National Theatre
Matt Wolf
There's commanding, and then there's Michael Sheen, who sweeps on to the Olivier stage 15 minutes or so into the new National Theatre revival of Under Milk Wood and scoops up the entire production with it. Inheriting a role made to order for this Welshman, Sheen takes to his fellow countryman Dylan Thomas's 1954 classic as if on a date with destiny. Lyndsey Turner's approach to the intrinsically piecemeal material may at times tilt towards the fussy, but Sheen comes at this portrait of small town life like a man possessed and holds the audience in his disheveled, gleaming-eyed grip from the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Limbo, in Jack Thorne’s latest play, is a room lined ceiling-high with drawers, a sort of morgue rebooted as a vast filing system. It apparently provides comfy accommodation for the souls waiting to pass over, and its activities are run in tight bureaucratic fashion by Five (Kevin McMonagle), a crisp but likeable Scot with a nice line in candour and a squeezebox on which he plays Gershwin melodies. Balloons erupt through the floor of the National's Dorfman auditorium; cherry blossom petals (“made by three little ladies from Northampton”, the operative named Four notes) drift down from the Read more ...
Heather Neill
Shakespeare's enduring tale of star-crossed lovers is especially pertinent in a pandemic. The fatal plot twist depends on failed communication during an outbreak of pestilence, and one of the most famous lines is Mercutio's heartfelt, "A plague on both your houses" – clearly no idle curse. Written a couple of years after plague had closed theatres in 1593 (when Shakespeare turned to writing poetry) that undercurrent must have been all too real for the first audiences. It resonates still.After the technical panache of the recent Manchester Palace version and before the Globe presents its Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In a much-depleted and truncated pantomime season that withered on the vine, the National Theatre's debut production of Dick Whittington lasted only four performances before the show was cancelled; it has now released this recording, which will be available throughout the current lockdown. It's an enjoyable two hours spent in amiable company, with lots of bright colours and fart gags to keep the young ones entertained while the adults will enjoy the saucy humour which the title character's name invites.The production started life in 2018 at the Lyric Hammersmith and writers Jude Christian and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Goodbye": The single word lingered heavily in the air last March 16, as the scripted closing both of the terrific Southwark Playhouse revival of The Last Five Years and as an ancillary farewell to live theatre. Late afternoon on that same day, in response to the gathering spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, a decision had been taken to shut theatres down, but the Jason Robert Brown two-hander (plus band) decided to go ahead anyway for the simple reason that the talent were already assembled in the building.And so it was that an audience sat held both by the musical's depiction of marital woe Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Broadway tends to be the Darwinian environment where a show's opening night can also mark its closing. But such has been the Covid-prompted fate of the National Theatre's fiery return to the fray that Death of England: Delroy managed 11 performances before shuddering to a lockdown-induced halt following its Nov 4th opening night. The good news is that Clint Dyer and Roy Williams' sequel to last winter's National entry, Death of England, was filmed at that decisive performance for tranmission in due course. The even better news is that the play, and co-author Dyer's direction of it, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
When the history of British theatre’s response to COVID-19 comes to be written, the names of two men will feature prominently: Nicholas Hytner and Nick Starr. The “two Nicks” were the creative force behind the National Theatre’s pioneering NT Live broadcasts, which then dominated the digital streaming landscape during lockdown, and now, as the chiefs of the Bridge Theatre, they have led the move to safe indoor theatre performances. Their season started with Beat the Devil, David Hare’s COVID monologue, blossomed out with Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, and now continues with a revival of Inua Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It is 41 years since Peter Shaffer ripped off Mozart’s respectable façade to reveal a foul-mouthed verbally incontinent child-man with no more ability to control his behaviour than his genius. Inspired by a short story by Alexander Pushkin that put forward the theory that Salieri murdered Mozart, he fleshed out bare biographical bones with virtuoso obscenity as part of an extraordinary study of obsession, cut-throat professional rivalry and malignant jealousy.Michael Longhurst’s astonishing, exhilarating production for the National Theatre takes a stage-play that many felt was eclipsed by Read more ...
Matt Wolf
We're easing out of lockdown, haircuts are being had, and the theatre continually shape-shifts to accommodate these changing times. All credit to the 14 writers who have conjoined forces in urgency and haste to create 846, a collection of audio plays responding to the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement. National Theatre at Home goes out on a real high with its transformative production of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, with Lucian Msamati inheriting a role previously played by Ian McKellen on Broadway and F Murray Abraham onscreen. And the time is always right to hear Audra Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Helen McCrory is an actor who can inject a world of feeling into one syllable that many actors would struggle to muster in an entire script. Towards the end of The Deep Blue Sea, she is telling her estranged husband what it was that attracted her to the feckless pilot for whom she has thrown away her marriage. She describes a conversation at a golf club, in which after talking about “how life seems to have no direction, no purpose”, he puts his hand on her arm and says, “I really think that you’re the most attractive girl I’ve ever met”. She explains, “In that ti-ny moment Read more ...
Theatre Lockdown Special 13: Early Lloyd Webber, vintage Rattigan, and a Dame or two in conversation
Matt Wolf
Stop the presses! For the first time in nearly four months, The Arts Desk can point to the first of several live theatre events amongst the highlights of the coming week: the tour across the nation's car parks to multiple drive-in audiences of Horrible Histories: Barmy Britain, a previous West End mainstay that has adapted with these strange times. Those preferring simply to stay put will be rewarded with a typically motley array of theatre fare, ranging from an ageless Donny Osmond as Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's often scantily clad Joseph and the Medea story repositioned once again to Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Lorraine Hansberry’s debut, A Raisin in the Sun, was the first drama written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway, where it opened in 1959. It is now an American classic, but it’s her last play, Les Blancs, that in the current context of the Black Lives Matter movement and resistance to institutional racism both in the US and UK feels even more relevant. Showing the clash between the dying colonialist rule of the whites, as indicated in the title, and the rise of African nationalism in an unspecified African country, it has a tremendous resonance and power, especially with a top-notch Read more ...