Young Vic
Sam Marlowe
“A simple story of everyday life in a big city, a story of love and passion and greed and death.” That was how Kurt Weill described Elmer Rice’s 1929 play, Street Scene, set on the front stoop of a New York brownstone in sweltering summertime. Together with lyricist Langston Hughes, the left-wing poet and writer, Weill turned the drama into a gritty 1947 American opera, setting Rice's book against a score that offered an exhilarating blend of Puccini-esque melody, bright, brassy, impudent jazz, brooding blues and sparkly Broadway showtune. Like the tenement where its struggling characters Read more ...
stephen.walsh
After a summer of operas set in what might tactfully be called fancy locations, it comes as a mild shock to return to Wales and a Don Giovanni that actually takes the composer’s instructions as its starting-point. John Caird, whose first ever production for WNO a few years back was Don Carlos, revisits Spain without a qualm. He gives us heavily embossed ironwork and carved oak, he gives us cowled monks and cloaked aristocrats. And he captures without irony a world in which God and the Devil can be defied but not denied – a world forever teetering on the brink of moral and spiritual Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Kafka is a bit of a stranger to British stages at the moment, but elsewhere he remains a strong presence. In his short parables, as well as in his classic novels such as The Trial, he conveys a deep understanding of the human condition. But while European postmodern culture might shrug off his insights, he is still close to the heart of some Middle Eastern theatre-makers. In this production, an adaptation of one of Kafka’s most famous short stories, the Palestinian ShiberHur theatre company prove his abiding relevance.Set in an almost deserted punishment camp, the story is as taut and spare Read more ...
David Nice
It's not often in classic comedy that you cry with laughter at the opening gags, and even rarer that the final scene of perfectly orchestrated ensemble acting actually crowns the work. More than two decades on from his groundbreaking Old Vic production of Ostrovsky's Too Clever By Half, director of genius Richard Jones is still finding the right mugs and pushing the boundaries of edgy satire. And this time he brings the wackiest Russian comedy of them all, Government Inspector by the great Gogol, shorn of its English definite article in - at last, slava! - a tumbling, pungent new translation Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Today’s Britons are a minor miracle of globalised taste. Typically, we are amazingly eclectic: we eat curry and sushi, read Swedish novels or South American magic realists, dress like Italians, drive German cars, listen to world music. Our houses are full of Scandinavian design. Our favourite films are as likely to be made in China or Afghanistan as in Hollywood. So, watching the British premiere of a new play by Norwegian Jon Fosse directed by French theatre legend Patrice Chéreau, one is compelled to ask: why are we so suspicious of foreign drama?One reason must be aesthetics: we are so Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Mark O’Rowe is one of Ireland’s leading contemporary playwrights, and Terminus was first produced in 2007 by the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. It transferred to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2008 and is now being revived by the Abbey in an international tour. His play charts another ordinary night in Dublin city, but as this captivating triptych unfolds the events his characters - simply named A, B and C - describe are anything but. A man and two women deliver a series of overlapping monologues about love, sex, loss, regret and acts of shocking violence, but also of angels transporting souls to the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Wars have no end. Soldiers may come home, battlefields may be vacated, peace treaties signed, but scars remain. The violence of combat has a way of revisiting itself on the victors and vanquished and ravaging soul and state. This was the message of Benedict Andrews's new production of Monteverdi's The Return of Ulysses for the English National Opera at the Young Vic, which sees Ithaca as a mutilated world, inhabited by a suicidal wife, a brutalised soldier and a society grotesquely drunk on its own supremacy.The curtain lifts on a grieving widow. Penelope circles her cage, a shiny modern Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A whiff of excrement hangs around DBC Pierre’s Booker Prize-winning Vernon God Little. It’s a novel that likes to get right up into the crevices of society and then inhale deeply. Written in an anarchic, freewheeling American patois, it’s the inner voice of Vernon himself (and Pierre’s brutal way with a simile) that plays shock and awe with the reader, delighting many and appalling more. The loss of narrative voice would seem enough to deter any would-be theatrical adaptor, but in 2007 Tanya Ronder and the Young Vic took up the challenge. The result (newly revised) now makes a return – Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Very early in 2003 I went to the offices of Faber & Faber in Bloomsbury to meet a first-time novelist. At 41, he looked slightly long in the tooth to be fresh out of the traps, even a bit roughed up by life. With seasoned teeth and capillaried cheeks, he had evidently survived a battle or two. It was his first ever interview. I remember asking him if he had any idea how good his book was. To be taken on by such reputable publishers after half a lifetime of epic underachievement was fairy tale enough. But that year the story moved rapidly on when Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre won Read more ...
joe.muggs
There's a kitchen-sink feel to this children's play by David Almond – indeed, nine-tenths of it takes place in a Newcastle kitchen – which adds a certain edge to it. Even though the broad, cartoonish comedy is signalled from the off, there's an initial hint of real-life grimness in the scenario of a little girl trying to care for her unkempt father who won't eat properly, emits abrupt shrieks and is convinced he is a bird. There's an engagement with loss that runs through the play too, a bittersweetness that makes it completely unsurprising that the Pet Shop Boys, those masters of putting a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Just about the time you're losing patience with the Young Vic revival of Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie - wondering at some of the variable accents and directorial overembellishments and the heavy sledding accompanying this most fragile and beautiful of plays - along comes one of the great, prolonged encounters of all 20th-century drama: that between an emotionally indrawn, "crippled" (in more ways than one) young woman and the scarcely less damaged swain who all too briefly offers salvation in a natty suit. And suddenly, as another character in a later Williams play would go on to Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Dario Marianelli won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for his score for the movie Atonement, and his return to the theatre after a long absence as composer for the Young Vic's new production of Tennessee Williams's first big Broadway success, The Glass Menagerie, is hotly anticipated. In the rehearsal room he talks about the intricate process that marries music to drama, be it on celluloid or stage. He talks about what fires his imagination and how, for instance, a typewriter (in Atonement) or a piano (in Pride and Prejudice) might unlock the colour and character of a score.
Williams's plays Read more ...