Theatre Reviews

LIFT 2012: The Coming Storm, BAC

Carmel Doohan Thursday, 21 June 2012

You know that feeling when you start telling a story in the pub only to realise that no one is listening? You look up to see that that two people at the end have started a new conversation among themselves and the rest are laughing about something someone else said earlier? You falter a little, try to catch someone’s eye and wonder if you should just plough on or give up. This could be what Forced Entertainment's new show The Coming Storm is about, but it's hard to tell.

The Last of the Haussmans, National Theatre

aleks Sierz Wednesday, 20 June 2012

When does an urgent new trend become a theatre cliché? Over the past couple of years, the idea of generational conflict between the have-it-all baby boomers and the have-nothing-but-debts youngsters has appeared in plays such as James Graham’s The Whisky Taster and Mike Bartlett’s Love, Love, Love. Now the South Bank flagship, in a production starring national treasure Julie Walters, enters the fray with actor Stephen Beresford’s first play, which opened last night.

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Mary Shelley, Tricycle Theatre

aleks Sierz Saturday, 16 June 2012

Mary Shelley and all her works have dogged the footsteps of contemporary theatre — in a way that’s a bit reminiscent of her most famous creation. Last year, there was Frankenstein at the National and this year a revival of Howard Brenton’s Bloody Poetry (about the Shelley/Byron ménage) on the fringe. Now, following the success of their Brontë, Shared Experience theatre company are back in London with a new Mrs Shelley docudrama.

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Twelfth Night/The Tempest, RSC, Roundhouse

alexandra Coghlan Friday, 15 June 2012

The RSC’s Twelfth Night dumps its audience unceremoniously onto the shores of Ilyria in the thump and beat of waves. While Viola struggles from the (very deep and very real) water, asking “What country friends is this?”, we by contrast find ourselves in familiar territory. Like this season’s opener, A Comedy of Errors, both Twelfth Night and The Tempest take their birth in the water.

Globe to Globe: Henry V, Shakespeare's Globe

Demetrios Matheou Friday, 15 June 2012

Henry V is a play with so many layers, and such ambivalence, that it can suit a multitude of purposes. When Laurence Olivier made his film version in 1944, it was as a propagandist rallying cry, a reminder of what was at stake in a war that was far from won; 60 years later, Nicholas Hytner’s modern-dress production at the National Theatre was a bullish anti-war statement, lent potency by the country’s then current excursion into Iraq.

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Manchester Lines, Library Theatre, Manchester

philip Radcliffe Friday, 15 June 2012

Visualise a large lost property office, such as that for Transport for London at Baker Street, which inspired this production, its racks stuffed with thousands of items, from false teeth to umbrellas, prosthetic limbs to mobile phones. You name it, it’s been lost – and found. Why, only the other day, some loved one’s ashes were left on the tram between Manchester and Bury.

LIFT 2012: Gatz, Noël Coward Theatre

bella Todd Thursday, 14 June 2012

You wouldn’t be surprised, in the programme for Elevator Repair Service’s adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s jazz age masterpiece The Great Gatsby, to find instructions for gentle exercises to stave off deep-vein thrombosis. With a run-time of eight hours, during which every single word of the novel is spoken on stage, in one sense Gatz is no adaptation at all.

The Witness, Royal Court Theatre

aleks Sierz Tuesday, 12 June 2012

A powerful trend in contemporary theatre is the family play. But the families usually depicted tend to be of the standard two-point-five variety, while other more complex forms — families as they actually are — tend to be ignored. So initially the good thing about Vivienne Franzmann’s new play is that it focuses on a family where the child is adopted. More controversially, it is about a white man who adopts a black girl from Africa.

The Physicists, Donmar Warehouse

Sam Marlowe Friday, 08 June 2012

If you weren’t sick when you arrived at Les Cerisiers, the private psychiatric hospital in this satiric early Sixties drama by Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt, you probably would be by the time the institution had finished with you. Its all-female staff are either grotesque or pulchritudinous; and the latter category have a worrying tendency to wind up murdered.

Globe to Globe: Hamlet, Shakespeare's Globe

Jasper Rees Monday, 04 June 2012

We’re fresh out of superlatives. The Globe to Globe season has put a girdle around the earth in 37 languages, and the visiting companies have now left the building. You have to high-five the Globe’s chutzpah for mounting this wondrous contribution to London 2012’s World Shakespeare Festival in the first place. But in quite properly keeping the biggest till last, it surely took extra testicles to stage the famous play about a royal family in turmoil on this of all weekends.

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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.