Theatre Reviews
The School for Scandal, Barbican TheatreSaturday, 21 May 2011
"There’s no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature,” preaches the Gospel according to Richard Brinsley Sheridan. What the playwright omits to mention, however, is that it is possible to be ill-natured without in fact being terribly witty, a flaw that proves almost fatal for Warner’s acerbic, alienated new production of The School for Scandal. Overstyling Sheridan’s most stylised of comedies, Warner turns what Hazlitt described as the most “finished and faultless”... Read more...
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Total Football, BarbicanThursday, 19 May 2011
Which came first? The low national self-esteem or the shit national football team? Is it possible, in the interests of blending in with one’s countrymen, to stimulate in oneself a love of the beautiful game? And can Britishness be boiled down to an application test? Total Football, from the two-man company Ridiculusmus, is a fleet-footed comedy which investigates the shifting parameters of what it means to belong in a country where symbols of national pride are hard to come by... Read more... |
Silence, Royal Shakespeare Company/Filter, Hampstead TheatreWednesday, 18 May 2011
If your heart breaks a continent or more away from home, does it make a noise? Very much so in the scintillating Royal Shakespeare Company/Filter collaboration Silence, the second in a series of three RSC premieres at the Hampstead Theatre. Wedding Filter's interest in the synergy between technology and text with a subset of Shakespeareans who have been wandering... Read more... |
The Cherry Orchard, National TheatreWednesday, 18 May 2011
A stench of decay rises from Howard Davies's production of this 1903 drama by Anton Chekhov. Ranyevskaya’s wooden home, designed with characteristic visual eloquence by Bunny Christie, is quietly rotting. Weeds sprout through cracks, the windows are filthy; an ugly pylon raises its arms in the foreground, its wires stretching into a future of seismic political and social change for which the family – and Russia itself – are so ill prepared. Read more... |
Macbeth, Everyman Theatre, LiverpoolFriday, 13 May 2011
Has the King of Knotty Ash been usurped? I saw him embrace Shakespeare and play Malvolio here just 40 years ago. I’m talking about Ken Dodd, more used to playing the fool. Now, another upstart from Knotty Ash is even more ambitiously playing the King of Scotland. I’m talking about David Morrissey. No fool he. Read more... |
A Delicate Balance, Almeida TheatreFriday, 13 May 2011
Serenity hangs by a fraying thread in the thrilling Almeida Theatre revival of A Delicate Balance, Edward Albee's 1966 Pulitzer Prize-winner about remembrance, fear, and somehow facing a new day. This particular playhouse has long been associated with Albee, from its (overrated) Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? through to various UK and even world premieres. But... Read more... |
Bette and Joan, Arts TheatreWednesday, 11 May 2011
Don't go expecting the "But ya are, Blaaanche, ya are" Gothic of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. After all, crazy Bette Davis and even phoney Joan Crawford must have been human behind the sacred-monster facade. Anton Burge's new play tries to show us just that in a two-hander set during one day of rehearsals for Robert Aldrich's shlocky B-movie in 1962. Read more... |
I Am the Wind, Young VicTuesday, 10 May 2011
Today’s Britons are a minor miracle of globalised taste. Typically, we are amazingly eclectic: we eat curry and sushi, read Swedish novels or South American magic realists, dress like Italians, drive German cars, listen to world music. Our houses are full of Scandinavian design. Our favourite films are as likely to be made in China or Afghanistan as in Hollywood. So, watching the British premiere of a new play by Norwegian Jon Fosse directed by French theatre legend Patrice Chéreau, one is... Read more... |
All's Well That Ends Well, Shakespeare's GlobeThursday, 05 May 2011
Trust the "wooden O" to set the Shakespearean record straighter than usual. In John Dove's production, this is no problem play but a bright comedy where the immaculate plotting proves more admirable than its questionable characters. Its low cuddleability quotient will never make All's Well Everyman's favourite; the heroine has Rosalind's or Viola's resourcefulness and none of their charm as she pursues a callow, snobbish young man whom you can't at first blame for feeling cornered... Read more... |
The Passion of Port Talbot, NTW/WildWorksMonday, 25 April 2011
To begin at the end, this was an astonishing creation, a piece of street theatre of transcendental power which no one who was there at the death last night could or will ever forget. Those witnesses included what felt like the whole population of Port Talbot who filled the streets in their many thousands - 5000? 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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