thu 21/09/2023

Young Vic

The Inheritance, Young Vic review - a long day’s journey into light

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....

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The Jungle, Young Vic review - physically and emotionally challenging

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,...

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Wings, Young Vic review - Juliet Stevenson goes high and low

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...

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Life of Galileo, Young Vic review - shared-experience Brecht is powerful, timely

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...

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A Midsummer Night's Dream, Young Vic

“The nine men’s morris is filled up with mud, and the quaint mazes in the wanton green for lack of tread are undistinguishable.” Titania may mourn the landscape withered by her conflict with Oberon, but games and mazes hold no interest for director...

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See Me Now, Young Vic

Sex workers come in all shapes and sizes. Everyone knows that. But why do they do it? Why does anyone take the risk of being intimate with a stranger for money? This new show, which was not only devised with the help of genuine prostitutes, but is...

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Once in a Lifetime, Young Vic

An amplified crunch in the dark, sound without vision, kicks off this take on Moss Hart and George S Kaufman's light comedy about the advent of the talking pictures. It's a typical Richard Jones leitmotif, not as fraught with horror as the baked...

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The Nest, Young Vic

Do we see enough in the UK of continental European drama in translation? No. Is what we actually get the best? Probably not in the case of popular German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz's The Nest. Still, it's rendered into pithy, convincing...

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A Man of Good Hope, Young Vic

The first thing you hear are the marimbas – music that’s pounded, punched out of the air by hundreds of fists. Later the instruments give us dances and songs, but this musical violence is never truly absent from an orchestra made up entirely of...

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First Person: A Man of Good Hope

To begin writing a book is to start something over which you are going to lose control. As it comes to life, a book acquires its own quiddity, its own interior authority, and if the writer does not obey this authority she ruins the book. A Man of...

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theartsdesk Q&A: Playwright Katori Hall

Is Katori Hall (b. 1981) the embodiment of Martin Luther King’s dream? She was born in Memphis, the city where King died. The Mountaintop, her play about his last night alive, had its world premiere at Theatre 503, a tiny pub stage in south London....

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The Emperor, Young Vic

She gave us the most moving King Lear years before the news broke that Glenda Jackson would be playing the role. Only Mark Rylance has recently matched the malicious wit of her Globe Richard III. Now Kathryn Hunter spellbinds in a very Shakespearean...

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