tue 03/12/2024

Complicite

The Chairs, Almeida Theatre review - a tragi-comic double act for the ages

By all accounts, whenever The Chairs is dusted off for a new production it manages to resonate for audiences, as would any half-decent play laughing in the face of the futility of existence. And this cheeky, charming, often uproarious new...

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Beware of Pity, Complicite & Schaubühne Berlin, Barbican

Prolific, fitfully great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig's two biggest popular biographies, Marie Antoinette: The Story of an Average Woman and Mary Stuart, would be a gift for any screenwriter, given their fully realised dramatic scenes. His best-...

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The private life of Stefan Zweig in England

On 23 February 1942 at half past four in the afternoon in a secluded Brazilian hilltown called Petrópolis about an hour from Rio, a maid and her husband pushed at the bedroom door of a modest rented house. Despite the late hour, the tenants had not...

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A Pacifist's Guide to the War on Cancer, National Theatre

Some have responded to the very notion of a musical about cancer as if the idea itself were breaking some unwritten code of what is permissible to put on stage – which seems a bit rich given that the same genre has accommodated pieces about AIDS (...

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Brighton Festival: The Encounter, Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts

Simon McBurney and Complicite have made plays about many things – maths, circuses, immigration, Japan, old age – but, at core, they’re all really about the same subject: storytelling. Their latest project is no different. The Encounter takes its...

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The Encounter, Barbican

Actor and director Simon McBurney’s one-man Complicite show has arrived in London after gathering plaudits in Edinburgh and elsewhere last year – before setting off again on a nationwide and European tour. It’s the story of a much more adventurous...

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The Encounter, Bristol Old Vic

Complicite have, for several decades, been Britain’s most consistently adventurous theatre company. The term "physical theatre" sells them short, for the intelligence of their shows, from The Street of Crocodiles to The Elephant Vanishes, The...

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The Master and Margarita, Barbican Theatre

The Master and Margarita is a rare beast. Not only is it considered to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, it also regularly tops reader-lists of all-time favourite books. So it’s no wonder that, since its publication in 1966, 26...

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Simon McBurney On Creating A Dog's Heart

For anyone who grew up in the former Soviet Union, Heart of a Dog is a seminal text. But it’s also in the great tradition of Gogol and all the Russian satirists. It springs out into absolutely delicious flights of fantasy, but really sharp-edged....

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A Dog's Heart, English National Opera

From discreetly poisoned violets at Covent Garden to buckets of man-dog blood in St Martin’s Lane has been quite a leap this week. True, the bourgeois plastic surgeon of Mikhail Bulgakov’s scabrous, long-suppressed 1925 novella goes about singing...

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Shun-kin, Complicite, Barbican Theatre

Complicite’s Shun-kin delivers sex and violence aplenty. A warped, wilfully kinky fusion of the two lies at the core of the play and its central relationship – sexy, edgy material with just the right degree of poetry to help smooth its way across...

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A Disappearing Number, Novello Theatre

“I want to disrupt your sense of logic and show you something really thrilling,” explains a young academic, as her animated scribbling on the whiteboard gains pace and incomprehensible complexity. It’s a promise that Complicite’s A Disappearing...

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