tue 08/10/2024

National Theatre

A Tupperware of Ashes, National Theatre review - family and food, love and loss

Queenie is in trouble. Bad trouble. For about a year now, this 68-year-old Indian woman has been forgetful. Losing her car keys; burning rice in the pan; mixing up memories; just plain blank episodes. At various times, she relives distant moments in...

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Coriolanus, Olivier/National Theatre review - ambitious staging but the tragedy goes missing

The National’s new production of Coriolanus has to be one of the most handsome to appear on the Olivier stage. But it has arrived minus a key item: a hero whose end is tragic.Maybe director Lyndsey Turner wasn’t aiming for that. Her protagonist,...

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Death of England: Michael / Death of England: Delroy, Soho Place review - thrilling portraits, brilliantly performed, of rebels without a cause

Two boys in east London, one Black, one white, grow up together, play pranks at school, then decades later have a tempestuous falling out. That’s the main narrative arc of these twin plays, but it accounts for none of their extraordinary richness...

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The Grapes of Wrath, NT Lyttelton review - a bleak journey into migrant purgatory

It’s a brave company that embarks on a staging of John Steinbeck’s award-winning 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. A grim study of human goodness in an unrelentingly cruel universe, it’s a long slog for both cast and audience.Steinbeck based his novel...

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The Hot Wing King, National Theatre review - high kitchen-stove comedy, with sides of drama

There’s an exuberant comedy from the start in Katori Hall’s The Hot Wing King, which comes to London after an initial Covid-truncated Off Broadway run which brought her a Pulitzer prize in 2021. Roy Alexander Weise’s production puts in all the...

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Boys from the Blackstuff, National Theatre review - a lyrical, funny, affecting variation on a television classic

Prolific playwright James Graham was born in 1982, the year Alan Bleasdale's unforgettable series was televised. From Nottingham rather than Liverpool, Graham recognised in his own surroundings the predicaments of the main characters, the bonds...

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London Tide, National Theatre review - haunting moody river blues

“He do the police in different voices.” If ever one phrase summed up a work of fiction, and the art of its writer, then surely it is this description, by Charles Dickens in his 1865 novel, Our Mutual Friend, of his character Sloppy’s ability to read...

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Standing at the Sky's Edge, Gillian Lynne Theatre review - heartwarming Sheffield musical arrives in the West End

Can there be anyone from Sheffield who has not seen Standing at the Sky’s Edge, possibly several times? This is the once local show, opening at the Sheffield Crucible in 2019, playing at the National Theatre's Olivier in 2023, and now bringing a...

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Hadestown, Lyric Theatre review - soul-stirring musical gloriously revamps classical myths

Doom and gloom, we are told, may have abounded in the classical underworld, but Hadestown suggests otherwise. Returning to London five years after its run at the National Theatre, this time with a slew of Tony Awards, this bracing musical...

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Dear Octopus, National Theatre - period rarity is a real pleasure

Sisters are doing it for themselves, just as families as a whole are, too, on the London stage these days. Dear Octopus follows Till the Stars Come Down and The Hills of California as the third domestic drama I've seen in the last 10 days and...

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Till the Stars Come Down, National Theatre review - exuberant comedy with a dark edge

The National Theatre is meant to represent the whole nation – and not just the metropolitan middle classes. So it’s really good to see that Beth Steel – who comes from an East Midlands working-class background and was once writer in...

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Kin, National Theatre review - heartfelt show makes its demands, but yields its rewards

Waiting in the National Theatre’s foyer on press night, a space teeming with people speaking different languages, boasting different heritages – London in other words – news came through that leading members of the government had resigned because...

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