Donmar Warehouse
The Night Alive, Donmar WarehouseThursday, 20 June 2013![]() Can theatrical lightning strike twice? That certainly looks to be the case at the Donmar, which has followed Josie Rourke's expert revival of Conor McPherson's contemporary classic, The Weir, with the world premiere of McPherson's latest, directed... Read more... |
The Weir, Donmar WarehouseFriday, 26 April 2013![]() Conor McPherson’s 1997 play has become a modern classic, and it's not difficult to see why. It's a glorious evening of storytelling that allows the cast to display their wares, as the conversation between characters who have known each other all... Read more... |
Trelawny of the Wells, Donmar WarehouseWednesday, 27 February 2013![]() His recent film adaptation of Anna Karenina framed the action of Tolstoy’s novel in a theatre, so it seems only natural that director Joe Wright should follow it up with a return to the stage himself. Redolent with the smell of “gas and oranges”,... Read more... |
The Dance of Death, Trafalgar StudiosTuesday, 18 December 2012![]() It sounds unlikely but The Dance of Death makes the perfect Christmas play. Half a minute with Strindberg's squabbling couple makes the ordinary family row over underdone/overdone turkey seem like a parlour game. Need a reminder that your relatives... Read more... |
Julius Caesar, Donmar WarehouseWednesday, 05 December 2012![]() There’s no ignoring gender in Julius Caesar. Whether it’s Portia’s “I grant I am a woman” speech, an enfeebled Caesar likened to a “sick girl”, or Cassius raging against oppression – “our yoke and sufferance make us womanish” – the issue is written... Read more... |
The Promise, Trafalgar StudiosTuesday, 20 November 2012![]() An expert cast delivers on their promise in Aleksei Arbuzov's triangular Russian drama from 1965 of the same name, which offers up war and peace and the shifting tides of love. There's so much of the last, in fact, that Alex Sims's production at... Read more... |
Berenice, Donmar WarehouseWednesday, 03 October 2012![]() It’s not often that the works of 17th-century French classicist playwright Jean Racine make an appearance in the West End, and you can’t fault the ambition of the Donmar’s artistic director, Josie Rourke, in bringing us this new version of his... Read more... |
Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Donmar WarehouseWednesday, 01 August 2012![]() Philadelphia, Here I Come! ends in its Donmar invocation with the roar of a plane taking off, which only amplifies one’s sense that the show has taken some while to take wing. Markedly better after the interval than during an abrasive first half,... Read more... |
The Physicists, Donmar WarehouseFriday, 08 June 2012![]() If you weren’t sick when you arrived at Les Cerisiers, the private psychiatric hospital in this satiric early Sixties drama by Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt, you probably would be by the time the institution had finished with you. Its all-... Read more... |
Making Noise Quietly, Donmar WarehouseTuesday, 24 April 2012![]() “It’s easy for me to talk to you; we don’t know each other”. Robert Holman’s Making Noise Quietly is a work that, like its title, lives in the delicate push-pull of contradiction: intimate strangers; bloodless wars; silent screams. Not one play at... Read more... |
The Recruiting Officer, Donmar WarehouseWednesday, 15 February 2012![]() Drum rolls, fiddles and flutes were all in action last night at the Donmar Warehouse to herald the beginning of an era. After ten successful years under the direction of Michael Grandage, it was the turn of the theatre’s new Artistic Director Josie... Read more... |
Huis Clos, Trafalgar StudiosTuesday, 10 January 2012![]() Of all the 20th century’s literary dystopias, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has proved most tenacious, epitomised by its sinister promise: “Big Brother is watching you.” But what happens when he stops watching? What becomes of us when the all... Read more... |
