Hampstead Theatre
Chariots of Fire, Gielgud TheatreWednesday, 23 May 2012
As the Olympic Park rises out of the desolation of East London, British theatre is also being regenerated by the sports fest that looms increasingly large on the horizon. Although it has recently lost its local authority funding, Edward Hall’s Swiss... Read more... |
Jakob Lenz, ENO, Hampstead TheatreWednesday, 18 April 2012
Forget opera-glasses, the must-have accessory for the contemporary opera-goer in London is fast becoming a sturdy pair of wellingtons. No sooner had we all dried off from our voyage into The Heart of Darkness at the Royal Opera House (where Edward... Read more... |
Farewell to the Theatre, Hampstead TheatreThursday, 08 March 2012
Harley Granville Barker is hardly a household name, but he was a huge influence on British theatre today. During the Edwardian era, he promoted new writing at the Royal Court; he wrote plays such as The Voysey Inheritance, Waste and The Madras House... Read more... |
The Trial of Ubu, Hampstead TheatreWednesday, 25 January 2012
Some theatre openings will be legendary for all time. One such was the Parisian evening of 10 December 1896 when Alfred Jarry’s character Père Ubu stepped onto the stage at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre and intoned “Merdre!” (roughly translated as Shittr... Read more... |
Herding Cats, Hampstead TheatreMonday, 12 December 2011
Loneliness is hard to put on stage. There is something about the feeling of unwanted urban solitude which is so repetitive and, let’s face it, boring, that writing a play about it risks sending the audience into the night before the story is... Read more... |
The Last of the Duchess, Hampstead TheatreThursday, 27 October 2011
Is it nostalgic to constantly revisit the history of the royal family? In this new play by Nicholas Wright, which opened last night, we travel back in time to 1980 when the aged Wallis Simpson - widow of the abdicated King Edward VIII - lived as a... Read more... |
No Naughty Bits, Hampstead TheatreTuesday, 13 September 2011
You could call it the BBC Four effect. It’s fact-based fictions set in the past, more often than not about the absurdities of sexual mores or other changing customs. In the latest theatrical example, Steve Thompson’s new play - which opened last... Read more... |
Loyalty, Hampstead TheatreThursday, 21 July 2011
Can journalists write good plays? Sarah Helm has been a Washington correspondent for The Independent during the first Gulf War in 1990, reported from Baghdad in the mid-1990s, and was based in Jerusalem for three years. So her debut play about the... Read more... |
Shakespeare Double Bill, Propeller, Hampstead TheatreSunday, 26 June 2011
As further proof that Shakespeare plays come these days not as single spies but in battalions, the London leg of the all-male Propeller ensemble's lengthy tour has pitched up in the capital in time to deliver their Richard III within days of Kevin... Read more... |
American Trade, Hampstead TheatreWednesday, 08 June 2011
Some theatre genres seem indestructible. One of these is the satirical city comedy, for which playwrights dip their pens in poison and spray their venom over the teeming mass of the shallow, the stupid and the successful. When they do this today,... Read more... |
Silence, Royal Shakespeare Company/Filter, Hampstead TheatreWednesday, 18 May 2011
If your heart breaks a continent or more away from home, does it make a noise? Very much so in the scintillating Royal Shakespeare Company/Filter collaboration Silence, the second in a series of three RSC premieres at the Hampstead Theatre. Wedding... Read more... |
Little Eagles, Hampstead TheatreThursday, 21 April 2011
Space is a great subject for theatre. I’m not sure why but it might be something to do with the contrast between the irreducible groundedness of live performance and the imaginary flights of fancy that the audience yearns to take. Whatever the... Read more... |
