Young Vic
aleks.sierz
Playwright Joe Orton was a merry prankster. His main work – such as Loot (1965) and What the Butler Saw (1969) – was provocative, taboo-tickling and often wildly hilarious. Now the Young Vic is staging a revival of his debut, Entertaining Mr Sloane, directed by this venue’s new supremo Nadia Fall, and starring celebrity polymath Jordan Stephens. But does 1960s provocation still resonate today?Well yes and well, no. While this play still has the ability, sporadically, to disturb, the passing of time also means that some of Orton’s attitudes have not aged well. So even Read more ...
mark.kidel
On the eve of recording an album at Real World Studios, guitarist Adrian Utley and the American trumpet player Eddie Henderson brought their “project” to the hallowed ground of Ronnie Scott’s in Soho, along with four other top-class British musicians.In a set that included moody arrangements played from a score and freewheeling improvisation, they drew on their individual strengths and wandered between post-bop and free jazz, with touches of noise and rock, in a mix that was at times exciting and at others not entirely convincing, as if drawing on so many influences got in the way of their Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The Young Vic has opened under a new artistic director with a puzzle play. The puzzle is, why stage this piece today?The key themes of Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play look promising on paper: a strong-willed woman battling her brothers for an inheritance, Succession replayed in the deep South. Regina Hubbard Giddens was a plum role for Tallulah Bankhead on stage and Bette Davis in the 1941 film version. And the cinema is where the piece is most at home, a Hollywood melodrama for an actress who can give Regina (the clue is in the name) a regal grandeur, as well as a skilled line in manipulation. Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It’s hard to work out why Kwame-Kwei Armah chose to end his tenure at the Young Vic by directing this soggy musical by Elvis Costello (songs/lyrics) and the American playwright Sarah Ruhl (book). Was it because of it seemed to be a warning about the dangers of populism? Such warnings are always welcome, but this isn’t the piece to do that. In its original form it was a punchy Elia Kazan film that in 1957 launched the career of future sitcom star, Andy Griffith. HIs TV show was a byword for down-home values and folksy wisdom, but In Kazan’s film he had played an Arkansas drifter, Larry “ Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
From New York’s Public Theater, the venue that nurtured Hamilton, comes another estimable pocket musical, Passing Strange. It was first staged in 2008, to Tony-nominated acclaim, and it shows. Its forthright cheek and irreverence are refreshing and welcome.First impressions might suggest this is another gig-musical, rather like MJ. The Young Vic’s main space has been tricked out as a recording studio, with a glass booth for a drumkit, flanked by three stations for keyboards and guitar stands. Around the stage area runs a raised narrow platform with sections that can glide in and out. Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If Mark Twain thought that a German joke was no laughing matter, what would he make of a German comedy? That quote came to mind more than once during Patrick Marber’s production of Marius von Mayenburg’s 2022 play, Nachtland. I know it’s supposed to be funny (and it often is), but should I really be giggling? That's hardly an uncommon feeling watching a black comedy, but there’s something in the rhythms of Maja Zade’s translation and the bleakness of the Berlin period, Bowie inflected soundtrack that undercuts the guilty pleasure with an insistent Teutonic froideur. With Read more ...
Heather Neill
As the audience enters, thick mist envelopes the thrust stage and jazz music fills the theatre. The set, designed by Moi Tran, consists of a sparsely furnished but spacious room, backed by a staircase. It is a place in the past but also anywhere and any time, both naturalistic and imaginary.The outline of this work – shocking when first seen in 1965 but soon recognised as a gripping, enigmatic examination of the power struggle between the sexes – is by now familiar. Teddy, Max's eldest son, has brought Ruth, his wife of six years, to meet his father and brothers, Lenny who is a pimp, and Joey Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Seldom can a title have given so much away about the play to follow, not just in terms of the subject matter but also in terms of the sledgehammer approach to driving home its points. Kimber Lee, who won the inaugural Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting 2019, International Award, certainly does not say anything once if she can say it twice or thrice nor leaves any ambiguity about every element of her stance regarding Orientalism. Of course, she does have a cast iron case. First up for a skewering is Madama Butterfly with its helpless/sexy Japanese girl who kills herself so her son can be saved by Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Trauma is the source of identity politics. In the case of African-Americans, the experience of brutal slavery, exploitative colonialism and violent racism are defining experiences in their history.Although many recent black dramas have contested this with images of a more celebratory kind of identity, it remains a standard trope, as proved by Kwame Kwei-Armah’s 2013 play, Beneatha’s Place, which he directs himself at the Young Vic, where he is artistic director. In it he channels, among other things, his own experiences of living and working in the United States between 2011 and 2018.An Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Some plays are instantly forgettable, others leave a tender fold in the memory. I well remember seeing Zinnie Harris’s evocatively titled Further Than the Furthest Thing in 2000, and marveling at its strange beauty and linguistic flair. Now revived at the Young Vic, in a beautifully visual, if tonally uncertain, production by Jennifer Tang, one of the venue’s Genesis Fellows, this version confirms my initial impression of a haunting story told in a magical way. And its welcomely diverse cast is led by Jenna Russell and Cyril Nri.Based on events that happened on Tristan da Cunha, an island in Read more ...
Mert Dilek
As bio-musicals continue to have their heyday, it makes sense for the Young Vic to throw its hat in the ring and champion a work about the hugely influential Nelson Mandela. But this new musical about the South African anti-apartheid activist and statesman is such a baffling hodgepodge that it actually risks being a disservice to Mandela’s legacy.Mandela covers the period in the eponymous figure’s life from his militant activities and subsequent imprisonment in the early 1960s to his release from prison in 1990. Perhaps because the piece is chiefly focused on Mandela’s imprisonment on Robben Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Opposition (and history) are the apparent mainstays of the ceaselessly busy James Graham, and he conjoins the two to riveting effect in Best of Enemies.Telling of the televised 1968 debates between William F Buckley and Gore Vidal during that year's presidential race, Graham's hurtling drama is now in the West End after its Young Vic debut nearly a year ago; Broadway, presumably, is the next destination, not least given his play's American setting. We've been down this road before in varying ways, via Frost/Nixon on the one hand and Graham's own Ink, which posited two male Read more ...