Donmar Warehouse
Helen Hawkins
Jean Genet’s 1947 play has been quite a clothes-horse over the years, at times a glamorous confection dressed by designers, and regularly shape-shifting and gender-fluid. Cards on the table: I have disliked most productions of it for this odd vacuity, which allows it to become unmoored so radically from its source, the real-life case of a mistress and her daughter murdered by their two maids.It pokes at you from the off with its sense of itself as an anti-play; it's more an arch ritual, there to provoke and mystify its audience, especially the average bourgeois. Its latest incarnation Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Mike Bartlett is, like many writers, a chronicler of both contemporary manners and of the state of the nation. In his latest domestic drama, which premieres at the Donmar Warehouse, he examines our anxieties about food, farming and the environment in a play of ideas that, despite its energy, is more cerebral than emotional.Set in Juniper Rise, a north-west Oxfordshire farm, the story concerns Ruth, a middle-class 40-something who now owns the land together with Lip, a dope smoking radical whose family has farmed in this area for generations. At the start of the action we are Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The corset is an unlikely star of the latest Lynn Nottage play to arrive at the Donmar Warehouse, 2003’s Intimate Apparel. After the more male-dominated Sweat and Clyde’s at the same address, this is a personal piece about the lot of Black women, inspired by Nottage’s discovery of an old photo of her great-grandmother Ethel.She set about excavating all she could about Ethel, but there wasn’t much in print about Black women of the time. She knew Ethel was born in Barbados in 1870, arrived, alone, in New York City at 18 and married a man she had corresponded with while he laboured on the Panama Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Patrick Marber’s powerful debut about gambling men is 30 years old, born as the Eighties entrepreneurial boom was starting to sour but before poker become a game for mathematical whizz kids. What it reveals as it maps the male psyche seems as pertinent as ever. Into the gladiatorial arena of a weekly poker game among restaurant colleagues comes a (disguised) pro player, and the results are explosive. There are no women here, which is the point. Their disapproving tongues aren’t needed as the combatants are perfectly adept at skewering themselves. These are men who have mistaken risk- Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The theatre director Anna Mackmin has written and directed an extraordinary play about a mother and daughter relationship: extraordinary because it puts the audience inside the maelstrom of these characters’ lives, forcing us to focus on how we interpret them and how our lives might resemble theirs.Things start relatively straightforwardly. A hospital bed dominates the raised half of the stage, with all the familiar accessories: the nurses’ sink in the corner, the IV drip stand, the urine bag. At the top of the back wall is a panoramic screen; at the front of the stage, a country kitchen Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Broadway shows sometimes hit the West End like, well, like a comet, burning brightly but briefly (Spring Awakening, for example), while others settle into orbit illuminating Shaftesbury Avenue with a neon blaze every night for years.So it might be a wise decision to install Dave Malloy’s much-awarded, 2016 musical, Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, in the bijou Donmar Warehouse – fortunately, it’s a gem of a show.“It’s not exactly War and Peace!” was a meme before there were memes, said of anything that was a little too facile to satisfy, the slabby novel a shorthand reference Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There is star casting, and there is casting the right star – not the same thing. The Donmar’s new production, The Fear of 13, succeeds in the latter category, in spades. The star in question is Adrien Brody, a child actor who left stage work for the cinema more than three decades ago, where he became the youngest recipient of the Best Actor Oscar for The Pianist. More recently, he has also graced premium television series such as Succession and Peaky Blinders. At the Donmar he has been allied to the director Justin Martin, an award-winner for Prima Facie, Stranger Things and The Read more ...
Lindsey Ferrentino
I turn 36 this year, while living in London and rehearsing my new play The Fear of 13 at the Donmar Warehouse. The cast places a cake on my desk, covered in script pages and 10 pairs of handcuffs. I video the cake, the handcuffs, the singing actors – led by Adrien Brody – who have now broken into a sort of birthday rap. I text the video 5,500 miles to LA to my friend Nick Yarris, the man about whom I wrote the play, whom Adrien Brody is playing.Nick always responds immediately: “I love how you use my time on death row as a merriment,” he ribs, noting the delicious looking dessert sitting atop Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
For a long stretch of its first half, Dominique Morrisseau’s 2016 award-winner, Skeleton Crew, seems a conventional workplace drama, though in a much gentler key than Lynn Nottage’s Sweat. But this slow burn catches fire.The first sign that this is not a lightly comedic tale of an endangered urban workforce comes when a young worker called Dez (Branden Cook, pictured below, bottom right)) produces a handgun from his backpack and stashes it in his padlocked locker in the break room. But again, this is not Chekhov. The gun will not fire.Dez’s place of work is an ailing car assembly Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Keeley Hawes onstage is something to look forward to, so rare are her appearances there. In Lucy Kirkwood’s new play, The Human Body, we are given a double treat: Hawes, plus her black and white screen image, projected all over the Donmar’s back wall from cameras roaming around the action. Up there she really does look as if she has just stepped out of Brief Encounter.Kirkwood toys with that 1945 film, and the look and sound of late-1940s British cinema in general, for what is from one angle a romance, from another a plea for the NHS. It’s 1948 and free health care is in the final stages of Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Lynn Nottage’s second London opening this year, the Donmar premiere of Clyde’s, is a comedy about a sandwich, the perfect sandwich. With just a little more punch to the plotting it would be another masterwork from this award-winning American playwright whose book for the musical MJ arrives on the West End next spring.Ebullient truckstop owner Clyde (Gbemisola Ikemulo, pictured below, left) takes on ex-cons as workers. This entraps them from the off: nobody else will be in a hurry to hire them, so Clyde is free to exploit and harangue them and generally make their iives tense. She does Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The journey from off-Broadway to central London has taken 15 years, but the multi-award-winning musical Next to Normal has finally made it. That time lag may lead to suspicions that its subject matter has become a tad outmoded, but this staging, directed by outgoing Donmar director Michael Longhurst, is fresh and affecting.The scene looks set for a conventional tale of middle-age crisis, of a “normal” middle-class kind. Diana and Dan live in a glass box they designed themselves – they met as architecture students – complete with Bulthaup-style minimal kitchen and stainless steel fridge. Read more ...