fri 29/03/2024

Bridge Theatre

Guys and Dolls, Bridge Theatre review - exuberant new production of the 1950 masterpiece

It now seems an inevitability that Marisha Wallace will be a frontrunner at next year's theatre awards, not just this year’s. Having barnstormed her way to a 2023 Olivier nomination for playing Ado Annie in the Young Vic’s Oklahoma!, her Miss...

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The Book of Dust, Bridge Theatre review – as much intelligence and provocation as fleet-footed fun

It’s been seventeen years since Nicholas Hytner first directed Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials at the National Theatre, ambitiously whirling audiences into Pullman’s universe of daemons, damnable clerics and parallel worlds. Now he has...

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Bach & Sons, Bridge Theatre review - humorous and deeply intelligent

In John Eliot Gardiner’s magnificent wide-ranging biography of Bach, Music In The Castle of Heaven, he tells the story of the composer’s early run-in with a bassoonist with his typical zest for detail. “[H]e called him a Zippel Fagottist. Even...

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A Christmas Carol, Bridge Theatre review - deluxe seasonal storytelling

A Christmas Carol is a seasonal standard. In a normal year, there are a couple of versions to be enjoyed, usually led by the Old Vic in London, but this winter it feels like there’s an epidemic of adaptations. Whether this reflects an attempt to...

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Quarter Life Crisis, Bridge Theatre review – slender and superficial

Success smells sweet. The Bridge Theatre’s pioneering season of one-person plays continues with sell-out performances of David Hare’s Beat the Devil and Fuel’s production of Inua Ellams’s An Evening with an Immigrant, with both having their runs...

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The Shrine & Bed Among the Lentils, Bridge Theatre review - loneliness shared, with wit and melancholy

Monologues and duets rule the stage right now. We can only dream of the day when theatre steps up to the classical music scene’s boldness and manages to have more performers gathered together, albeit suitably distanced (not so easy when the drama...

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The Outside Dog & The Hand of God, Bridge Theatre review - gems of frustration and disquiet

For some of us, it doesn’t take a lockdown to imprison us in our own hellish little world. Since his first series of dramatic monologues, broadcast on the BBC in 1988, Alan Bennett has taken a scalpel to the mindsets of those who have battled life’s...

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Beat the Devil, Bridge Theatre review – Ralph Fiennes delivers an arresting account of Covid-19

For a riveting, cathartic – and often surprisingly humorous – 50 minutes Ralph Fiennes paces the stage at the Bridge Theatre to deliver an account of Covid-19 that is as political as it is personal. In a script written by David Hare – who contracted...

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A Midsummer Night's Dream, National Theatre At Home review – a mad delight

Nicholas Hytner’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, filmed for NT Live at the Bridge Theatre last summer, is – as it gleefully acknowledges – completely bonkers. But it doesn’t start out that way. A troop of actors trudge through...

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Theatre Lockdown Special 11: Shakespeare-as-rave, a starlit Old Vic, and, yes, those singing nuns

Might we be nearing light at the end of the lockdown tunnel? It definitely seems that way, with the news in recent days that social life beyond the home may be resuming soon, at least after a fashion. All the while, theatrical offerings continue to...

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A Number, Bridge Theatre review - a dream team dazzles anew

There are any number of ways to perform A Number, Caryl Churchill’s bleak and beautiful play about a father and three of who knows how many of his genetically cloned sons. Since it first opened at the Royal Court in 2002, this hourlong two-hander...

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Two Ladies, Bridge Theatre review - Cvitešić and Wanamaker really rock

Are first ladies second-class citizens? Do they always have to stand behind their husbands? What are they really like as people? Questions such as these have inspired Irish playwright Nancy Harris to explore the relationship between two fictional...

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