Theatre Reviews
Rules for Living, National TheatreWednesday, 25 March 2015
The seasonal family reunion play is a hardy perennial. Like the Christmas tree that must take its place on the stage, it is usually spiky, dry and decorated with glittering ornaments – as in acidic jokes, acute embarrassments and ghastly revelations. Into every yuletide family a stranger must come, and all the most careful preparations must be ruined. Normally, everyone gets drunk, food gets thrown and truths get told. Read more... |
Harvey, Theatre Royal HaymarketTuesday, 24 March 2015
If insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, repeatedly unfunny Harvey isn’t just a study of madness, but a punishing example of it. Mary Chase’s dusty 1944 farce about a man hallucinating a 6ft 3in rabbit has slapstick trappings, but, in Lindsay Posner’s flat revival, the pace and energy of a straggling funeral procession. Read more... |
Man to Man, Wales Millennium Centre, CardiffTuesday, 24 March 2015
There can be few modern plays as testing for a female actor as Manfred Karge’s Man to Man. When Tilda Swinton took it on at the Royal Court in 1987 and brought to the many roles of this one woman show her androgynous intensity it was the performance that made her name. Read more... |
Sweeney Todd, Harrington's Pie and Mash Shop, Shaftesbury AvenueMonday, 23 March 2015
Stephen Sondheim's ever-elastic masterpiece is downsized to largely dazzling effect in its latest iteration, which has been transferred intact to a Shaftesbury Avenue pop-up after premiering last autumn within the surrounds of an actual pie-and-mash eatery called Harrington's in Tooting, south London. Read more... |
Trainspotting, King’s Head TheatreSunday, 22 March 2015
Hey, it’s the 1990s – yet again. After high-profile revivals of contemporary classics, such as Patrick Marber’s Closer and Kevin Elyot’s My Night with Reg, here comes, from that edgy decade, a fringe version of the iconic story of Leith heroin addicts, based on the cult book by Irvine Welsh which spawned a classic 1996 film by Danny Boyle, as well as this play, adapted by Harry Gibson in 1994. Read more... |
The Father, Trafalgar StudiosFriday, 20 March 2015
This 1887 domestic drama by August Strindberg is rarely seen in London, and Abbey Wright’s new production of Laurie Slade’s new version might have seized the opportunity to give this gristly chunk of pre-Freudian sexual polemic a thorough 21st-century shake-up. That chance is missed. Read more... |
Buyer & Cellar, Menier Chocolate FactoryFriday, 20 March 2015
This is, stresses our guide, a work of pure (read: non-libellous) fiction, except that its “preposterous” premise is rooted in even more preposterous truth. In 2010, diva extraordinaire Barbra Streisand produced wildly narcissistic coffee-table book My Passion for Design chronicling the creation of her gaudy Malibu dream estate, which – gloriously – includes a basement storing her extravagant collections in fully-fledged “shoppes”. Read more... |
The Broken Heart, Sam Wanamaker PlayhouseThursday, 19 March 2015
Jacobean playwright John Ford is flavour of the season at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. His better-known, and simply better, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, opened the venue’s new programme last autumn and is followed now by that work’s younger sibling, The Broken Heart, in a production that rather gloriously surprises. Read more... |
The Cutting of the Cloth, Southwark PlayhouseWednesday, 18 March 2015
Nowadays, playwrights do their apprenticeships at university, studying drama. But, once upon a time, they had proper jobs before they started making theatre. Such is the case of the late Michael Hastings, who died in 2011 and whose most famous piece is Tom & Viv (about TS Eliot and his wife). Before becoming a playwright, he worked for three years as a tailor's apprentice. Read more... |
Stevie, Hampstead TheatreMonday, 16 March 2015
Writing about writers: exploring what you know, or the very definition of stifling egoism? Either way, it can be a terrible trap for the playwright, with craft becoming not just the subject of a work, but its defining feature. Hugh Whitemore narrowly avoids that fate in his unashamedly writerly 1977 piece about poet and novelist Stevie Smith, which is packed to the gills with erudite bon mots, yet, in Christopher Morahan’s leisurely revival, somewhat lacking in dramatic thrust. 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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