Young Vic
alexandra.coghlan
British theatre company 1927 celebrate their 10th birthday next year. Over this nearly-decade they have produced just three shows (plus a reimagining of The Magic Flute for Berlin’s Komische Oper). If that seems a little like slacking then you’ve obviously never seen one of their creations. To say they are meticulous is true, but also fails to reflect the sense of imaginative excess, of abundance, that pulses through everything they make. Animation, live action, music, song, dance and mime all have a place in their world. Theatre for 1927 is a four-dimensional affair, and Golem scores on Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A Martian, a Spitfire and a flatulent penguin are the unlikely ingredients for The Way Back Home, English National Opera’s first foray into the colourful world of children’s opera. And if those don’t sound like enticement enough, be reassured, at only 45 minutes long this really is a child-friendly taster of a genre that doesn’t always get the best press when it comes to accessibility.Amahl and the Night Visitors, L'enfant et les sortilèges, Hansel and Gretel, Where the Wild Things Are: opera for children might be a niche-of-a-niche, but over the centuries it has punched above its weight. Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Ghosts are walking at the Young Vic. Katie Mitchell’s stark, startling production of Chekhov’s final lament is not just an evocation of a lost era, but a summoning of the spirits haunting Vicki Mortimer’s chilling sepulchral mansion. This is a Cherry Orchard cast into shadow – literal and figurative – but pulsing with furious energy. The past will not go gentle into that good night; it calls out in a keening cry.At just one hour 50, Simon Stephens’ taut adaptation combines elegy with economy. The stripped-back text suits Mitchell’s absolute clarity of purpose, although the excised repetition Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Fresh from global domination with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, currently garnering rapturous reviews on Broadway, inexhaustible playwright and adaptor Simon Stephens has swapped Mark Haddon for Anton Chekhov and a new version of The Cherry Orchard, now previewing at the Young Vic. It’s not his first time bringing late-19th-century work to the venue, having enjoyed enormous success with A Doll’s House in 2012, but it is his first time tackling Chekhov, who he readily professes is his all-time writing hero. No pressure, then.Stockport-born Stephens, whose playwriting Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The latest production of Tennessee Williams’s sultry, brutal yet poetic masterpiece is mainstream theatre that dares to go out on a limb. Directed by Benedict Andrews, it may occasionally miss a beat, but its risk-taking comes with an innate sense of the play’s scorching pathos and an unnerving, dare one say exhilarating taste for the jugular that matches that of its primal male.Gillian Anderson is Blanche DuBois, the Southern Belle whose sanity is fading with her fortunes, riding the streetcar named Desire to the New Orleans home of her sister Stella (Vanessa Kirby) in a last-ditch bid for Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“If we go to the theatre, it’s because we want to be surprised, even amazed.” Peter Brook’s programme note for The Valley of Astonishment stresses emotion and sensation above all things. How curious then that the play itself should be so cold, so cerebral a thing. In unpacking the mysterious valley of the human mind, Brook has become so engrossed in his subject matter and its scientific facts and phenomena that he forgets to add the drama that they need to move from lecture to theatre.Brook’s latest work – another collaboration with writer and director Marie-Hélène Estienne following The Suit Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What is it with the London theatre and this particular Arthur Miller play? In 1987, Michael Gambon reached a career-best peak playing the Italian-American longshoreman, Eddie Carbone, in a defining National Theatre revival of A View From the Bridge directed by Alan Ayckbourn, and Ken Stott was arguably even more scorching in the same role on the West End five years ago. Now along comes the Flemish director Ivo van Hove to rattle the cages of received theatrical practice with a stripped-back approach to Miller's high-octane text that places the focus directly on leading man Mark Strong and an Read more ...
Naima Khan
Written and directed by the ever-varied Amir Nizar Zuabi, Oh My Sweet Land tells the story of a German-Syrian woman living in Paris and struggling with her connection to the raging civil war abroad. Zuabi, the Palestinian theatre-maker who gave us 2012's divisive treatment of the story of Abraham in The Beloved and the RSC's Middle East-inspired take on The Comedy of Errors, now looks at similar themes of love, loss and reunion, albeit with a very different tone. Performed by Corinne Jaber who, like her character, is German-Syrian but based in France, Oh My Sweet Land couples Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
"My mum was given this new wonder-drug for morning sickness when she was pregnant with me," explains Mat Fraser at the start of Beauty and the Beast. "It was called Thalidomide. That's why I was born with arms like this."This is the simple, straightforward opening to a show that is anything but. Husband-and-wife team Julie Atlas Muz and Mat Fraser have devised something here that is part fairytale, part puppet show, part cabaret and part burlesque – with a fair amount of wry comedy thrown in for good measure.It ostensibly follows the well-known tale of Beauty and the Beast, with Muz ( Read more ...
kate.bassett
Forever breaking into song and dance, musicals are fun, fun, fun. They are primarily what folks go to for uplifting entertainment, are they not? Actually, many of the best aren't anything like that simplistic. Opening at the Young Vic last night, The Scottsboro Boys is no mere barrel of vacuous laughs, though it is comical and buoyant along the way.With its score and lyrics by America’s John Kander and Fred Ebb, and its book by David Thompson, this is a barbed biomusical about racism and miscarriages of justice. Set in the Deep South of the 1930s, it plays – sometimes very sharply – with the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
We all know the drill: Wedekind’s Lulu is a page men have written on through the centuries, the canvas on which they have painted their desires, the feminine void they have filled. The patriarchy have appropriated her, and the perverts, and now it’s contemporary composer Olga Neuwirth’s turn.Neuwirth’s reworking of Berg’s unfinished opera (itself an adaptation of Wedekind’s Lulu plays) purports to voice the unvoiced, to empower the heroine to wrest her story out of the hands of men. What it actually does is add yet another palimpsest-layer to an already overladen archetype, denying Lulu her Read more ...
David Nice
No theatre in London, surely, has offered us more miracles of transformed space than the Young Vic. Small it may be, but its productions often feel big in every way, and none more so than Joe Wright’s total-theatre take on Aimé Césaire’s A Season in the Congo. Enter the auditorium and designer Lizzie Clachan immediately places you – in all but the humidity, which doesn’t seep through from outside – on a street or square in Kinshasa, quickly taking you back to its former status as colonial Léopoldville in 1955 where Patrice Lumumba is selling beer. None of this would work, though, if it weren’ Read more ...