Old Vic
Matt Wolf
Can a play peak too soon? That's the quandary that attends the Old Vic airing of Eureka Day, Jonathan Spector's on-point if overextended comedy that was written prior to the pandemic but has absolutely come into its own just now. A skewering of liberal pieties that puts one in mind of a fellow theatrical satirist like Bruce Norris (Clybourne Park), Eureka Day takes few prisoners on the way to a flat-seeming ending.But Katy Rudd's production, featuring Helen Hunt (pictured below) in a notably unstarry London stage debut, is lucky enough before that to have sent the audience into the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s great to see August Wilson’s early play – the first of his “Century Cycle”, that remarkable decalogy that explored a century of Black American experience through the prism of the playwright’s native Pittsburgh – back on the London stage. It’s been two decades since it premiered at the National Theatre, winning the 2002 Olivier Best New Play award.Another reason to celebrate is Tinuke Craig’s terrific production at the Old Vic (produced with Leeds Playhouse and Headlong), which gives Jitney an energy and sense of wider perspective that the play, concentrated as it is around a single Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Time continues to be kind to A Number, the astonishing 2002 play by Caryl Churchill that reaps fresh rewards with every viewing. Revived just prior to the pandemic at the Bridge, here it is anew at the Old Vic, in a smart reappraisal by the director Lyndsey Turner who seems to be making her way through the canon of Britain's most adventurous and invaluable playwright, now 83. This play can withstand varying degrees of realism, having been birthed at the Royal Court in a scalpel-sharp rendition from Stephen Daldry that was pretty much entirely abstract. Turner, by contrast, gives us a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There was no live theatre at the start of 2021, just a return to the world of virtual performance and streaming to which we had become well accustomed, and very quickly, too. So imagine the collective surprise come the start of this month as show after show, venue after venue, ceased performance or curtailed operations, however temporarily. Hex, Force Majeure and Moulin Rouge were three prominent end-of-year openings to push their press nights into 2022, a year shrouded as I write this by Omicron-prompted uncertainty. All one can do, and hardly for the first time these days, is hope that Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Four years and a Broadway run on from its Old Vic debut, director Matthew Warchus and writer,Jack Thorne are still throwing everything they can at one of the most familiar stories, and characters, in English literature. That may be to address the obvious question of whether we need yet another three ghosts and an epiphany or whether it's playing a little too safe to displace Dickens's themes of Ignorance and Want 150 years or so into the past. Inevitably, we get some hits and some misses.We're greeted with mince pies and by carollers in top hats and frock coats with - and I'm sure I'm Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A stealthily powerful play gets the production of its dreams in Camp Siegfried, which marks a high-profile UK presence for the American writer Bess Wohl. A world premiere at the Old Vic, Wohl's two-hander shines a scary and pertinent light on a Nazi training ground in the 1930s that is seen to have all sorts of ongoing repercussions for today. That a potentially slippery text is as well realised as it is pays tribute, and then some, to a creative team working in complete harmony, starting with an impeccable cast, Luke Thallon and Patsy Ferran, who deliver the play's darkening affect well Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A gorgeous song exists in search of a show to match over at Bagdad Café, the 1987 film that gave the world the memorably plaintive "Calling You", which is threaded throughout Emma Rice's stage adaptation of the movie with understandable insistence.What hasn't yet been achieved in this Old Vic premiere is much narrative heft to go with the abundant heart of an evening that ends with a collective Zoom, a reminder in our fraught times of the collective call-out to community. All that's needed now is something more of substance. Rice has always been great when it comes to feeling and Read more ...
Heather Neill
Pinter wrote The Dumb Waiter in 1957 (although it wasn't seen in London until 1960) the year before The Birthday Party received its notorious première at the Lyric Hammersmith. When a friend described them both as political plays, about power and victimisation, the playwright readily agreed. And it is this aspect of the 50-minute, one-act piece that director Jeremy Herrin foregrounds.Ben and Gus are two hit men waiting in a Birmingham basement for their latest victim to arrive. The room is furnished merely with two single beds between which is the dumb waiter of the title (although there is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As proof that you can't have too much of a good thing, consider the return of Matthew Warchus's buoyant production of A Christmas Carol, now marking its fourth year at the Old Vic (with a lauded Broadway run last Christmas included, for good measure). But I would wager that neither Warchus nor his savvy adapter, Jack Thorne, ever thought that a production making a real virtue of inclusion would be playing this time out to an empty auditorium.Such are the dictates of the pandemic, however, that the show is closing out the ambitious In Camera series at this address allowing access in absentia Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The world premiere of Stephen Beresford’s new hourlong play, livestreamed to home audiences in four performances as part of the Old Vic’s In Camera series, was postponed a couple of times due to Andrew Scott undergoing minor surgery. Thankfully, the actor has fully recovered, and his performance of this affecting piece was certainly worth the wait.Beresford’s play centres on the fraught relationship between Patrick and his absentee father. They first meet when the former is an awed, frightened eight-year-old, admiring this stranger’s flamboyant dress, stylish smoking and expansive tales Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Theatres will begin gently unlocking their doors as we head into August. In the meantime, a beleaguered community continues to find fresh and startling ways to sustain interest and excitement, whether that be the premiere of a new play starring Andrew Scott at the Old Vic or a pictorial tour round long-shuttered playhouses from the photographer Helen Murray. The American composer Jason Robert Brown is back on view yet again, this time with a revival of his earliest show as performed by a high-voltage musical theatre cast, and one of the most celebrated theatres in the world livestreams a show Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Can this weekly lineup really now be three months old? As we move towards at least some degree of relaxation on the social restrictions that have long been in place, the offerings of theatre online continue to afford many a reason not to leave your laptop. National Theatre at Home has a particularly weighty (and timely) entry in its capacious rendering of Lorraine Hansberry's rarely glimpsed Les Blancs, whilst the Old Vic down the road places the music industry under the microscope via the Joe Penhall play Mood Music. You get recipe cards if you tune into Toast, not to mention the Read more ...