Hampstead Theatre
Matt Wolf
The play that famously got away when one of its stars (quite literally) jumped ship is back. In 1995, Stephen Fry abandoned the West End premiere of Simon Gray's espionage drama Cell Mates, leaving co-star Rik Mayall in the lurch and prompting Gray to write a particularly dyspeptic account of the bizarre goings-on called Fat Chance. Resurfacing for a well-cast Hampstead Theatre revival neither of whose leading men look likely to bolt for the exit, Cell Mates can now be seen for the pecularity that it is: a decidedly English variant on The Odd Couple that seems, weirdly, to leave the actual Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The Second World War is central to our national imagination, yet it has been oddly absent from our stages recently. Not any more. Nicholas Wright’s new play, an adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s 1947 novel about lonely English women and American servicemen which premieres at the Hampstead Theatre in north London, effortlessly evokes the world of the Home Front deep in the middle of total war. Yet adapting novels is a risky business, mainly because their tone is so hard to convey without using paragraph after paragraph of prose, and Wright struggles to give us a convincing stage version of a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jack Cardiff was one of the all-time greats of cinematography, the man who shot such Powell and Pressburger classics as The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death, worked on John Huston’s The African Queen with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, and lensed Marilyn Monroe in The Prince and the Showgirl. He was renowned as “the man who makes women look beautiful”, but despite this he didn’t shrink from shooting Sylvester Stallone in Rambo: First Blood (Part II).Terry Johnson’s new play for Hampstead Theatre depicts Cardiff in his twilight years, reliving chunks of his past while his Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As with life, so it is in art: in the same way that one can't predict the curve balls that get thrown our way, the American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins defies categorisation. On the basis of barely a handful of plays, two of which happen now to be running concurrently in London, this 32-year-old Pulitzer prize finalist seems to embark upon a fresh path with each new venture. Starting with its entirely unanticipated structure, Gloria at Hampstead Theatre confounds expectation to a heady and exhilarating degree, if one can apply those adjectives to so ferocious a vision of American life. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"This is the most fun province in Iraq" isn't the sort of sentence you hear every day on a London stage. On the basis of geographical breadth alone, one applauds Occupational Hazards, in which playwright Stephen Brown adapts global adventurer-turned-Tory MP Rory Stewart's 2006 account of his attempt to bring order to a newly-liberated Iraq. Ambitious in scope but piecemeal in impact, the play gains immeasurably from Simon Godwin's fleet, pacy production, though you wonder if the whole enterprise might not work better on screen. In terms of content, Brown's adaptation furthers the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Odd bedfellows are an ideal subject for comedy, and for passion — because opposites attract, right? Well this is certainly the set up of the latest and smartish new drama from American playwright and House of Cards script-writer Laura Eason, which tells the story of an odd-couple meeting that results in some hot sex and some even more heated ambition. In this two-hander, its latest homage to Americana, the Hampstead Theatre has cast Emilia Fox, the Silent Witness regular who has previously appeared here in Gina Gionfriddo’s Rapture, Blister, Burn, as well as television and film star Theo Read more ...
Matt Wolf
This Chekhov-intensive year comes to a muted climax with a rare sighting of Wild Honey. Michael Frayn's reappraisal of the Russian master's untitled early text is more commonly known as Platonov. There was a scorching production of the play this summer at the National as part of a Young Chekhov trilogy. A separate Broadway Platonov, adapted by Andrew Upton under the title The Present and starring his wife Cate Blanchett, begins previews next week.That's a lot of airings of a supposedly obscure play. It was superlatively well served on the South Bank by the director Jonathan Kent. And here Read more ...
David Nice
So many words, starting with the title - we're told we can call it iHo - and so many lines spoken by anything up to nine characters at once. But as this is the unique world of Tony Kushner, it's all matter from the heart, balancing big ideas and complex characters and leading them beyond the realms of any safe and simply effective new play, in this case towards a father-and-daughter scene as great as anything you'll see in the theatre today.This is a different sort of epic style to the freewheeling mastery of Angels in America. It's unusual to find a Kushner play where you can nominally Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Who do you trust? The EU Referendum campaign has exposed a mounting suspicion of the establishment, from financial institutions to press and politicians, and our sense of nationhood has never been murkier. But if we cease to believe in anything, how does that affect our sense of self?Mike Bartlett’s latest takes Edward Snowden as a jumping-off point for this existential exploration. American leaker Andrew (Jack Farthing, pictured below with Caoilfhionn Dunne) is holed up in a Russian hotel room, awaiting contact from a man holed up in an embassy – a fellow member of the “everyone Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Sequel-itis has spread to the stage. There’s no caped crusader, but the troubled quartet of Neil LaBute’s latest will be familiar to anyone who caught Reasons to be Pretty at the Almeida in 2011 – as will Soutra Gilmour’s industrial crate set. We even begin the same way: in the middle of a foul-mouthed shouting match between relentlessly combative Steph and sometime-paramour Greg. But nostalgia value aside, this melancholic reprise is generally a case of diminishing returns.Three years have passed, and Steph (Lauren O’Neil) and Greg (Tom Burke) are now exes. The source of her fury is the Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The death of a child is an unnatural loss. There’s no reassurance that the departed lived a full life, rather the jagged edge of one cut short. In the case of Becca and Howie, it’s also nonsensical: their perfectly healthy four-year-old son struck by a car in a freak accident while chasing their dog onto a quiet suburban street. How to find meaning in such absurd horror?The central problem of American playwright David Lindsay-Abaire’s empathetic, Pulitzer-winning work is that their respective coping mechanisms have taken them down different paths, opening up a chasm between them. Becca ( Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A supposed Stoppardian footnote gets a first-class reclamation in Howard Davies's sizzling revival of Hapgood, the espionage-themed drama from 1988 that resonates intellectually and emotionally to a degree it didn't begin to achieve at a West End premiere that I recall almost three decades on.As if taking a leaf from the same play's subsequent (and much-improved) 1994 New York Lincoln Center premiere, a once-abstruse work finds the necessary pulse to keep audiences engaged in a text that comes positioned both chronologically and temperamentally between The Real Thing and Arcadia (Hapgood Read more ...