Theatre
Heather Neill
Asked in an interview if there remained any taboos in the theatre, Edward Albee answered, “Yes. I don’t think you should be allowed to bore an intelligent, responsive, sober audience”. An experienced interviewee, he pokes mischievous fun at a celebrity Q&A in the first scene of The Goat, revived in the West End, to reveal the distraction of Martin (Damian Lewis), an architect at the pinnacle of his career.Ross, his oldest friend, is attempting to interview him for a television series entitled “People Who Matter”. Martin is not focused, the questions seem banal, they talk at cross purposes Read more ...
aleks.sierz
It’s hot. Real hot. And you’re dancing, just lost in music. You’re at the legendary Shrine nightclub in Lagos, where Afrobeat star Fela Kuti is king. It’s 1994. And it’s hot. Sweat is just pouring off you, no longer in little trickles but soaking through your clothes. And still you dance. As the beat pounds along, you can hear Fela intone: “Men are born; kings are made”, then something about “one nation, indivisible”, before he says, “War has never been the answer — long live Nigeria! Viva Africa!” It sounds like glory. Surely this is heaven on earth.The next day, in Adura Onashile’s 65- Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Brighton Festival, which takes place every May, is renowned for its plethora of free events. The 2017 Festival is curated by Guest Director Kate Tempest, the poet, writer and performer, alongside Festival CEO Andrew Comben who’s been the event's overall manager since 2008 (also overseeing the Brighton Dome venues all year round). This year the Festival’s theme is “Everyday Epic”.“Kate has this sense of the arts being important through the everyday of our lives,” Comben explains, “at the same time as acknowledging that, for everyone, things can take on epic proportions, whether that’s Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Rape is such a serious social issue that it’s hardly surprising that several recent plays have tackled it. I’m thinking of Gary Owen’s Violence and Son, James Fritz’s Four Minutes Twelve Seconds and Evan Placey’s Consensual. All of these discuss, whether implicitly or explicitly, the notion of consent, which is the name of playwright and director Nina Raine’s latest drama about the subject. As staged at the National Theatre by director Roger Michell and starring his wife Anna Maxwell Martin, this promised to be a thrilling evening.And it doesn’t disappoint. Immediately we find ourselves among Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Can London support two dance musicals, each one dazzling in a different way? We're about to find out, now that the mother of all toe-tappers, 42nd Street, has set up shop a jeté or two away from where An American in Paris is achieving balletic lift-off. Similar generically but as different in content and approach as two major Broadway transplants to the West End can be, 42nd Street proves decisively that sometimes bigger really is better. You can scale back Sondheim and the like to rending effect, but when it comes to the sheer synchronised splendour accompanying an army of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The social permutations of love are beguilingly explored in the 90-minute stage traffic of Marivaux’s The Lottery of Love, with Paul Miller’s production at the Orange Tree Theatre making the most of the venue’s unencumbered in-the-round space to dance the action along at a brisk pace. The only adornment in Simon Daw’s design is an elaborate chandelier, bedecked with candles and hanging roses, but the sheer élan of the piece more than occupies the stage in itself.The theatre's Richmond location couldn’t be better either, the Georgian villas around its Green and along the Thames just the kind Read more ...
Paul Tickell
Karen Blixen (1885-1962), the prolific Danish storyteller, is perhaps most immediately recognised for the portrayal of her and her works on the big screen, above all by Meryl Streep in Out of Africa. But her own story, and her place in the literary canon, can often be overlooked. Over the past three years I’ve been working closely with Riotous Company on Out of Blixen, a production exploring the many sides to Blixen and the rich layers of her tales. It is directed by and stars Kathryn Hunter (pictured below in rehearsal, by Dan Fearon).Blixen’s life is ripe for theatrical interpretation. She Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Updating the classics is not without its pitfalls. How can a modern audience, which has a completely different set of religious beliefs, relate to a 17th century morality tale in which the lead character behaves really badly, but gets his comeuppance by being roasted in hell fire? This is the case with Molière’s Don Juan, or The Feast with the Statue, which was originally staged in 1665. In 2006, playwright and director Patrick Marber took this classic and pummelled it into shape as a play for today, complete with contemporary references aplenty. Now it’s being revived, with some rewrites, in Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You may be having a moment of déjà vu, as Ian Hislop and Nick Newman’s new play (which lands in the West End after a UK tour) was previously a BBC film (shown in 2013), and a very fine one too, covering as it does a true story from the First World War. Now, with added music by Nick Green, they have turned The Wipers Times into an intimate stage piece.In the mud and mayhem of Flanders, in a bombed-out building in the Belgian town of Ypres (mis-pronounced Wipers by British Tommies), two officers – Captain Fred Roberts (James Dutton) and Lieutenant Jack Pearson (George Kemp) – discover an Read more ...
Heather Neill
She was Lyra in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials at the National, she has shared the stage with Eileen Atkins (in Honour and The Female of the Species), played Isabella in Measure for Measure, Regan in King Lear and Sally Bowles in Cabaret. She has worn bonnets in Bleak House and North and South, a corset as Elizabeth Darcy in PD James's Death Comes to Pemberley (pictured below) and a prison officer’s uniform in Accused, a gritty Jimmy McGovern story on television. An enviably versatile actress, Anna Maxwell Martin has won two BAFTAs (for Esther Summerson in Bleak House and N in Poppy Read more ...
Jasper Rees
David Storey, who has died at the age of 83, was the last of the Angry Young Men who, in fiction and drama, made a hero of the working-class Northerner. His father spent his life down a Yorkshire pit, and out of guilt that he belonged to an educated post-war generation which ducked the same fate, Storey would always see his career as a daily series of grinding shifts mining black stuff from the seam of his own soul.He remained resolutely best-known for This Sporting Life (1960), his debut novel set in the gritty world of rugby league which three years on was made into a groundbreaking film Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In Radcliffe, an early novel by David Storey, one character murders another with a telling blow from a hammer. The author was later advised that Kenneth Halliwell was reading Radcliffe on the night in 1967 before he killed his lover Joe Orton, also with a hammer. But however many Orton plays Storey indirectly lost, he pulped many more of his own.In the first part of this two-part interview the writer, who has died at the age of 83, talked about the forces which shaped him: the fact that he dodged a life down the pit to pursue his ambition to become an artist, a choice paid for by a reluctant Read more ...