Young Vic
alexandra.coghlan
“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 Joe Hill-Gibbins. His A Midsummer Night’s Dream has put aside such childish things (along with fairies and clean trousers), burying them deep in a pit of mud that spans the entire breadth of the Young Vic – a slippery stage for a very messy exploration of love.After the jelly smearing of The Changeling and the sex dolls that dominated Measure for Read more ...
aleks.sierz
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 also acted by them, introduces us to both the enormous variety of sex workers and to their wide range of motives. The play, which was created by director Mimi Poskitt and playwright Molly Taylor, takes us by the hand and gently ushers us into a darkened room, designed by Katrina Lindsay, to show us a slice of life that is mainly invisible to most of Read more ...
David Nice
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 beans of his Wozzeck or the spinning top in his Royal Opera Boris Godunov. This, bathetically, is merely the noise of "Indian" nuts being consumed by the play's holy fool George Lewis, an idiot everyone thinks is savant. The effect is sparely operated thereafter. But then nothing needs overegging in this piece of perfectly-executed seasonal froth. Two Read more ...
David Nice
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 vernacular by no less a writer than Conor McPherson, well enough directed by Ian Rickson and plausibly characterised by two fine Irish actors.A greater play could take a fuller outline of its contents than can be given here without depriving the reader of more to chew on as spectator. Let's just say that Caolifhionn Dunn and Laurence Kinlan, who've just Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
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 percussion. It’s the heartbeat of A Man of Good Hope, a tale whose chapters are measured out in blows, beatings, rapes and murders, whose very horizon is barred with corrugated iron.Jonny Steinberg’s 2015 book tells the story of the author’s encounter with Assad Abdulahi, a Somalian refugee he met in South Africa. Fleeing Mogadishu after the murder of Read more ...
Jonny Steinberg
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 Good Hope tells the true story of Asad, a Somali refugee who embarks on an transcontinential journey to reach South Africa. About halfway through the writing, the book began demanding that I stick uncompromisingly to Asad's point of view as he was subjected to South Africa’s relentless, slow-drip violence.This was not what I wanted to hear. Asad’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
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. But the unanimity of the reviews, combined with the timely arrival of a black man in the White House, propelled the two-hander into the West End where it played to standing ovations from notably multiracial audiences. In a year which saw the premiere of Enron by Lucy Prebble and Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth, it won the coveted Best New Play award Read more ...
David Nice
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 downfall drama about the court of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie – but this time the Elect of God doesn’t actually appear in person, not literally at any rate, and the triumph is shared by everybody involved, lighting and soundscape designers included.Hunter plays 12 parts, the voices of the ruler’s courtiers as reported in Ryszard Kapuściński’s Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Billie Piper vaults to the top rank of British theatre actresses with Yerma, Australian writer-director Simon Stone's rabidly free rewrite of Lorca's 1934 play that posits its young star as the sort of take-no-prisoners talent whose gifts come not from drama school but from something gloriously unfettered and astonishingly free.Billed as "after Lorca", Stone quickly leaves behind his Spanish source to construct a modern-day story about a psyche in freefall that takes a marriage with it, the occasional directorial modishness soon giving itself over to an unsparing portrait of individual Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange is one of the best plays of the past two decades. First staged at the National Theatre in 2000, with the dream cast of Chiwetel Ejiofor, Andrew Lincoln and Bill Nighy, it won an Olivier Award for Best Play and has been constantly revived ever since. Not only does it have a strong story, but the characters, and their interaction, are credible, engaging and dramatic, while the play fizzes with ideas as well as emotions. It is a contemporary classic.Like all the best well-made plays, it has a single set and a limited time span. Located in an NHS psychiatric unit, Blue/ Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Joe Penhall first thwacked his way to the attention of British theatregoers more than 20 years ago with a series of plays about schizos and psychos and wackos. An iconoclastic laureate of lithium, his early hit Some Voices (1994), about a care-in-the-community schizophrenic, went on to be filmed starring Daniel Craig. In 2000 he returned to the subject in Blue/Orange.The play was first performed at the National’s Cottesloe Theatre and introduced Chiwetel Ejiofor as Christopher, a young man from a White City estate who has been sectioned under the Mental Health Act. He's about to be discharged Read more ...
Matthew Wright
It’s easier to say what Jane Horrocks’s new musical dance-drama isn’t that what it is. Horrocks makes a short speech at the beginning and the end about the mysteries of love, as depicted in her selection of Mancunian heartbreakers from Gang of Four, Joy Division, Buzzcocks and The Smiths, among others. But there’s no narrative, as such, or individual characters, and the songs are only connected with a series of semi-abstract dance routines usually performed at the front of the stage, and often involving Horrocks herself. It’s not a musical or a play, and while it is a kind of covers gig, it Read more ...