Young Vic
Mert Dilek
A bare interior with tarnished walls, a single bed, and an oxygen tube. The stage seems to have been set for a Beckett play, but the figure who comes to inhabit this dejected enclosure for 90 minutes is grounded in a far different world.Powerful multitudes collide and combine in Ivo van Hove’s adaptation of Who Killed My Father, the acclaimed French writer Édouard Louis’s autobiographical work from 2018. The Belgian director entrusts the monologue to the Dutch actor Hans Kesting, from the Internationaal Theatre Amsterdam ensemble, whose most recent London appearance was in Age of Rage. Read more ...
aleks.sierz
While Britain is experiencing a "summer of discontent", with inflation, strikes and other conflicts, it is odd that so few plays are as overtly political, and as overtly resonant as Sonali Bhattacharyya’s Chasing Hares, which won the activist Theatre Uncut’s Political Playwriting Award, and is now on the main stage at the Young Vic.Although the play is set in Kolkata in the 2000s, it makes connections with Britain today, and includes a passionate argument in praise of the power of theatre to change people’s attitudes. The story focuses on Prab, a machine operator in a West Bengali factory who Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
No surreys, fringes or corny chap-slapping: the Rodgers and Hammerstein revival that has arrived at the Young Vic from New York, trailing a Tony award, is no ordinary makeover. Daniel Fish, its director, has spent the best part of 15 years stripping down and remodelling the 1943 original. The framework of the story — of farmers and cowmen in 1906 Oklahoma Indian Territory, poised to join the union and warring over their womenfolk — is still there. But its new engine takes it to exciting and violent places. We enter the auditorium with the house lights on full beam. The room twice goes to Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Conundrum is a tricky play. Written and directed by Paul Anthony Morris, founder of Crying in the Wilderness Productions, it’s an extended meditation on Blackness and what it means to live in a racist society. Anthony Ofoegbu is the star of the show, but his mesmerising performance isn’t enough to make sense out of Morris’s inscrutable script.Fidel (Ofoegbu, pictured below) is decluttering, shredding documents he doesn’t need anymore. He stumbles across a page of biology notes, and starts testing himself on parts of the body: hypothalamus, oesophagus, carotid canal. He scrawls the words in Read more ...
Heather Neill
It is a truism that every Hamlet is different, depending more than any other play on the casting of the lead. Each production moulds itself around the personality of the actor playing the prince. In Cush Jumbo, working here with Greg Hersov, who successfully directed her in As You Like It and A Doll's House at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, we have an accomplished actor of wit and intelligence, relishing Shakespeare's language and expressing the complex emotions and intellectual challenges of Hamlet, sometimes street-cool, sometimes febrile, always modern.A woman in the role is nothing new Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The Young Vic, led by the inspiring figure of Kwame Kwei-Armah, is back. After a prolonged closure, during which this venue has passionately continued to work with young directors, the local community (including both delivering food and creative engagement) and the Black Lives Matter movement, the main stage now reopens with Booker Prize winner Ben Okri’s short play, Changing Destiny, directed by Kwei-Armah. Based on a 4,000-year-old poem from ancient Egypt called Sinuhe, the story is one of political intrigue, fearful exile and then spiritual rebirth. At a time of increasing rhetoric and Read more ...
David Lan
In June 2001 the London Festival of International Theatre brought Amir Nizar Zuabi’s Alive from Palestine to the Royal Court Theatre for one performance. The Guardian said, “How often do you see a piece of necessary theatre? These 'stories under occupation' fall precisely into that category. We are used to the idea of theatre as a diversion. Here it is fulfilling a more important function of bringing us the news.”I didn’t see it and I couldn’t get hold of a full script – perhaps there wasn’t one – but by reading a print-out of the English surtitles I felt I’d got enough of a sense of its Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Filmed, as one would, well, imagine, prior to lockdown, Imagine .... My Name is Kwame hearkens to what now seems a bygone era of full and buzzy playhouses and adventurous theatre-making that was about the live experience and not some facsimile online. That the hourlong film, directed by Charlie Sever, tells of the multiple iterations over time of a theatre practitioner, Kwame Kwei-Armah, now running the Young Vic makes one long to be back in the whirligig of playgoing again to see where this multi-hyphenate talent will lead us next.But the focus of such programmes is inevitably to look Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The National Theatre’s triumphant march through its archive of NT Live recordings continues this week with a glorious blaze of a show. Starring Gillian Anderson, Ben Foster and Vanessa Kirby, this 2014 revival of Tennessee Williams’s 1947 modern classic A Streetcar Named Desire was a Young Vic production, and its film version is presented by National Theatre at Home. Anderson had wanted to play the central role of Blanche DuBois for decades, she says, ever since at the age of 16 she learned one of the character’s monologues for a competition. So the character has been in her DNA for years – Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Can we really be entering a third month in lockdown? Indeed we can, and culture, thank heavens, shows no signs whatsoever of leaving us in the lurch. This week's lineup of highlights offers a typically electic bunch, ranging from two sizable American talents streaming a two-hander for one night only to the arrival online of the latest work from an octogenarian playwriting treasure, Sir Alan Ayckbourn, who ought to be more celebrated of late than he is. (Some of his smaller-cast plays might lend themselves to revival in our straitened times.) Gillian Anderson, who seems rarely these days to be Read more ...
Heather Neill
Ibsen's Nora slammed the door on her infantilising marriage in 1879 but the sound of it has continued to reverberate down the years. In 2013, Carrie Cracknell directed Hattie Morahan in an award-winning performance at this theatre, last year Tanika Gupta profitably wove her story into that of colonial India at the Lyric, Hammersmith, Robert Icke's Children of Nora is due to open in Amsterdam in April and Samuel Adamson's exploration of relationships in four distinct periods, Wife, at the Kiln last summer, echoed Nora's experience. Jamie Lloyd is scheduled to bring his original touch to Frank Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview comes to the Young Vic with the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama under its belt, and a reputation for putting audiences on their mettle through a build-up of theatrical surprises that culminate in a denouement about which the playwright has urged all who have seen the play to keep silent. It certainly delivers a final act that places viewers in a theatrical position that they have probably never experienced before, one that will prompt reflection long after the impassioned note on which the play's frenetic 90 minutes conclude.The result is ingenious in every way Read more ...