Theatre Reviews
The Tempest, Little Angel Theatre/ Royal Shakespeare CompanySaturday, 23 April 2011
Puppetry has come a long way in this country. Once considered the domain of children’s theatre only, you’ll now be hard pushed to find a classical production where puppets are not used in some way. For this sea change we have to thank, amongst others, a couple of Canadian geniuses, Ronnie Birkett and Robert Lepage, and - almost single-handedly carrying the torch for puppetry as a grown-up form to be taken seriously in this country - John and Lyndie Wright, founders of the Little Angel... Read more... |
Tender Napalm, Southwark PlayhouseFriday, 22 April 2011
Playwright, film-maker and polymath Philip Ridley has had a great couple of years. All over the place, there have been powerful and revealing revivals of his 1990s classics, such as The Fastest Clock in the Universe. His 2000 play, Vincent River, enjoyed an outing in the West End and his 2005 shocker, Mercury Fur, got a new and exciting site-specific production. Read more... |
Little Eagles, Hampstead TheatreThursday, 21 April 2011
Space is a great subject for theatre. I’m not sure why but it might be something to do with the contrast between the irreducible groundedness of live performance and the imaginary flights of fancy that the audience yearns to take. Whatever the reason, memorable past explorations of this subject, from the Soviet side of the space race, include Robert Lepage’s The Far Side of the Moon and David Greig’s The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet... Read more... |
Electra, Gate TheatreMonday, 18 April 2011
Certain big dramas can work really well in small places. Sophocles’s revenge play Electra (end of the fifth century BC) is as consequential, and influential, as they come; the Gate Theatre one of the smallest spaces in London. It continually produces sparky, original productions of old and new work. Read more... |
Lakeboat/ Prairie du Chien, Arcola Theatre Studio 2Sunday, 17 April 2011
David Mamet plays can, nearly always, be relied upon to be muscular. Leastways, when you think about his early signature plays – American Buffalo (1975), Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1976) and the Pulitzer award-winning Glengarry Glen Ross (1983) – the first thing that springs to mind is the manner and cadence of male speech and communication. A consistent critique of capitalism, Mamet’s early works did it by exploring masculinity and brilliantly dissecting... Read more... |
London Road, National TheatreThursday, 14 April 2011
The murders of five prostitutes in Ipswich: it’s hard to imagine a less likely subject for a musical, not least because the memory of the crimes of forklift-truck driver Steve Wright, committed in late 2006, is still so horribly fresh. But there is nothing lurid about this exceptional piece of theatre, created by Alecky Blythe and composer Adam Cork, and directed with restraint, tenderness and potent simplicity by Rufus Norris. It’s moving, fascinating and even funny. Read more... |
Betty Blue Eyes, Novello TheatreThursday, 14 April 2011
Foot fetishists will have a field day at Betty Blue Eyes, given that the producer Cameron Mackintosh's latest venture is also the first in my experience to sing of bunions, calluses and corns, the last encompassing a passing reference to a lyric from Oklahoma!: another show on Sir Cameron's CV. Read more... |
Moonlight, Donmar WarehouseWednesday, 13 April 2011
One wants to be antagonised by Harold Pinter. In his substantial early dramas (The Homecoming, The Caretaker, The Birthday Party), aggression and menace coil through the texts like rattlesnakes. He was, then, revolutionary. Maybe it's glib - critical shorthand - to suggest that there were, thereafter, two to three decades of falling away; but some of us... Read more... |
Thrill Me, Tristan Bates TheatreMonday, 11 April 2011
Does the perfect murder make for the perfect musical? One doesn't have to make undue claims for the work's chamber-size appeal to warm to Thrill Me, the American two-hander that has arrived at the Tristan Bates Theatre as this season's entry in retelling the story of the Chicago killers, Leopold and Loeb. Read more... |
The Tempest, Cheek By Jowl, Barbican TheatreSaturday, 09 April 2011
Tradition, in the form of Victorian performance, conferred on The Tempest the VC of Highest Shakespearean Poetry, though it probably wasn't Shakespeare's final play. John Gielgud was in an important sense the last great Victorian English thesp and, in the apparently valedictory role of Prospero, took the island parable to an Olympus of rhetoric. 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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