adaptation
Gary Naylor
Life is full of coincidences and contradictions. As I was walking to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was on his feet in the House of Commons delivering yet another rebalancing of individual and collective resources. On reading a couple of fine essays in the excellent programme, I saw the acknowledgement of the production’s sponsor, Pragnell.The first item that appears on the jeweller’s website is a pair of earrings retailing at an eye-watering £71,500. Which is to say that the inequalities that fired Charles Dickens’ anger in the 1840s are still with us in the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Whorehouses, gay prostitution and suicide – you can see why James Jones’ bestselling 1951 novel was bowdlerised by the publishers and sanitised into subtext by Hollywood for the Oscar-laden movie released a couple of years later. As the extensive list of trigger warnings at the box office suggests, we’re very much in the world of the unexpurgated original text (eventually published in 2011) for this West End revival of Stuart Brayson’s and Sir Tim Rice’s musical.A fortnight before Pearl Harbour, the army boys are kicking their heels, thousands of miles from action, in the apparent backwater Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Irregular warfare has proved to be a speciality with the British armed forces. This new six-part series, based on Ben Macintyre’s 2016 book, tells the story of the chaotic birth of the Special Air Service during the war in North Africa in 1941, and it's a rollicking ride.The screenplay is by Steven Knight, who has repeated his Peaky Blinders trick of using an ahistorical soundtrack to soup up the on-screen action. However, where the Brummie gangster odyssey unfolded against a backdrop of the White Stripes, Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen, this time Knight has gone rockier. The narrative is Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Opening a theatre should be a celebration, says Nica Burns, the West End power behind this new theatre which is situated next to Tottenham Court Road tube. The co-owner of Nimax Theatre group, she has come up with an elegantly gleaming 600-seat theatre in the round as part of the urban regeneration of the scuzzy top of Charing Cross Road.Her choice of an opening production is this celebratory bio-drama about Newcastle-under-Lyme’s local legend, the irrepressible Neil "Nello" Baldwin, whose amazing career proves that disability can be overcome – a heartwarming message in these turbulent times Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Robert Icke is an expert in corporate tragedy. I don’t mean that in a bad way - just that he has a penchant for taking classics (Hamlet, The Oresteia, Mary Stuart) and transporting them, with the help of designer Hildegard Bechtler, to the frosted-glass doors and pale wood of the boardroom. The Doctor, his 2019 swan song at the Almeida Theatre now transferred to the Duke of York’s Theatre, is an adaptation of a 1912 play by Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler. It’s a sharp-tongued vivisection of identity politics, anchored by an astonishing lead performance from Juliet Stevenson.Like all good Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Brecht – as I suppose he intended – is always a shock to the system. With not a word on what to expect from his commitment to the strictures of epic theatre in the programme, a star of West End musical theatre cast in the lead and a venue with a history of more user-friendly shows, some are going to have to sit up straight in their seats from the very start – including your reviewer.This new production, the first in London for 25 years, opens on a present day refugee camp, displaced people squabbling over who gets to go home first and what support they can expect when they get Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It’s particularly poignant to watch this story in the knowledge that a little over a year after US-led troops withdrew from Afghanistan, women and girls are enduring a renewed repression of their rights under the Taliban. The real-life story of The Boy with Two Hearts took place in 2000 – the year before the western invasion began; to see it today is a depressing reminder of how little was achieved through that ill-thought-out venture.Though the focus of the story is on Hussein – the older brother of narrator Hamed – the dramatic backdrop is the entire family’s forced flight from Afghanistan Read more ...
Mert Dilek
A bare interior with tarnished walls, a single bed, and an oxygen tube. The stage seems to have been set for a Beckett play, but the figure who comes to inhabit this dejected enclosure for 90 minutes is grounded in a far different world.Powerful multitudes collide and combine in Ivo van Hove’s adaptation of Who Killed My Father, the acclaimed French writer Édouard Louis’s autobiographical work from 2018. The Belgian director entrusts the monologue to the Dutch actor Hans Kesting, from the Internationaal Theatre Amsterdam ensemble, whose most recent London appearance was in Age of Rage. Read more ...
David Kettle
Those working-class people really are appalling, aren’t they? Racist, sexist, definitely homophobic, violent too. Thank god our young hero can escape their clutches into the safety of a nice, bourgeois acting academy where he can be his true self.Okay, the degradations and brutal humiliations inflicted on the gay central character in Édouard Louis’s autobiographical 2014 trauma memoir The End of Eddy are undeniably horrific, and apparently unending. But to call Louis’s portrayal of his working-class background in northern France problematic is a bit of an understatement. He surrounds himself Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If jukebox shows occupy one end of the musical theatre spectrum and Stephen Sondheim's masterpieces the other, Sister Act The Musical is somewhere in-between.We get songs we know (Alan Menken's score, heard first on the West End and then, in 2011, on Broadway, includes many staples of talent shows and daytime radio), stunt casting for name recognition and, best of all for a production delayed for two years by Covid, a confident showmanship that screams "entertainment"! If you can afford to be sniffy about such blatant commerciality in these straitened times, then good for you!The director Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's further training, shall we say, still needed on 101 Dalmatians, the much-delayed show that marks the second consecutive musical this summer at the Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park, following their revisionist Legally Blonde.A busy, bustling title that takes ages to come into focus, Timothy Sheader's production feels like a work-in-progress, even if the puppetry work from the busy Toby Olié (concurrently represented by The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) as it is could scarcely be bettered. Is the piece worth pursuing further? You bet, not least because of the enduring Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Can a comedy have too many jokes? That may seem an odd question, but one that applies to this latest high-octane, eager-to-please outing by Richard Bean, which flies out of the hanger at such high velocity that it’s in danger of crashing before it leaves the runway.If the play is guilty of trying too hard, and is a tad one-dimensional, it’s also fair to say that once it breaks through the clouds and we’ve taken our seat belts off, Jack Absolute Flies Again does settle into a veritable hoot. With a skilled and hugely likeable cast, it’s genuinely funny and charming, spectacularly, Read more ...