Theatre Reviews
Orson's Shadow, Southwark PlayhouseTuesday, 07 July 2015
The latest transatlantic transfer is curiously esoteric, concerning as it does an obscure period in the lives of two great men: Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles. The centenary of the latter’s birth makes this an apt moment for the European premiere of Austin Pendleton’s Chicago-originating 2000 play, but its appeal may not extend beyond dedicated students of theatre history. Read more... |
Measure for Measure, Shakespeare's GlobeFriday, 03 July 2015
If Simon McBurney’s Measure for Measure for the National Theatre and Declan Donnellan’s recent Cheek By Jowl production mined deep for darkness, Dominic Dromgoole’s for the Globe is content to skim the play’s sunny surface – the comedy manqué that Shakespeare didn’t quite write. It’s a decision that makes sense of a difficult work on the Globe’s own terms, playing to a summer crowd, but one that also generates its own confusions and inconsistencies. Read more... |
The Importance of Being Earnest, Vaudeville TheatreThursday, 02 July 2015
Geoffrey Rush has done it, Gyles Brandreth has done it, Stephen Fry came close to doing it, and now David Suchet is giving it a go – donning drag and a perpetually disgusted expression to play everyone’s favourite drawing-room gorgon, Lady Bracknell. Read more... |
{150}, National Theatre Wales/Theatr Genedlaethol CymruWednesday, 01 July 2015
The brackets around {150} are ambiguous, almost apologetic. The 150th anniversary of Y Wladfa (The Colony), the semi-legendary "oasis of Welshness" in the Patagonian wilderness has given occasion in Wales for the celebration of a most unlikely story. One hundred and fifty men, women and children left their homes all over Wales and created a new life for themselves, against all the odds, at the other end of the world. Read more... |
The Trial, Young VicSaturday, 27 June 2015
Kafka and Jones, the names above this little shop of horrors, would be a marriage made in off-kilter theatreland had the Czech genius written any plays. He didn’t, so Nick Gill has made a well-shaped drama out of the assembled fragments of which The Trial consists. Read more... |
The Seagull, Regent's Park Open Air TheatreThursday, 25 June 2015
Hamlet instructs his players to "hold...the mirror up to nature”, advice taken literally in this arresting 120-year anniversary staging of Chekhov’s homage to the Bard. Jon Bausor’s set is dominated by a vast angled mirror, offering an appropriately bird’s-eye view and lending cinematic scope to this familial tale. It’s also the perfect encapsulation of a group who need their image reflected back at them through the admiration of others in order to satisfy their egos. Read more... |
Bend It Like Beckham The Musical, Phoenix TheatreThursday, 25 June 2015
Gurinder Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham was a huge hit, a small-budget British film that in 2002 unexpectedly found an international audience way beyond its setting in suburban west London, and made stars of its two young leads, Keira Knightley and Parminder Nagra. Now the director (with her husband, Paul Mayeda Berges) has written a stage musical version, with music by Howard Goodall and lyrics by Charles Hart. Read more... |
An Oak Tree, National TheatreWednesday, 24 June 2015
The play I have just seen is not the play you will see. Of course, one of the draws of live performance is that no two nights are the same, but that idea is taken to a mesmerising extreme in Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree, celebrating its 10th anniversary. Every night, a new guest actor – who has never seen the show nor read the script – joins Crouch in this two-hander; past playmates include Sophie Okonedo, Christopher Eccleston, Frances McDormand and Roger Lloyd Pack. Read more... |
Luna Gale, Hampstead TheatreTuesday, 23 June 2015
Can we really distinguish between experience-based judgement and personal bias? Caroline, the social worker at the centre of American writer Rebecca Gilman’s latest "issue" play, trusts a gut instinct informed by her 25-year career, but those decisions – which shape the lives of her young charges and their families – are gradually revealed to be subjective in the extreme. Read more... |
The Motherf**ker with the Hat, National TheatreThursday, 18 June 2015
The play that lost the 2011 Tony Award to War Horse is now receiving its British debut at the very address where War Horse premiered. But such theatrical coincidences won't register in most circles as much as a title, The Motherf**ker with the Hat, that sent newspaper copy desks into a tailspin (the New York Times didn't print the M word at all, even with the asterisks). Read more... |
Pages
Advertising feature
★★★★★
‘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.
latest in today
Help to give theartsdesk a future!
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...
Music Reissues Weekly: Celebrate Yourself! The Sonic Cathedr...
Yeti Lane’s second album The Echo Show was released in March 2012. The Paris-based duo’s LP was stunning: holding together overall, as...
Album: Lambrini Girls - Who Let the Dogs Out
Phoebe Lunny and Lilly Macieira are furious. Livid with the rapist...
Maria review - Pablo Larraín's haunting portrait of an...
As Bono once commented about Luciano Pavarotti, “the opera follows him off stage”. Legendary...
Titanique, Criterion Theatre review - musical parody sinks d...
This Celine Dion jukebox musical has been a big hit in New York, but...
Album: Franz Ferdinand - The Human Fear
Travel back in time to the mid 2000s and you would be hard pressed to escape "Take Me Out" by Franz Ferdinand on the air waves. On the radio,...
Babygirl review - would-be steamy drama that only flirts wit...
Babygirl starts with the sound of sex, piped in over the credits. There's a lot of it on our screens at the moment, from ...
It's Raining Men review - frothy French comedy avoids d...
Iris (Laure Calamy) and her husband Stéphane (Vincent Elbaz) haven’t had sex for four years. Waiting at school for the parent-teacher conference (...
Album: Bridget Hayden and The Apparitions - Cold Blows The R...
The title Cold Blows The Rain encapsulates it. A mournful, unembellished female voice sings of loss. The musical backing is sparse....