Theatre Reviews
Camille O'Sullivan, ApolloWednesday, 09 December 2009
It is telling that there were drama critics at the Apollo to review Camille O’Sullivan’s show, The Dark Angel. The half-French, half-Irish woman is ostensibly a singer, but so unique is her delivery that each song is a piece of theatre in its own right. My companion confessed to being just a little scared of O’Sullivan, who has a distinctive look - part vamp, part cabariste, but... Read more... |
Red, Donmar WarehouseWednesday, 09 December 2009
He was the biggest hitter in an A-team of mid-20th-century American painters: Jackson Pollock, Barnet Newman, Willem de Kooning. Mark Rothko, born Marcus Rothkovitz in what has become Latvia, was Abstract Expressionism's shaman, its restless thinker and febrile poet, an artist who fashioned from an investigation into the power of pure colour a philosophy of art as potent as Crick and Watson's contemporaneous unravelling of the double helix. Read more... |
Darker Shores, Hampstead TheatreTuesday, 08 December 2009
What’s the appeal of the traditional ghost story? Is it the knowledge that while the victims of the tale quake in their boots, you are perfectly safe and grinning like the Cheshire Cat? Or is it because the supernatural gives us a chance to journey into the weird and fearsome corners of our psyche, all the time kidding ourselves that we are just normal human beings? In Michael Punter’s new ghost story, Darker Shores, which opened last night at the Hampstead Theatre, all the rooms of... Read more... |
The Stefan Golaszewski Plays, Bush TheatreSaturday, 05 December 2009
Passion, pain and loss: they are companions in life more faithful than many a lover. This duo of solo dramas by Stefan Golaszewski, which opened last night in London after success in Edinburgh, turns its perceptive gaze upon them through the eyes of both eager youth and desolate old age. Poignantly, true emotional maturity remains elusive. Read more... |
Sweet Charity, Menier Chocolate FactoryThursday, 03 December 2009
"Fun! Laughs! Good times!" Anyone remember them? That snatch of lyrics from Sweet Charity, the 1960s musical that lifted Broadway to newly brassy heights and has been frequently revived on both sides of the Atlantic, serves as an apt summation of the Menier Chocolate Factory's latest musical crowd-pleaser, which, like Sunday in the Park with George, A Little Night Music, and La Cage aux Folles before it, surely has the West End in its sights. Read more... |
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Novello TheatreTuesday, 01 December 2009
The voice has landed, and what an astonishing sound it makes. Read more... |
Detaining Justice, Tricycle TheatreTuesday, 01 December 2009
The plight of asylum-seekers is no laughing matter, but that doesn’t mean that dramas about the subject have to be worthy, or dull. In fact, young playwright Bola Agbaje’s Detaining Justice, which opened last night, is an exemplary mix of laughter and tears. As the final part of the Tricycle Theatre’s trilogy examining the state of the nation at the end of the new millennium’s first decade, this play confirms the feeling that much of the energy in new writing is coming from black... Read more... |
The Priory, Royal Court TheatreThursday, 26 November 2009
If it’s not quite the time of year to start making New Year resolutions, then it’s not far off. Everywhere, you can read the signs: bright lights on the main shopping streets, merry cash registers ringing and the sound of yule logs being felled in empty forests. Plus chronic gift anxieties and a grim foreboding about the coming Election Year. In Michael Wynne’s new comedy, The Priory, which opened last night at the Royal Court, a New Year’s Eve party gives us a taste of what’s to come... Read more... |
The Line, Arcola TheatreTuesday, 24 November 2009
The habit of art - a favourite topic of late, or so it would seem - gets a pummelling in The Line, a sort of Several Decades in the Atelier with Edgar (as in Degas) that would defy even Stephen Sondheim to shake a wordy and dour play into impassioned life. Henry Goodman brings his customary fervour to an assignment whose... Read more... |
Cock, Royal Court Theatre UpstairsThursday, 19 November 2009
Indecision takes the characters to the point of psychic collapse and beyond in Cock, the provocatively titled Mike Bartlett play that forsakes nudity for a far more troubling collective baring of the soul. Ben Whishaw is the name draw for a run that is already pretty well sold out, but James Macdonald's production is scathingly acted across the board; this is a play best seen with someone you fully trust. Read more... |
Pages
Advertising feature
★★★★★
‘A compulsive, involving, emotionally stirring evening – theatre’s answer to a page-turner.’
The Observer, Kate Kellaway
Direct from a sold-out season at Kiln Theatre the five star, hit play, The Son, is now playing at the Duke of York’s Theatre for a strictly limited season.
★★★★★
‘This final part of Florian Zeller’s trilogy is the most powerful of all.’
The Times, Ann Treneman
Written by the internationally acclaimed Florian Zeller (The Father, The Mother), lauded by The Guardian as ‘the most exciting playwright of our time’, The Son is directed by the award-winning Michael Longhurst.
Book by 30 September and get tickets from £15*
with no booking fee.
latest in today
Brancusi, Pompidou Centre, Paris review - founding father of...
One hundred and twenty sculptures, and so much more: the current Brancusi blockbuster at the Centre Pompidou, the first large Paris show of the...
Album: Bab L'Bluz - Swaken
Bab L’Bluz are a French-Moroccan four-piece that play a tasty blend of fiery psychedelic rock backed up with hypnotic North African gnawa rhythms...
Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story, Disney+ review - h...
To mark the 40th anniversary of New Jersey’s second-greatest gift to rock’n’roll,...
Album: Pokey LaFarge - Rhumba Country
Pokey LaFarge has always defied categorisation. He likened his 2020 album Rock Bottom Rhapsody to a mix tape, with elements of...
L'Olimpiade, Irish National Opera review - Vivaldi...
In Vivaldi’s more extravagant operas, some of the arias can seem like a competition for the gold medal. L’Olimpiade is relatively modest...
Red Eye, ITV review - Anglo-Chinese relations tested in junk...
Aircraft hijacking is a ghoulishly popular theme in films and TV, but Red Eye brings a slightly different twist to the perils of air...
Album: Josienne Clarke - Parenthesis, I
Parentheses, I is an album title – (I) – that’s a hieroglyph of the self, the brackets like...
Music Reissues Weekly: West Coast Consortium - All The Love...
West Coast Consortium’s first single was July 1967’s “Some Other Someday,” a delightful slice of Mellotron-infused harmony pop which wasn’t too...
Love Lies Bleeding review - a pumped-up neo-noir
Somewhere along a desert highway in the American Southwest, where there's not much to do besides get drunk, shoot guns, and pump iron, a stranger...
Remembering conductor Andrew Davis (1944-2024)
As a human being of immense warmth, humour and erudition, Andrew Davis made it all too easy to forget what towering, incandescent performances he...