Theatre
Marianka Swain
Can you peg a whole play on a decent twist? When We Were Women’s narrative tease pays off interestingly, but takes a hell of a long time getting there. It leaves little space to explore the ramifications of an intriguing revelation, a frustration amplified by the constant chronological cross-cutting in this revived Sharman Macdonald work, first seen at the National in 1988.In 1944, some terrible event has driven pregnant Isla (Abigail Lawrie) from the arms of sailor Mackenzie (Mark Edel-Hunt, pictured below), back to her aspirant working-class parents’ (Lorraine Pilkington and Steve Nicolson Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“My brother died.” That’s the reality New York-based banker Willem struggles to inhabit when he returns to his estranged family in Amsterdam. There is no sense in Pauli’s loss – a sudden heart attack at 20, cradled by a stranger in the street – nor finality. Willem’s response is to continue the conversation through an elegiac series of letters, countering the abandonment and searching for meaning in both a life interrupted and his own isolated existence.Protean Simon Stephens, in his first original play for the Young Vic, delivers a penetrating 75-minute monologue. Its stark potency is Read more ...
aleks.sierz
We all know what the word “addict” means, but what does it feel like to be one? Thirtysomething Emma – a minor actress played with immense conviction and quirky charm by Denise Gough – knows exactly. At one point in Duncan Macmillan’s engrossing new play, she says, “People who aren’t addicted to anything are really missing out, you know?” For the addict lives a life of glory: they feel complete, and loved and satisfied. Yes, that’s it. They love their addiction – and their addiction loves them back. Well, Emma should know: she has bottles stashed all around her flat, and a Read more ...
David Kettle
It felt a bit like we were seeing things. At the fag-end of Edinburgh’s 2015 August of festival mayhem, with extreme exhaustion and input overload mixing to brain-addling effect in the heads of most festival-goers and participants, a hallucinatory, day-glo farce of a show that obsessively repeats just a single word seemed pretty fitting.Murmel Murmel was the Edinburgh International Festival’s last major show to be unveiled. Flown in from Berlin’s Volksbühne theatre, it’s a crazy creation of maverick director and designer Herbert Fritsch based on Swiss Fluxus-influenced artist Dieter Roth’s Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Well, here’s an oddity. You Won’t Succeed... is too fragmented for musical theatre, too bombastic for cabaret, and about as profound as a first-draft Wikipedia page. Channelling the self-referential levity of the Monty Python show from which it takes its name would certainly help, but it’s mainly played straight. And what insight into the indelible Jewish contribution to musical theatre does two and a half hours’ investment get you? Those guys…they wrote some great songs. Oy vey.The weakest aspect is the low-rent video clips – with basic animation and soporific voiceover – guiding this Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The political wheel has turned full-circle. When Our Country’s Good was premiered in 1988, it was a barely-veiled protest against Thatcher’s slash-and-burn approach to the arts in general and arts funding in particular. It couldn’t have returned at a more apt moment. Once again the arts are being forced to make a commercial case for their existence, to claw and squabble over scraps of government money, while the newspapers are filled with photos from Syria, of the apparent destruction of Palmyra. If the arts really are “an expression of civilisation” then we’ve rarely been in more trouble.A Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The set turns out to be the thing now that Benedict Cumberbatch's star turn in Hamlet has finally arrived, trailing in its wake a level of expectation, hysteria and scrutiny that might well have made many a lesser actor head for the hills. None of that here: Cumberbatch is on view from the opening moment – indeed, the play's first line, "Who's there?", has been reassigned to the title character so as to meet the audience's febrile anticipation head on.And yet, for much of a notably short evening (just over three hours due to some heavy cuts), you can scarcely locate the actors amid Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Jason Hughes belongs to an influential generation of actors who emerged from South Wales in the 1990s. A promising rugby player as a teenager, his head was turned by theatre. Ruth Jones and Rob Brydon were only a few years above him at school in Porthcawl. In the National Youth Theatre of Wales he met Michael Sheen. The name may be less familiar, but the face is known from two very different Joneses whom Hughes has created on television: Warren Jones, the young gay lawyer in This Life, and Ben Jones, John Nettles’s sidekick in Midsomer Murders.His seven-year stint solving murders in Midsomer Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
If you were expecting a fusty, formal adaptation of Anthony Trollope – and one of his least known novels, to boot – Lady Anna: All At Sea will come as a breath of fresh air. Colin Blumenau’s production of Craig Baxter’s play, based loosely around the Trollope novel of the same name and commissioned by the Trollope Society to mark the bicentenary of the writer’s birth, speeds through its two-hour-plus run, keeping a nimble crew of seven on its toes and the audience engaged in its ludic conspiracies.The “All At Sea” element, the “interloping” part of the story if you like, refers to Trollope Read more ...
David Kettle
Incoming director Fergus Linehan has assembled some of the most respected names in their fields for his first Edinburgh International Festival. For classical music, that means Anne-Sophie Mutter, Valery Gergiev and Michael Tilson Thomas (among many others); for dance it means Sylvie Guillem; and for theatre it means Simon McBurney’s Complicite and Robert Lepage.It’s a risky strategy – not to mention an expensive one – and an approach that could threaten to sideline more experimental, less starry artists whose names aren’t quite so well known. But on the strength of Lepage and his company Ex Read more ...
David Nice
You don’t know Homer’s Iliad until you’ve heard it read aloud, all 24 books – not quite every line, but almost – and 16 hours of it. Yesterday's marathon was surely something like the events in which the Athenians kept the oral tradition going during their great Dionysiac festivals - in most things, at least, except the original feats of memory.For “you don’t” above, read “I didn’t”, since despite having studied several of the later books for ancient Greek A-level, then the first 12 over one university year, it wasn’t until Simon Russell Beale started invoking the muse in the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Walking the Tightrope, Underbelly Potterow ★★★★ Subtitled The Tension Between Art and Politics, this collection of eight short plays on the subject of censorship was prompted by the boycott of an Israeli hip hop troupe at this venue last year. Do we have the right to stop art happening if we are offended by the artist or the content of their work, or where their funding comes from? Or is freedom of expression an absolute right?The standard of writing is consistently high (not always the case in a portmanteau work), much aided by a terrific cast of four and slick direction by Cressida Read more ...