Orange Tree
Marianka Swain
Can you peg a whole play on a decent twist? When We Were Women’s narrative tease pays off interestingly, but takes a hell of a long time getting there. It leaves little space to explore the ramifications of an intriguing revelation, a frustration amplified by the constant chronological cross-cutting in this revived Sharman Macdonald work, first seen at the National in 1988.In 1944, some terrible event has driven pregnant Isla (Abigail Lawrie) from the arms of sailor Mackenzie (Mark Edel-Hunt, pictured below), back to her aspirant working-class parents’ (Lorraine Pilkington and Steve Nicolson Read more ...
Heather Neill
Mustapha Matura's 1974 play is a celebration of liberation, both social and political, and a sly warning about the possible pitfalls of sudden freedom. Mas (or Masquerade) is the Trinidadian version of Carnival, an exotic mixture of Christian and African tradition played out just before Lent. It provides an opportunity to adopt a different persona, to drink to excess and to behave in ways unacceptable at any other time. But Matura's play is set on either side of colonial Trinidad's liberation from Britain in 1962; the acting out of roles and dressing up as policemen and generals takes on a Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The Orange Tree’s renaissance continues with this searing piece from playwright of the moment Alice Birch, who will shortly follow up last year’s subversive Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again with an interrogation of the porn industry for Rufus Norris’s debut National season. Her fearlessness is also in evidence in deceptive early work Little Light, an initially typical domestic drama that furiously erupts in a bruising, bravura 90 minutes.The beachside converted barn of Teddy (Paul Rattray) and Alison (Lorna Brown) is the setting for an annual Sunday lunch ruled by ritual, but this year is Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Are there any real taboos left? I mean, there have been scores of plays about incest, about abuse and about paedophilia. Have all proverbial stones been turned over? According to Deborah Bruce, a director turned playwright, there is one situation that still troubles people, especially women: it is mothers who leave their children. Although this is a staple of women’s magazines, there have been few plays about the subject. So Bruce’s new drama is welcome — and it comes with the always watchable Helen Baxendale as its star.The story centres on the 40-year-old Bea (Baxendale), a British middle- Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Sam Walters, Britain's longest-serving artistic director of a theatre (43 years!), looks to the past as well as the future with his Orange Tree swansong. This varied festival features nine plays and six world premieres across two programmes, all of them staged by returning graduates of the Richmond venue's trainee director scheme. The diligent Programme One viewer will spot a number of recurring subjects, including science teachers and astrophysicists, the resurfacing in adulthood of childhood dynamics, and constant grappling with faith and mortality.The thematic throughline lends the evening Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
In French, when you want to end a digression and get a conversation back on point, you say "revenons à nos moutons". It's a commonly used idiom, meaning literally "let's get back to our sheep", the sheep representing the actual subject under discussion. It also offers a way of looking at David Mamet's one-act play Squirrels, too, for no matter how far away their flights of imagination take them, the characters will always find their way back to their original theme, with a little help from an improbable animal – a squirrel, not a sheep, but you get the idea.The action concerns Arthur, a Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
Usually, to describe a play as "of its time" is a criticism. It is suggestive of drama that hasn't aged well, that doesn't work quite as well for today's audience as it did for the original crowd. First performed in 1847, Dion Boucicault's The School for Scheming seems at first glance to fall into this category, with its mannered language, twisting plot and moral overtones.But, as this revival demonstrates, pre-emptive assumptions of staleness can be confounded by a production that is all witty observations, sly mimicry and sarcastic asides. As the title would suggest, the action Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
It's unusual for a play to be political without being preachy, or dull, or both. As obsessed as we are with class distinctions, we aren't as good as we should be at pulling them apart. Invincible is therefore something rare, for it turns social distinctions into compelling comic drama.Alan Ayckbourn is generally considered to be the master of this kind of writing. Given that, it is perhaps unsurprising that Invincible's writer, Torben Betts, has worked as a resident dramatist at Ayckbourn's famous stomping ground, the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough.If Invincible has a flaw it is that Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
Would you be able to tell if the world had ended? For Beth and Franklin, the wannabe intellectuals at the heart of Stephen Sewell's play, it proves quite difficult to ascertain whether life as they know it has come to an end from their privileged life high in a luxury Melbourne apartment. Whether they are bickering about how the New Yorker has gone downhill or despairing about terrorism, they remain insulated from the world by their own self-absorption.The stoppage of the title directly refers to the electricity, water, telephone line, mobile network and internet. The baser side of these Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Adapt a Jane Austen novel for the stage and you have a generous handful of characters and a selection of drawing rooms in which to put them. Adapt a George Eliot novel and you’re faced with a whole town of people – figures from grand houses, workhouses and everything in between. It’s quite a task, but one that Geoffrey Beevers has made his speciality. He’s already tackled Silas Marner and Adam Bede but now, in a new triptych of plays for Richmond’s Orange Tree Theatre, he takes on the big one: Middlemarch.In the age of the TV series and the box set, theatre’s claim on literary adaptations is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The American repertoire has featured big-time on the London stage this year but perhaps nowhere more oddly than courtesy the ever-adventurous Orange Tree's staging of a World War Two play from Susan Glaspell, here receiving its world premiere. Long (nearly three hours), defiantly peculiar and yet possessed of an intriguing (and relevant) moral debate, Sam Walters' production marks the start of this sterling artistic director's final season with a slice of the dramatic canon best thought of as one for collectors of curiosities - and at a venue that has made something of a house dramatist of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Although overwhelmingly remembered now as a novelist, Somerset Maugham was best known during his lifetime as a playwright. “England’s Dramatist”, as the newspapers christened him, produced more than 20 plays spanning the length of his career, outdoing contemporaries Shaw and Rattigan for popular and critical success. But his was not an enduring fame, and with his work now strikingly absent from the theatrical repertoire, any revival must inevitably face the suspicious question: why?Romping its way through questions of “love, beauty and the economic situation” (with a few theatrical detours to Read more ...