Theatre Reviews
Even Stillness Breathes Softly Against a Brick Wall, Soho TheatreTuesday, 04 June 2013
I love poetic play titles, but even I would admit that sometimes they are difficult to remember. In this case, the name of Brad Birch’s new play has taught me a lesson that I’m happy to pass on. It’s this: if you go and see this show please spend a few minutes practising the words Even Stillness Breathes Softly Against a Brick Wall before arriving at the box office. It will help you save face. It will prepare you for the evening ahead. Read more... |
Race, Hampstead TheatreSaturday, 01 June 2013
We know that David Mamet doesn’t beat about the bush. He tackles sensitive issues and the least attractive aspects of human nature head on, while his characters use language as weapons against each other with such ferocity and guile that the audience is left with a sort of battered admiration. Read more... |
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare's GlobeFriday, 31 May 2013
Midsummer’s Eve may still be a month away and the evenings more bracing than balmy, but despite a serious chill still in the air the Globe Theatre yesterday proved yet again that it exists in its own microclimate. It’s a theatre and a company made for comedy. Such is the laughter, the sense of occasion, the energy of the crowd, that you find yourself swept up in the joy of it all – enjoying a summer holiday, if only for the evening. Read more... |
Praxis Makes Perfect, National Theatre WalesFriday, 24 May 2013
Almost before the dust has settled on their globe-spanning collaboration with New National Theatre Tokyo, National Theatre Wales embarks on a very different, if no less ambitious, partnership with the mercurial synth pop duo Neon Neon. Read more... |
To Kill A Mockingbird, Regent’s Park Open Air TheatreThursday, 23 May 2013
Every May the townspeople of Monroeville, Alabama, the home of Harper Lee, perform Christopher Sergel’s theatrical adaptation of Lee’s acclaimed, much beloved novel, on the grounds of the county courthouse. It’s a potent, somehow ironic demonstration of the enduring regard for the novel, in the very part of America whose racial intolerance Lee exposed. Read more... |
Disgraced, Bush TheatreThursday, 23 May 2013
There’s one big problem about being an Asian actor in America — you just don’t get the big parts. So the multitalented Ayad Akhtar put acting on hold, and turned to screen writing, producing The War Within, a film about jihadism. Then he tried playwriting and his debut, Disgraced, struck gold: after it was a big hit in Chicago and New York, it won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Read more... |
The Kite Runner, Theatre Royal BrightonWednesday, 22 May 2013
The absolute loyalty of a little boy to his under-deserving friend is what swells The Kite Runner’s heart and fuels its tragedy. So you can’t really blame Matthew Spangler’s stage adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s 2003 bestseller for sticking faithfully to the novel’s melodramatic side. Read more... |
Relatively Speaking, Wyndham's TheatreTuesday, 21 May 2013
The pronouns have it in Alan Ayckbourn's career-defining comedy of spiralling misunderstandings, which has arrived on the West End 46 years after first hinting at the formidable talent of a dramatist who could make of many an "it" and "she" a robustly funny study in two couples in varying degrees of crisis. Read more... |
Limbo, Southbank CentreTuesday, 21 May 2013
Circus is a broad church these days. It can be housed on the street, a grand proscenium stage and all points in between. For this latest incendiary reinvention of the form, it makes its way back into an intimate big top where the residual DNA of circus’s regular trappings seem all to be in situ. There’s bendiness and balancing, aerobatics and good old trapezing, fire-eating (pictured below) and sword-swallowing. Read more... |
Say It With Flowers, Sherman Theatre, CardiffSunday, 19 May 2013
There is a glaring irony in that a play about an all-consuming obsession with one thing (fame) has no real idea of what it itself is supposed to be. Say It With Flowers, a purported biography of iconic lounge singer Dorothy Squires, teases at the sequins of the musical, the psychological drama, the tragi-comedy, the biopic, gritty realism, expressionism, and soap opera, but eventually falls between the cracks of all these. It makes for a frustrating two hours. 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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