West End
Ismene Brown
Tom Stoppard’s humungously funny play Travesties was born out of a piece of James Joyce doggerel about how a British diplomat sued him for the cost of two pairs of trousers. It’s like this. Joyce was organising an expat amateur production of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in Zurich; the British consul Henry Carr agreed to play Algernon on the understanding that he would choose his own trousers and – crucially – have two full costume changes.As is the way in theatre, heads butted when the box office takings came in, and Joyce wrote in an outraged ditty about the incident: "We paid all Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The writing of Tennessee Williams, said his contemporary Arthur Miller, planted “the flag of beauty on the shores of commercial theatre”. This American production of Williams’s breakthrough play – a hit on Broadway and at the Edinburgh Festival last summer – does not disappoint in the beauty stakes, drawing both eye and ear to its chamber-work delicacy, translucent as one of Laura Wingfield’s glass animals.The production is directed by John Tiffany, a creative force behind the West End's Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and, sure enough, inexplicable things happen here, too. Tom Wingfield ( Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“I’m Death.” “And you’re on holiday?” Well, there’s really no way to disguise the preposterousness of this musical’s premise, nor to reconcile its winking humour and self-serious grand romance. Thus, Thom Southerland’s London premiere wisely diverts attention to its seductive qualities as a stylish period piece – come for the flappers, champers, saucy maids and misty Italian arches.Alberto Casella’s 1924 play, adapted into a 2011 chamber musical by Maury Yeston, Thomas Meehan and Peter Stone, is perhaps best known in another incarnation: the interminable 1998 Brad Pitt/Anthony Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Khaled Hosseini's 2003 bestseller ticks all the boxes as an A-level text. A personal story with epic sweep, it interweaves the bloody recent history of Afghanistan with a gripping family saga. Its treatment of racism and radicalism is timely. Other themes too might have been hand-picked for classroom discussion: bullying, betrayal, bad parenting, family secrets. Its first-person narrative makes it feel real.The trouble with this stage adaptation newly arrived in the West End is that only a small portion of the audience is using it for exam revision. Those merely hoping for a theatre Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo.” A sudden cold breeze blows through the endless summer afternoon of Love’s Labour's Lost in the play’s final moments. Death enters Shakespeare’s Edenic garden and innocence is lost. But what, asks director Christopher Luscombe, might happen if those songs were to return? What if these youthful courtships were resumed by characters older, if not wiser, scarred by life but still hopeful of love?His answer comes in the form of a funny, sunny, Shakespearean double-bill (seen here for the third time since the productions debuted in 2014) Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It’s taken almost four nail-biting decades for Dreamgirls to evolve from the germ of an idea to the most anticipated musical never to have quite made it, lock, stock, and smoking barrel across the Atlantic. The germ of an idea – the tale of a fictional girl-group whose journey from backing singers to headliners proves a particularly bumpy one (sounding familiar?) – acquired a sequence of songs by Henry Krieger and Tom Eyen that sprang so naturally and convincingly from the golden era of R & B that over the decades they have assumed a popularity and status barely distinguishable from the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What a joy it is to have pantomime back at the Palladium, the first at this glorious theatre in 29 years. And the producers of Cinderella have pulled out the stops; a star-studded cast, a large ensemble, fabulous costumes and a live orchestra make for a magnificent three-hour entertainment.The creatives (writers Alan McHugh and David McGillivray, director Michael Harrison and choreographer Andrew Wright) have shown a similar lack of restraint in producing their pantomime story, stuffing it with more characters than it really needs – in order to accommodate, one presumes, their embarrassment Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When Shakespeare visits the bearpit of the West End, it is usually in the company of a big name: Judi Dench, Sheridan Smith, Martin Freeman. This Christmas the bard enters the Theatre Royal, Haymarket without any such support. And there is a further hurdle to clear: Love’s Labour’s Lost is barely ever been seen outside the subsidised sector. It forms part of a pair which audiences might take a moment to get their head around: Much Ado About Nothing is presented as its Shakespearean twin called Love’s Labour’s Won.The double bill began at Stratford in 2014. The shows, set either Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
What stroke of prescience brought two Sam Shepard plays to London in the very month America voted for Trump? The kind of people we’re learning to call the disenfranchised have been Shepard’s focus for the last 40 years, and now they’re global news. In Fool for Love (which there’s still time to catch at the pop-up venue Found III) he exposed the grubby truth behind the working-class alpha-male ideal. In Buried Child (which won a Pulitzer on its first outing in 1978) he turned his X-ray gaze on the traditional American family.The USP of this revival is its casting, with Ed Harris, Hollywood Read more ...
Ismene Brown
This House arrives in the West End with magic timing - a comedy about the farcical horrors of being a government with a wafer-thin majority, frantically wheeling out dying, suicidal and breastfeeding MPs to vote, horsetrading with "odds and sods" to keep their nails on power. James Graham’s play about the 1970s Labour travails, produced by the National Theatre/Chichester Festival, opened in 2012 to a mixed reception, but its reappearance on Charing Cross Road acquired some serendipitous overnight oomph as Tory fellow-traveller Zac Goldsmith lost his seat to the Lib Dems yesterday, Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Mark Rylance was once renowned for skipping thank yous to agents, friends and everyone he’s ever met in award speeches and instead giving us a blast of Minnesotan prose poet Louis Jenkins. Now the two men have co-created an oddball meditation, first seen in New York earlier this year, in which comedy meets soul-searching on an untethered frozen lake.Rylance the writer has given Rylance the actor a typically Rylance part: charmingly guileless and gormless Ron, the loquacious and gently dotty companion of serious fisherman Erik (Jim Lichtscheidl), whose suffering of this irksome presence Read more ...
Matt Wolf
That old saw about a star being born really is on view at the Noel Coward Theatre, where newcomer Charlie Stemp justifies and then some, the fuss being made about him in this "revisal" of the onetime Tommy Steele vehicle Half A Sixpence. Whether you'll respond as warmly to the show itself may depend on your appetite for nostalgia and the implicit message of a piece at considerable odds with an aspirational climate that long ago left the attitudes on view here in the dust. But stick with Stemp's unforced and genuinely buoyant charm, and as long as he is vaulting with unbridled abandon about Read more ...