sun 08/12/2024

Theatre Reviews

Speaking in Tongues, Duke of York's

Veronica Lee

Take four superb actors - Lucy Cohu, Kerry Fox, Ian Hart and John Simm - cast them in a revival of a play that inspired a haunting film, and what do you get? On the evidence of last night’s opening performance of Speaking in Tongues, a right mess, that’s what.

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Mother Courage and Her Children, National Theatre

james Woodall

Bertolt Brecht was probably made for them: Deborah Warner directing Fiona Shaw in Mother Courage and her Children is as desirable a coupling, surely, as the Warner-Shaw Richard II or Happy Days, both immensely satisfying showcases for the director's imaginative reach and the actress's fabled versatility.

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The Fastest Clock in the Universe, Hampstead Theatre

aleks Sierz

Behold the gleaming dark. At one point in this spirited and imaginative revival of Philip Ridley's 1992 play, The Fastest Clock in the Universe, one of the characters says, "We're all as bad as each other. All hungry little cannibals at our own cannibal party. So fuck the milk of human kindness and welcome to the abattoir!" Yes, well. As welcomes go, this is about as pleasant as a razor blade hidden in a cupcake - and perfectly apt for this sharp slice of East End gothic.

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Our Class, Cottesloe, National Theatre

james Woodall

Nine years ago, historian Jan T Gross published a book called Neighbours. It chronicled, and tried to analyse the reasons for, the massacre of 1,600 Jews in a north-eastern Polish village, Jedwabne, in July 1941. That was a month after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, into which, in 1939, this bit of Poland had been absorbed by Stalin. The unexamined historical assumption had been that, like so many similar east European communities, Jedwabne simply fell victim to the by then...

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Talent, Menier Chocolate Factory

Veronica Lee

Talent, Victoria Wood’s first play, premiered at the Sheffield Crucible in 1978 and was made into a television drama the following year for ITV. Roger Glossop asked Wood to revisit the work for a festival he runs at the Old Laundry Theatre in Bowness-on-Windermere and last night it transferred to the Menier Chocolate...

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Othello, Trafalgar Studios

Veronica Lee

For someone who until very recently had an avowed dislike of Shakespeare, stand-up comic Lenny Henry makes a decent fist of Othello. It’s an astonishing role in which to make his stage acting debut - complex emotions are expressed in rhetorical gymnastics and he’s rarely off stage - but not for one moment does one believe Henry guilty of hubris. Rather, this is a man who has come to the Bard late (Henry is now 51) and clearly fallen in love with him.

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2nd May 1997, Bush Theatre

aleks Sierz

Can 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.

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Kurt & Sid, Trafalgar 2 Studios, Whitehall

Adam Sweeting

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-...

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The Shawshank Redemption, Wyndham's

Matt Wolf

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.

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Judgment Day, Almeida

james Woodall

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.

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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.


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