Theatre Reviews
Off the Endz, Royal Court TheatreSunday, 21 February 2010
Over the past decade, much of the energy in new writing has come from black Britons. Homegrown talents such as Roy Williams, debbie tucker green and Kwame Kwei-Armah have sent us updates about the state of hybrid, streetsmart culture, and alerted us to the experiences of minorities. In doing so, they have reinvented punchy dialogue, with stage chat that zips along with dizzy humour and linguistic freshness. Read more...
|
Serenading Louie, Donmar WarehouseFriday, 19 February 2010
American spiritual anomie, that beloved realm of cultural enquiry that has fuelled the likes of Revolutionary Road and Ordinary People and much else besides, gets its latest theatrical airing in the form of Serenading Louie, a Lanford Wilson play that is almost as infrequently seen States-side as it is here. Now, here it is at the Donmar, in a mournful, acutely... Read more... |
Dunsinane, RSC/Hampstead TheatreThursday, 18 February 2010
Scottish playwright David Greig’s new play, for the Royal Shakespeare Company in their London season at Hampstead, picks up where Shakespeare’s Macbeth left off (almost). We are in 11th-century Dunsinane, the seat of power in Scotland. Read more... |
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Rose TheatreTuesday, 16 February 2010
It’s the pretext that reunites Judi Dench and Peter Hall to collaborate on Shakespeare’s comedy nearly five decades after they first ventured into the Athenian woods together at the RSC. But the conceit of conflating the fairy queen Titania with Gloriana doesn’t come close to lending Hall’s workaday production the necessary sense of enchantment. It’s performed on Elizabeth Bury’s sparse and decidedly... Read more... |
Jerusalem, Apollo TheatreWednesday, 10 February 2010
Looking at posters outside the Apollo Theatre, where the West End transfer of Jez Butterworth’s award-heavy Royal Court success opened last night, you might be tempted to start humming: “And did those feet in ancient time…” But such nostalgic sentiments are unlikely to survive the opening scene of this phenomenal play. Soon after the curtain, a symbolically faded flag of St George, rises, we see a familiar rural scene: under-aged kids stoned out of their minds, dancing in a thumping rave. Read more... |
A Life in Three Acts, Soho TheatreTuesday, 09 February 2010
You may know the actor, drag artist and gay activist Bette Bourne from his portrayal of Quentin Crisp in the theatre, or perhaps his Lady Bracknell for English Touring Theatre (a role he was surely born to play) but outside the gay/theatrical London loop, he is less well known. That’s a shame because this charming and rather unorthodox piece of theatre shows that his life story - from an East End childhood, through early gay liberation, the scourge of Aids and the advent of queer theatre to... Read more... |
Really Old, Like Forty Five, National TheatreWednesday, 03 February 2010
Okay, now that you’re a citizen of Dystopia, and you’ve reached the regulation old age, it’s time to check into an approved care home. Please enter the Ark, and take your allotted bed. A government official will be with you in due course. Yes, that’s right, just take those pills and you will be fine. Will you be expecting visitors? Okay. Any problems, just ask Nurse. In Tamsin Oglesby’s satirical new drama, which opened last night at the National's Cottesloe space, the biblically named Ark... Read more... |
Waiting For Godot, Theatre Royal HaymarketThursday, 28 January 2010
The wait is over. Less than six months after dramatic literature's defining tramps departed the West End, here are Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo) back again, with some new faces to flesh out Beckett's eternal verities about that grievous but also grimly funny thing we call life. Read more... |
Wet Weather Cover, King's Head TheatreThursday, 28 January 2010
"Plays about cinema tend to be written by people who have done some movies, come back and filled their fountain pens from their spleen," the Oscar-nominated screenwriter Larry Gelbart once told me. David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow is probably the best-known example, followed by such works as Christopher Hampton's Tales From Hollywood, Martin Crimp's The Treatment and, most recently, last week's ... Read more... |
The Whisky Taster, Bush TheatreWednesday, 27 January 2010
Synaesthesia is a tricky beast. It’s basically a neurological condition which condemns those afflicted with it to a life in which words evoke colours, and emotions can be experienced as colour. Sometimes it is almost playful, with the mere names of the days of the week evoking tonal sensations; at other times it is intensely painful, with the mere glimpse of a buzzy pattern causing dizziness or strong feelings conjuring up great blasts of colour, an unbearable onslaught of confusion and... 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
theartsdesk Q&A: Eddie Marsan and the American Revolutio...
He’s not the kind of actor who has paparazzi following him...
DVD/Blu-ray: Billy Connolly - Big Banana Feet
The most striking things about the 1976 documentary (restored and re-released by the BFI) is just how polite Billy Connolly comes across as. Not...
The Great Escape Festival 2024, Brighton review - 12 hours o...
If the weather’s good TGE Beach is a grand start to a day. As it sounds, it’s a purpose-built seafront space to the east of central...
Rebus, BBC One review - revival of Ian Rankin's Scottis...
The previous incarnation of Ian Rankin’s Scottish detective on ITV starred, in their contrasting styles, John Hannah and Ken Stott. For this ...
Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, Sousa, St Martin-in...
Better (much better, indeed) late than never. The Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique should have given their cycle of Beethoven symphonies at...
Die Zauberflöte, Glyndebourne review - cornucopia of visual...
Five years after it first clattered onto the ...
Hough, Hallé, Elder, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - a...
It’s probably a bit early to be getting misty-eyed about the approaching end of Sir Mark Elder’s time as music director of the Hallé, but the...
Clinton Baptiste, Touring review - spoof clairvoyant on grea...
Clinton Baptiste – clairvoyant, medium and psychic – first appeared briefly as a character in Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights on Channel 4....
Music Reissues Weekly: Andwella - To Dream
Original pressings of Love And Poetry sell for up to £2,800. Copies of the August 1969 debut album by Andwellas Dream can sometimes also...
Bavouzet, Manchester Camerata, Takács-Nagy, Stoller Hall, Ma...
There’s a sense of cheerful abandon about Manchester Camerata’s ...