Young Vic
Rachel Halliburton
It is 70 years since Willy Loman first paced a Broadway stage; 70 years since audiences were sucked into the vortex of a man trying to live America’s capitalist dream only to see his life crash and burn around him. This production, which transfers from the Young Vic, famously recasts Arthur Miller’s vision from a black man’s perspective, a powerful idea that gains heightened potency in an era in which Trump continues so shamelessly to reclaim America for the oppressed white man.Director Marianne Elliott – who so brilliantly re-energised Sondheim’s Company last year by making the Read more ...
Heather Neill
Earthiness, lyricism, fatalism, the undeniable force of passion, of ecstatic attraction, known as "duende": these are the familiar ingredients of Lorca's plays set in rural Spain. Blood Wedding, written in 1932, was the first, followed by Yerma two years later and The House of Bernarda Alba in 1936, the year of Lorca's murder by Nationalists. As a gay, left-wing artist - he was a poet and musician as well as a playwright - he was an obvious target.Yerma - about a woman desperate to conceive - was given a stunning production here in 2016 with an emotionally shattering performance by Billie Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s hard, and finally fruitless to attempt to describe Okwui Okpokwasili’s Bronx Gothic in conventional terms of genre: combining elements of dance and theatre, this visceral solo performance transcends both. It engages with frantic movement at the same time as nursing a text – an utterance, rather than a narrative – that attains a fervid urgency, a state that demands immersion from the viewer. The concentrated effort of its 80-minute run clearly takes a huge amount out of the Nigerian-American actor-writer: it’s hard to call her just a performer, this is an experience that she lives.Her Read more ...
Heather Neill
The Young Vic, a welcoming theatre with a culturally diverse audience, has been home to memorable Miller revivals before, notably Ivo van Hove's emotionally shattering, stripped-back A View From the Bridge in 2014. But before that, in the 1980s and Nineties, the then artistic director David Thacker was an important champion of Miller's work at a time when he was less well regarded at home. Miller, who died in 2005, became a close friend of both Thacker and the theatre and observed with pleasure several productions of earlier work and the London premiere of The Last Yankee here.Now, 70 years Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An entirely electric leading performance from the fast-rising Ukweli Roach is the reason for being for revisiting Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train, back in London for the first major production since the late Philip Seymour Hoffman brought his acclaimed Off Broadway premiere of it to the Donmar in 2002. Since then, author Stephen Adly Guirgis has to be honest written better plays, not least the thrilling The Motherf**er with the Hat which doesn't try so hard to flag its bravura at every turn. Kate Hewitt's revival for the Young Vic rides the inbuilt energy of the play, but the net result is Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Wow! First, the Black Panther team took cinema by storm; now, they have conquered theatre as well. Or, at least, two of them have. The Convert has been written by actor and playwright Danai Gurira (Okoye), and stars Letitia Wright (Shuri). Originally staged in the United States in 2012, and currently part of Kwame Kwei-Armah's first season at the Young Vic, this three-hour historical epic, which tells the harrowing story of an African Catholic believer's attempt to convert a young black woman in colonial South-East Africa, has a great cast which also includes Ivanno Jeremiah, Wright's Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What better way to celebrate a homecoming than with a party? That is the capacious-hearted thinking behind this new musical version of Twelfth Night, which additionally marks Kwame Kwei-Armah's debut production at the helm of that undeniable dynamo otherwise known as the Young Vic. Resident of late Stateside where he was running Baltimore's Center Stage, Kwei-Armah has posited as his opening production a show that celebrates London in a giddy spirit of inclusion that seems a necessary antidote to our mean-spirited times.And if Kwei-Armah's production, credited to him and the powerhouse Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It seems only too fitting that David Lan’s luminous reign at the Young Vic should draw to a close with this bold, creatively thrilling international import. Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron’s Tony-winning musical, which premiered Off-Broadway in 2013, is an exquisite adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic-novel memoir – a heartfelt detective story that traipses through memory in order to decode our loved ones, and ourselves.We meet Alison at three different ages: as a child in small-town Pennsylvania, where her father runs the funeral – or “fun” – home; as a college student coming out as a Read more ...
David Benedict
About a decade ago, theatre-makers started routinely describing themselves as being in the business of storytelling. And “storytelling” is most certainly the term that best describes Matthew Lopez’s two-part, seven-hour epic The Inheritance. Beautifully cast, economically designed and directed with strikingly elegant simplicity by Stephen Daldry, it has plenty to recommended it but there’s no denying a central problem. This gay male revamp of E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End is a case of too much telling of story at the expense, all too often, of true drama. “Who Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Refugees, it is said, have no nationality – they are all individuals. This new docu-drama, deftly put together by theatre-makers Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, is a sombre account of a couple of recent years of the great European migration crisis, and acts as a testament to the individuality and complexity of the refugee experience. As this co-production between Good Chance theatre company, the National and the Young Vic opens, in an immersive production steered by directors Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, it raises various troubling questions about this kind of theatre, most of which are Read more ...
David Nice
Now look here, Giles Coren: immersion in a great play well acted can send you out of the theatre feeling very different from when you entered it – and I don’t mean stressed-out. In this case, light as air and sad as hell, simultaneously. You may still find it funny or contrived. Yet these things are true: when in 1976 Arthur Kopit, visiting his stroke-incapacitated father in hospital, met three strong women there, he transformed their experiences into a superbly structured, strikingly phrased poetic drama. And now, over 40 years later, Juliet Stevenson and the director who helped her to make Read more ...
Heather Neill
Never mind breaking the fourth wall, Joe Wright and the Young Vic have smashed the other three as well. This isn’t simply because their engaging production of Life of Galileo, demonstrating the struggle between science and prevailing authority, is played in the round, but because the audience is such an integral part of the proceedings. To begin with, characters pop up from among spectators sitting in the circle under an enormous ceiling disc which will later act as a cosmic screen or Renaissance dome, but actors also address the audience (even once name-checking the director) as the action Read more ...