Theatre
Demetrios Matheou
If one definition of Shakespeare’s problem plays is that they can’t easily be categorised in the canon, being neither tragedy nor comedy, then that issue is swept aside by this radical Young Vic production. In the hands of director Joe Hill-Gibbins, Measure for Measure is incontrovertibly a comedy, careering between satire and feverish farce.After the Globe’s, this is the second rowdy presentation of the play this year; there’s clearly something in the air. But Hill-Gibbins’ modern-dress version doesn’t entirely eschew meaning for frivolity. The famous inconsistencies in the characters’ Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
His style is probably too subtle to be described as causing anything as noisily obtrusive as a splash, but Barney Norris’s debut play Visitors certainly created significant ripples last year. This follow-up drama is also, on the surface at least, low-key: a gentle, melancholy rumination on love and loss, in which the more drastic events happen offstage and time ticks by, ungraspable, inexorable.Set in a Hampshire village, it’s in part an elegy for a rural way of life, fading away in the face of consumerist modernity; it’s also a lament for the lonely, and a hymn to the redemptive power of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Paul, Jan and Louis, three young men living in a gritty part of south London, are bored and broke and, for them, there are two kinds of Britain – one with money and power, and the one they live in, with no money and little to look forward to. No, it's not a play set in 2015, but Barrie Keeffe's Barbarians, set in the mid-1970s when youth unemployment was at an all-time high and the pound was at an all-time low.The parallels to today, with a burgeoning underclass and a widening gulf between the haves and have-nots in the UK, are obvious – which perhaps explains why this co-production Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Dementia is an increasingly common theme in theatre, television and film. But although there are plenty of stories about old people suffering from Alzheimer’s, what does it feel like to experience this condition? French playwright and novelist Florian Zeller’s Molière Award-winning play – transferring to the West End after highly praised runs at the Tricycle Theatre in north London and the Theatre Royal Bath – attempts an answer by using a sophisticated structure and a deliberately ambiguous method of storytelling.Eighty-year-old André lives in a posh flat in Paris. He is suffering from loss Read more ...
Heather Neill
At the press night curtain call for Richard III, about eleven-and-a half hours after the beginning of this anniversary three-play production, Trevor Nunn stepped in front of his impressively large cast. Not usually a man of few words, this time he uttered only five: "Peter Hall and John Barton".The duo's adaptation of Henry VI parts One, Two and Three and Richard III into a trilogy was a landmark in the development of the new Royal Shakespeare Company in 1963 and had a profound effect on theatregoers, including a young Trevor Nunn. Hall, the RSC's 33-year-old artistic director, and academic Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Titles don’t come much more evocative than this: Valhalla, the gigantic hall in Odin’s Asgard where those slain in battle come to feast, is the Norse mythological version of the Islamist fantasy of eternal life for jihadist martyrs. Valhalla brings to mind the sound of Wagnerian horns and the sights of vast mountain peaks. It’s all very Nordic, very Aryan and very Tolkien. And it’s the setting for playwright Paul Murphy’s excellent new play about scientific ethics, an 80-minute two-hander which is co-winner, with Bea Roberts’s similary great And Then Come the Nightjars, of this new-writing Read more ...
David Nice
With her strong, often fierce features and her convincing simulations of rage, Kate Fleetwood might have been born to play Medea. Unfortunately this isn’t Euripides’ Medea but Rachel Cusk’s free variations on the myth rather than the play. Many of her observations on marriage, motherhood and divorce are as penetrating and harsh as much of what we find in Greek tragedy, but they don’t join up to form the great dramatic arc you get in the original. Even director Rupert Goold, going way beyond the safe boundaries of so much British theatre as ever, can’t transcend the obstacles.In this last Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Stop press: our rampant celebrity culture might not be wholly positive! If you’ve already been apprised of that fact some time in the past century, go ahead and skip actor Daniel Dingsdale’s debut play, which – along with Steve Thompson’s similarly outmoded Roaring Trade in the main house – stifles the often creatively programmed Park Theatre’s claim to relevance.Cast your minds back to 2008, when Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross left messages on Andrew Sachs’s phone claiming Brand had slept with his granddaughter. Here we have another pair of obnoxious, bantering shock jocks – Rob (Tom Maller Read more ...
David Nice
No doubt this sophisticated bagatelle starring Mark Rylance worked like a charm in the intimate space and woody resonance of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. The Duke of York's Theatre is one of the West End’s smaller mainstream venues, its proscenium arch is appropriate to the early 18th century operatic world in which castrato Farinelli made a fortune enchanting his audiences, and the recreation of the Southwark gem onstage with its ranks of candles in chandeliers as well as footlights and its pretty boxes has been perfectly achieved by Jonathan Fensom for the transfer of John Dove’s production Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Theatre is in the very bones of this bold adaptation, with the Lyric gifted a cameo role: past productions are fleetingly pastiched in a flashback to the era of the venue’s foundation. Laura Wade and Lyndsey Turner translate the vividly immediate first-person narrative of Sarah Waters’ 1998 novel into a world coloured by the experience of their heroine, whose coming-of-age story is sparked by the stage: make-believe illuminating the truth of her sexual identity. Music hall vocabulary creates a stylistic framework for this episodic, picaresque tale, but there are too few glimpses behind Read more ...
Heather Neill
Jane Lapotaire's distinguished career on stage and screen was cut short in 2000 when she collapsed in Paris with a massive brain haemorrhage. She was giving a Shakespeare masterclass at the time and now, 15 years later, at the age of 70, she is once again acting on stage in Shakespeare.She made the return to theatre in 2013 with an emotionally charged account of a small role, the mourning Duchess of Gloucester in the RSC's Richard II, starring David Tennant. As Greg Doran adds Henry V to his cycle of Histories – Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, were unveiled last year – she is relishing the Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Entertaining our troops overseas has already proved a fruitful subject for drama, and not only for its show-within-a-show potential. Peter Nichols’ Privates on Parade – revived in the West End three years ago – combined latrine-level banter and tawdry cabaret to create pathos and comedy. Now, updating the military status quo, comes The Sweethearts, a new play by Sarah Page marking the first anniversary of the withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan.Coco, Mari and Helena are a manufactured girl-band – "The Sweethearts" of the title – inured to their every move being Read more ...