages, the ultimate TV series about the discrepancy between seeming and being. Which is the theme, too, of Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, adapted from Choderlos de Laclos’ peerless epistolary novel. Read more... |
The Dazzle, FOUND111Wednesday, 16 December 2015
The proverbial pond that separates the New York and London theatres has had a seismic effect on The Dazzle, Richard Greenberg's ironically titled play from 2002 that in every way seems darker, stranger, and more compelling in its British premiere than it did when I first caught it Off Broadway. Read more... |
Sleeping Beauty, Bristol Old VicTuesday, 15 December 2015
Christmas pantomime is all about letting go, and being carried away on a wave of communal jollity. The genre also delights in carnivalesque gender-bending, the anarchic undermining of authority and the playful representation of evil. Read more... |
Forget Me Not, Bush TheatreTuesday, 15 December 2015
Past wrongs cast long shadows. Following the passing of the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act, successive Australian governments favoured migrants from English-speaking countries in what was called the White Australia policy. Between 1945 and 1968, for example, more than 3,000 British children were sent to the antipodes and told they were orphans. They expected the sunshine of a new start; what they got was the darkness of abuse. Read more... |
Peter Pan Goes Wrong, Apollo TheatreMonday, 14 December 2015
The pleasures to be found in the pitfalls that are part of live performance rear their accident-prone head yet again in Peter Pan Goes Wrong, the latest exercise in controlled (or is it?) chaos from Mischief Theatre, the young and clearly very resilient troupe that is gradually extending its farcical tentacles across the West End. Read more... |
Tracks of the Winter Bear, Traverse Theatre, EdinburghSaturday, 12 December 2015
The first surprise in the Traverse Theatre’s seasonal production comes on entering the theatre – being led backstage, then onto what’s normally the performing area, and finally to two ranks of audience seating either side of a gently undulating transverse strip of stage. Read more... |
wonder.land, National TheatreFriday, 11 December 2015
Widely hyped as “an Alice for the online generation”, and “a coming-of-age adventure that explores the blurred boundaries between our online and offline lives”, this version of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland stories is advertised with a poster that shows a Cheshire cat whose smile is more drug-addled rictus than quizzical grin. Read more... |
Hapgood, Hampstead TheatreThursday, 10 December 2015
A supposed Stoppardian footnote gets a first-class reclamation in Howard Davies's sizzling revival of Hapgood, the espionage-themed drama from 1988 that resonates intellectually and emotionally to a degree it didn't begin to achieve at a West End premiere that I recall almost three decades on. Read more... |
A Christmas Carol, Noël Coward TheatreThursday, 10 December 2015
Is Jim Broadbent Britain’s best-loved actor? The slate of screen roles he’s accumulated over the years – this Christmas Carol is his return to theatre after a decade away – has surely given him a very special quality in the nation's consciousness, a combination of general benignity with more than a hint of absent-mindedness, an almost madcap bafflement at the world. Read more... |
You for Me for You, Royal Court TheatreWednesday, 09 December 2015
North Korea is the kind of place that haunts the imagination of the West – and not in a good way. One of the last hardline Communist dictatorships, it is also a country of immense sadness, a landscape of food shortages and human-rights abuses. Yet its regime calls this dismal place the "Best Nation in the World". To us, it’s a secret world, a strange culture difficult to comprehend, easy to fear. Read more... |
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★★★★★
‘A compulsive, involving, emotionally stirring evening – theatre’s answer to a page-turner.’
The Observer, Kate Kellaway
Direct from a sold-out season at Kiln Theatre the five star, hit play, The Son, is now playing at the Duke of York’s Theatre for a strictly limited season.
★★★★★
‘This final part of Florian Zeller’s trilogy is the most powerful of all.’
The Times, Ann Treneman
Written by the internationally acclaimed Florian Zeller (The Father, The Mother), lauded by The Guardian as ‘the most exciting playwright of our time’, The Son is directed by the award-winning Michael Longhurst.
Book by 30 September and get tickets from £15*
with no booking fee.
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