Donmar Warehouse
aleks.sierz
Can things change, or must they always stay the same? The latest history play by Jack Thorne, a man of the moment whose Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is still in the West End and whose National Theatre hit The Motive and the Cue will transfer in December, revisits the early history of the BBC to show how current tensions between public service impartiality and political expediency have a long backstory.With a title that evokes the past, When Winston Went to War with the Wireless is a lively play of ideas that sits comfortably in the Donmar Warehouse’s intimate surroundings. But is this Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's not often with Private Lives that you feel Amanda and Elyot are one step away from a visit to A&E. But such is the startling force of Michael Longhurst's Donmar Warehouse revival of arguably Noël Coward's most durable play that you are aware throughout of violence and pain as the flipside of passion at its most intense. Some will complain (and have) that the result negates the comedy coursing through this time-honored text; I would argue that the laughs are still there, tempered in this instance by an awareness of the lacerations oftentimes inflicted by love. After all Read more ...
aleks.sierz
With the fast-approaching anniversary of the latest war in Europe, our culture’s continued fascination with World War Two gets a contemporary boost from Trouble in Butetown at the Donmar Warehouse.Written by Diana Nneka Atuona, this follow-up to Liberian Girl, her 2015 debut, won the 2019 George Devine Award for most promising playwright. Although it revisits familiar territory, and adopts a deliberately traditional theatre form, it includes an interesting slant on race, multiculturalism and the Special Relationship between the UK and the USA.Set in Butetown, or Tiger Bay, a port area in Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We’re reminded, in a grainy black and white video framing device, that, as late as the summer of 1941, the USA saw World War II as just another European war. As brilliantly illustrated in Phillip Roth’s The Plot Against America, not only was such indifference to the rise of fascism more widespread than feels comfortable to reflect upon, but so, too, was a sympathy extended to the Nazis in their psychotic mission to make Germany great again.It was against that complacent background that Lillian Hellman wrote Watch on the Rhine, a seductive call to arms that knew its audience of New York’s Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Not much happens but, in its way, everything does in The Band's Visit, the gentle, sweet-natured musical that rather unexpectedly stormed Broadway late in 2017 and is just now receiving a notably empathic London debut.Broadway isn't always hospitable to musicals that wear understatement on their sleeve (cue Moulin Rouge by way of an exact opposite), and there was no guarantee that this adaptation of the 2007 Israeli film of the same name might find the mainstream appeal that it did. Its London perch at the Donmar is in fact closer in vibe to the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Partition equals trauma. It cannot have escaped anyone’s attention that the British Empire’s solution to intractable problems in three of its most important colonies and mandates – namely Ireland, India and Palestine – was the divisive device of drawing boundaries which created local catastrophes.Seventy-five years ago, the Indian Partition – which has already been explored in plays such as Howard Brenton’s Drawing the Line – resulted in millions being uprooted, terrible violence and unimaginable suffering. Now four British playwrights have adapted Kavita Puri’s book Partition Voices: Untold Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Dystopian theatre takes many forms – but this is the first which is a jury-room drama. Dawn King has previously explored the world of double-think and the use of fear and fake news by oppressive regimes in her 2011 drama, Foxfinder, and now turns her attention to climate change litigation. With a twist. In The Trials, a jury of young people must deliver verdicts on the role of older individuals in contributing to the climate change. Since an overheating world is of burning interest to many young people, this Donmar Warehouse production is part of project involving schools and community Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Slamming the door on experience comes with repercussions in A Doll's House, Part 2, the thrilling Broadway entry from American writer Lucas Hnath that has arrived at the Donmar as part of an America-friendly season at that address including Marys Seacole (already finished) and The Band's Visit (still to come).In each case, the Covent Garden venue has chosen to take a fresh look at the source rather than bringing over a pre-existing version, which in this case allows for the director James Macdonald to effect his customary wizardry. This veteran of new writing is well-matched to Hnath's Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Inspiration jostles irritation in Marys Seacole, Jackie Sibblies Drury's Off Broadway hit from 2019 that has arrived at the Donmar as part of a banner season of late for Black American writing in the capital (cf. "Daddy": A Melodrama at the Almeida and Is God Is last year at the Royal Court).Riffing on the life and legacy of the Anglo-Jamaican nurse of the title who knew Florence Nightingale and lent invaluable assistance during the Crimean War, Drury's one-act play asks probing questions about the very workings of biography and the nature of bequest. And Nadia Latif's deeply felt production Read more ...
David Nice
Sharp suits swapped for combat fatigues, a people’s commander: you’d think that Max Webster’s production of Shakespeare's surprisingly nuanced propaganda history-play would have special resonance in a week which has seen horrors and heroism unleashed in equal measure. Yet despite input from former Royal Marines Commando Tom Leigh, this is too much of a gimmicky show of war to chime with what’s churning us up now.Parallels with President Zelenskyy have been overstated in previous reports: despite plenty of lines about mercy which leap out at us, plus the key idea of “all things are ready Read more ...
David Nice
It sounds like the title of a play by Rattigan. No such luck: “Force Majeure” – a legal term with which all too few will be familiar, in which circumstances beyond anyone’s control cancel a contract – is how Ruben Östlund’s 2014 film Turist is known beyond Sweden (an American remake with Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, not good by all accounts, has much the best title, Downhill).This tragicomedy about the consequences of a husband and father running away from his family when an avalanche seems about to overwhelm a ski-resort restaurant has been adapted for the stage by Tim Price and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It seemed impossible and yet, the other evening, while idly flicking through emails, I learned the unimaginable: Stephen Sondheim, age 91, had passed away. And very quickly by all accounts, given that he was reported to have enjoyed a Thanksgiving meal with friends just the previous day."They die but they don't," goes a lyric from Into the Woods, as my mind filled with multiple responses to the news, many of them culled from his work (and often cited by others in their own, instantaneous reactions). I, too, was "sorry/grateful" – bereft at the news and yet grateful for the work. But I suppose Read more ...