Theatre Reviews
The Cocktail Party, The Print RoomSaturday, 19 September 2015
It’s a pleasing serendipity that while Martin McDonagh’s clamorously anticipated Hangmen opened at the Royal Court last night, just a little further west T.S Eliot’s The Cocktail Party should also be having its opening night. Back in 1956 another Royal Court premiere – John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger – called time on Eliot and his dramatic ilk, ushering him into a neglect from which he has never really recovered. Read more...
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Jane Eyre, National TheatreFriday, 18 September 2015
Last February, director Sally Cookson shrunk Charlotte Brontë’s 400-page novel Jane Eyre down to a four-and-a-half-hour play spread across two nights at the Bristol Old Vic. Now, as this co-production finally arrives at the National Theatre, it has slimmed still further – shedding one hour and one night to become a (comparatively) brisk Hamlet-length evening of physically and sensorily-charged theatre. Read more... |
Don Juan, Lesya Ukrainka Theatre, St James TheatreFriday, 18 September 2015
Whose Don Juan – progenitor Tirso de Molina’s, Molière’s or Pushkin’s? None of the above. Unless you have some knowledge of Ukrainian culture, you won’t have heard of Lesya Ukrainka, born Larysa Petrivna Kosach-Kvitka in 1871 to a proudly nationalist (if half-Byelorusian) father and a mother whose pioneering work in women’s rights she continued. Read more... |
Kinky Boots, Adelphi TheatreThursday, 17 September 2015
If the shoe fits, they say, wear it. But in truth there's always been a bit of a size differential between Kinky Boots, the modest urban Brit-flick set in a struggling shoe factory, and the Cyndi Lauper/Harvey Fierstein musical that it spawned, first on Broadway and now here. Read more... |
Fuck the Polar Bears, Bush TheatreThursday, 17 September 2015
With the election of lefty outsider Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership, are we entering a new era when upsets and surprises have become a new way of life? Is it really true that anything is now possible? As if to engage with these pressing questions, Tanya Ronder’s new play is all about how a perfect family is suddenly visited by some totally unexpected events. What starts with a dodgy doorknob escalates over 90 minutes into a full-scale domestic breakdown. Read more... |
The Sting, Wilton's Music HallWednesday, 16 September 2015
One of the oldest and most striking venues in London lends itself to immersive theatrical experiences. A few years ago the Victorian interior of Wilton’s Music Hall was infused with pre-show activity to recreate the 1920s of The Great Gatsby. Now a similar flick of the wrist by the same director draws punters into the 1930s and an adaptation of one of cinema’s great con capers. Read more... |
Photograph 51, Noël Coward TheatreTuesday, 15 September 2015
Nicole Kidman has returned to the West End 17 years after causing an innuendo-laden sensation in The Blue Room, the David Hare play that promptly transferred from the Donmar to Broadway, where one major magazine at the time actually bothered to inform readers where best to sit for the optimal view of a stage semi-neophyte en déshabillé. Read more... |
Mouthful, Trafalgar StudiosMonday, 14 September 2015
Metta Theatre’s didactic "short plays" evening takes a rigorously Poppins approach: a spoonful of drama to help the medicine go down. The sobering facts – “We need to produce more food globally by 2050 than we have done in the whole of human history” – come thick and fast, emblazoned on a screen and spouted by four versatile performers. Some pieces, written in collaboration with scientists, are fuelled by those stats, others crumble under their weight. Read more... |
One Minute, The VaultsSaturday, 12 September 2015
The repercussions of loss ripple inexorably through Simon Stephens’ 2003 play One Minute. Foreshadowing elements the prolific playwright has developed in his later work, it’s a testing piece that speaks most of all about the currents of loneliness that fan out within the fabric of the modern metropolis. Read more... |
Future Conditional, Old VicFriday, 11 September 2015
Can we – should we – control the future? That’s the dilemma faced by anxious parents attempting to steer their offspring through a labyrinthine school system, educational think-tanks, and the teachers shaping young lives. Tamsin Oglesby’s play is an intriguing opener for the Matthew Warchus era: impassioned, fiercely topical, and – with its relatively youthful cast – kicking against the “old” in “Old Vic”. That, and electric guitars as rousing musical accompaniment. 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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