Theatre Reviews
2nd May 1997, Bush TheatreWednesday, 16 September 2009Can elections cause erections? In Jack Thorne's new 90-minute play, 2nd May 1997, Tony Blair's historic landslide victory over the Tories is the background to three stories about sex and love. As the media pumps out the election results, including the memorable Portillo moment, three very different couples in three very different bedrooms react very differently to the dawning of a new political age. Read more... |
Kurt & Sid, Trafalgar 2 Studios, WhitehallTuesday, 15 September 2009
The death of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain in 1994 has provided a densely populated field of daydreams for conspiracy theorists, several of whom hotly insist that the troubled avatar of Grunge was murdered. Conversely, he may be playing in a ZZ Top covers band in Peru with Elvis and Jim Morrison. Whatever, playwright Roy Smiles has pursued a more original angle. Picking up on a rumour that there had been somebody with Cobain on the night of his suicide, Smiles exploits Cobain's well-... Read more... |
The Shawshank Redemption, Wyndham'sSunday, 13 September 2009
A beloved if flawed film becomes the latest celluloid icon to stumble on its way to the stage, The Shawshank Redemption on the West End flailing where theatre adaptations of The Graduate, When Harry Met Sally, and Rain Man, among various others, previously led. Read more... |
Judgment Day, AlmeidaFriday, 11 September 2009
Fresh from scripting one of the year's feeblest films, Stephen Frears's Michelle Pfeiffer-love-in Chéri, Christopher Hampton has turned his translating hand to a solid 20th-century German drama. Ödön von Horváth's late-1930s Judgment Day is not a bad play, but the Almeida Theatre's new staging of it struggles to convince us that it's worth making that much of a modern fuss about. |
Punk Rock, Lyric HammersmithThursday, 10 September 2009
Is youth wasted on the young? Well, precious few grown-ups who watch Simon Stephens's new drama, Punk Rock, will develop a sudden urge to be a teenager again: his portrait of a group of middle-class youngsters is every parent's nightmare. They are either foul-mouthed and aggressive bullies, or deeply troubled neurotics - and the gradual escalation of their conflicts ends in the kind of mindless violence that stays on the front pages for days. Read more... |
Duchess of Malfi, King's Head TheatreWednesday, 09 September 2009
Have Your Cake Theatre has a mission to 'demonstrate that the big themes have never gone away', and an Eighties stab at John Webster's Duchess of Malfi (if you'll pardon the pun) is their opening salvo. |
Ed Byrne, Vaudeville TheatreTuesday, 08 September 2009It says much for Ed Byrne’s talents as a stand-up that he can make his show Different Class, which he first performed a year ago, feel fresh and current. But with topical gags aplenty - many of which must have been written just hours before he took the stage at the Vaudeville Theatre in London, where is doing a month-long residency - it feels bang up to the minute. Read more... |
Lolita, National TheatreTuesday, 08 September 2009
Adrian Lyne met controversy in the cinema with it head on, while Vladimir Nabokov's novel prompted one of the resounding Broadway flops of Edward Albee's stage career. (Trust me: I am among the few who caught its 1981 New York run.) So here is Lolita once more, this time filleted and distilled into a one-person show suspended somewhere between a stage reading and an actual play. Call it what you will, the result is mesmerising. Read more... |
Over There, Royal CourtTuesday, 23 June 2009
Why do writers end up parodying themselves? The late Harold Pinter was a case in point: in the 1950s and 1960s, his voice was fresh, his pauses enigmatic and his style delivered the shock of the new. In the 1970s, he played imaginative games with theatre form; in the 1980s, he discovered politics. By the 1990s, his new plays seemed to be parodies of his own style. The dialogues were too Pinteresque, the pauses risible, the form contrived. |
Eonnagata, Sylvie Guillem/ Robert LePage/ Russell Maliphant, Sadler’s WellsSaturday, 28 February 2009
With five first-magnitude stars in it you're expecting at least a five-star show from Eonnagata, the collaboration between ballerina Sylvie Guillem, theatre director Robert Lepage, choreographer Russell Maliphant, designer Alexander McQueen and lighting genius Michael Hulls - possibly even the Milky Way. But I can't divvy up more than two stars for the result. 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
Taylor Swift, Wembley Stadium review - the Eras Tour lights...
Unless you were around when The Beatles toured America in the mid-1960s, it’s doubtful you've heard anything like this. In 40 years of extensive...
Album: Linda Thompson - Proxy Music
She has one of the most distinctive voices in folk and contemporary British music, impossible to forget once heard, and impossible to ignore. Even...
Bartlett, Fantasia Orchestra, Fetherstonhaugh, Proms at St J...
Any programme featuring Gershwin’s top large-scale works might tend to the “pops” side. Bernstein’s West Side Story Overture and even the...
My Father's Fable, Bush Theatre review - hilarious and...
Following the huge success of Benedict Lombe’s Shifters, which transfers soon to the West End, the...
Blu-ray: Army of Shadows
One of those rare films that leaves you speechless after the closing credits, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows (L'Armée des...
Giulio Cesare, Glyndebourne review - every number a winner f...
How much better can a classic get? Sebastian Scotney more or less asked the same question on theartsdesk the last time Giulio...
Kelly Clancy: Playing with Reality - How Games Shape Our Wor...
For a couple of decades, the free video game America’s Army was a powerful recruitment aid for the US military. More than a shoot-em-up,...
Album: Madeleine Peyroux - Let's Walk
Madeleine Peyroux made her name with her second album, 2004’s Careless Love. It consists almost completely of cover versions, delivered...
Music Reissues Weekly: The Cryin’ Shames - Please Stay, Do T...
Liverpool’s The Cryin’ Shames were responsible for two of mid-Sixties Britain’s most striking single’s tracks. The February 1966 top side “Please...
theartsdesk at Smetanova Litomyšl - three fascinating operas...
What did they put in the water of Czechia’s central Bohemia/Moravia borderlands? From south to north there's Mahler’s birthplace in Kali...