tragedy
Mert Dilek
Few would have imagined that Kenneth Branagh’s return to the West End would see him garbed in fur-lined, prehistoric clothes. But this is how he takes on the gargantuan role of King Lear, in a compact, fast-paced production of Shakespeare’s great tragedy featuring a cast of RADA graduates and directed by himself.Branagh not only distils the play to an intermissionless two hours, but also sets it in a neolithic period of sticks, stones, and spears, where Lear’s tale of psychic and political dispossession gains a timeless aura. Jon Bausor’s set is surrounded by a Stonehenge-like series of Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A dystopian present. Sirens ring out across the city. Firefighters rush to the wrong locations. A man insists on entry to a big house. He’s not selling anything, so he can’t be an arsonist can he? His friend turns up and she’s pretty upfront about her intentions – and the barrels of petrol in the attic rather give the game away. But the wealthy homeowner, so ruthless at work, is so polite at home, the coming conflagration all but accepted as a matter of… manners, social convention, apathy?Max Frisch’s 1950s play started as a radio production that has moved to theatres around the world, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Writing about the upcoming 60th anniversary of the founding of the National Theatre in The Guardian recently, the usually reliable Michael Billington made a rare misstep. He called for the successor to Rufus Norris, the departing artistic director, to stage neglected classics: “I would also argue that the National, given its resources, has a civic duty to revive the drama of the past that, Shakespeare aside, is in danger of being consigned to the dustbin.” But does it need to? Whilst it is obvious that an NT production would be a very different beast to a fringe show, Lazarus Theatre Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Shakespeare gives Iago over 1000 lines to implant the jealous rage in Othello, so there’s plenty to of raw material to work with. The director Sinéad Rushe has had the idea to split these weaselly words between three actors, a device that seems so natural, so revealing, so obvious that one wonders why it hasn’t been done before (or, perhaps, more often).Cut to 100 minutes all-through, this production does not just re-invent the wicked ensign, but forces us to reconsider the Iagos we have met in the past and the Othellos he has driven to dreadful murder. Michael C Fox, Orlando James and Read more ...
Gary Naylor
That Shakespeare speaks to his audiences anew with every production is a cliché, but, like so many such, the glib blandness of the assertion conceals an insistent truth. The Thane of Glamis has had some success in life, gains preferment from those who really should have seen through his shallowness and vaulting ambition – he even says the phrase himself – and achieves power without really knowing what to do with it. The crown not only justifies the means of his ascension up the slippery pole, but its preservation becomes the sole object of his every deed. History does not record if Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The family pet dies. It’s a problem many parents face, and when Gracie learns from her evasive father that her dog isn’t just gone, but gone forever, her five-year-old brain cannot process it and so begins a lifelong relationship with deaths, funerals and grief. It’s something we all experience but seldom talk about and, as such, it’s fertile ground for theatre. So Jacob Marx Rice’s new play is a worthy addition to the Finborough Theatre’s fine record of staging interesting work in its intimate space, all the more laudable as, on the face of it, this production is a tough sell in Read more ...
Mert Dilek
What is one to do with Greek tragedy on the contemporary stage? For Simon Stone, whose Phaedra is currently playing at the National Theatre, the answer is a kind of radical adaptation that retains the myth’s backbone but revises all else.For an alternative response, London theatregoers could do worse than head to @sohoplace, where Dominic Cooke’s production of Euripides’s Medea, in a version by the American poet Robinson Jeffers, does something far less unorthodox but is duly searching.A lot hinges here on the heavy-lifting done by Cooke’s lead cast: an unsurprisingly commanding Sophie Read more ...
aleks.sierz
How can old texts speak to us now? The point is not just to adapt classics, but to reimagine them – and that’s exactly what hotshot Australian director Simon Stone does. Having brilliantly staged Lorca’s Yerma with Billie Piper, he now turns his attention to Phaedra, creating an amazing and thrilling mash up of the myth as told by Euripides, Seneca and Racine.Using the full resources of the National to great effect, and bringing Janet McTeer of Ozark fame back to the London stage, his superb reimagining also stars Assaad Bouab, who played Hicham Janowski in the original French series of Call Read more ...
Nick Hasted
John Michael McDonagh’s acerbic tragedy of manners and morals sees West meets East, in a literal car crash of sloppy behaviour and messy intentions.Alcoholic doctor David and blocked children’s author Jo (Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain) are the burnt-out upper-class couple speeding through the Moroccan night, David drunkenly at the wheel, when Berber boy Driss (Omar Ghazaoui) steps into their path. They fatally hit, and run on to the decadent party at the desert home of Richard (Matt Smith). It seems a clean getaway, till Driss’s father Abdellah (Ismael Kanater) arrives at the gates Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A semi-staged concert performance of a musical is a little like a third trimester ultrasound scan. You should see the anatomy in development, the shape of what is to come and, most importantly, discern a heart beating at its centre. But you can’t tell if what will arrive some time later will be a bouncing baby or a sickly child. So it is with this iteration of a new British musical, Treason. We’re in a divided kingdom whose leader, Queen Elizabeth I, is about to die and whose successor is unclear – the audience did not need too much prompting to catch the contemporary parallels. Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Drama is writing in thin air, its content instantly spirited away into unreliable memory, so if a play is to be revived a quarter century on from its first run, it has to say something substantial about the human condition. Patrick Marber's Closer does so because people are always balancing the need for love with the need for sex, dealing with the gnawing desire for someone just out of reach, wearily coping with the emotional baggage of lives lived badly.And here it is in a 25th anniversary revival at the Lyric Hammersmith directed by Clare Lizzimore: not bad for a play that opened Read more ...
David Nice
Hunger for the gruesome horrors and euphoric highs of Greek tragedy seems to be stronger than ever. Yet when it comes to epic sequences, nothing in recent decades has quite had the impact of Peter Hall’s Aeschylus Oresteia at the National Theatre or John Barton’s three-night RSC journey from Aulis to Tauris The Greeks. Now Age of Rage from Ivo van Hove and his Internationaal Theater/Toneelgroep Amsterdam joins them in the pantheon of great theatre.There’s a radical reaction here against everything that seems to me to have gone wrong with often admirable UK attempts to reimagine that ancient Read more ...