Theatre
theartsdesk
Once upon a time... Storytelling is an integral part of all human cultures, and a central pillar of an enlightened education. Some children get the hang of it quickly – they are, as the phrase has it, natural storytellers. This week the Royal Court introduces several youthful writers with Primetime, a series of short plays written by primary school children between the ages of eight and 11.The new Royal Court playwrights join a sizeable pantheon of young authors, whom we celebrate in this edition of Listed. We have set the rule that, to qualify, the writer had to be under 18 when they picked Read more ...
Heather Neill
Families. Whether it's the House of Atreus, the court at Elsinore or the Archers, they tend to be of compelling interest. For most of us, loyalties, guilty secrets, truths that will out, petty jealousies and sentimentality tend to be the order of the day more often than towering passion and murder. And that is what Andrew Keatley focuses on in this gentle, poignant, often funny play about a family reunion in the run-up to the "things can only get better" election in 1997.It is in many ways a sweetly old-fashioned piece, recalling not so much Ayckbourn as Dear Octopus, Dodie Smith's pre-war Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Burt Bacharach, existentialist? That's among the surprising thoughts prompted by the searchingly titled What's It All About?, the altogether delightful but also touching musical revue that trawls Bacharach's back catalogue – and that on opening night found the 87-year-old tunesmith tinkling the ivories for a moment or two during the curtain call.First seen Off Broadway 18 months ago, director Steven Hoggett's jukebox musical-with-a-twist proves even more winning on a second viewiing. The material may well be a bit too sincere – that's to say, in-your-face earnest – for more Read more ...
stephen.walsh
We’re so used these days to theatre music as aural torture – blasts of pop music on the tannoy, assorted electronics or, if you’re (moderately) lucky, a snatch of too-loud Chopin or Grieg before the lights come up on the Ibsen drawing-room – that it’s easy to forget a time when plays were introduced, interrupted and even accompanied by a pit orchestra playing music specially composed by the greatest composers of the day. We now hear this music as concert overtures and suites: Egmont, Peer Gynt, L’Arlésienne, and the like.But there’s a good case for occasionally putting it back where it Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Life, the universe and everything… in 70 minutes. You certainly can’t fault Nick Payne’s ambition, nor help but admire the dazzling inventiveness of his theoretical physics romcom with a side helping of artisanal beekeeping.This 2012 Royal Court hit, which has since travelled across the pond, lends dramatic form to quantum multiverse theory: every event and every decision has numerous outcomes, coexisting in parallel universes. The human dimension for the science comes through the romance of cosmologist Marianne (Louise Brealey, pictured below with Joe Armstrong) and apiarist Roland ( Read more ...
Veronica Lee
A Richard Bean play is always to be welcomed – he wrote England People Very Nice and One Man, Two Guvnors, two of the most enjoyably rambunctious comedies of recent years – but also with a note of caution. Sometimes, as with The Big Fellah, there's more style than substance (or more jokes than narrative) and that's the case with his 2002 play The Mentalists, being given a West End revival with a huge comedy star making his stage debut.We are in a dingy north London hotel room (nicely realised by Richard Kent), where Ted (Stephen Merchant, co-creator with Ricky Gervais of The Office Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Roger Rees, whose death at the age of 71 was announced yesterday, never intended to act. He trained at the Slade and made extra money painting theatrical scenery. One day a director asked if he’d like to act, and he laid down his brush. The second time he applied to join the RSC, he got in. He stayed with the company for a now unimaginable 22 years and in due course became one of the great stars of British theatre in the 1980s.He was a mercurial Hamlet, but overwhelmingly his best remembered performance was in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. The eight-and-a-half hours’ traffic Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a clear territorial divide in the small space of the Jermyn Street Theatre at the opening of Ashley G Holloway’s new drama Lesere. At the centre of Ellan Parry’s persuasive design there’s a bright decked area in which the seemingly sunny lives of its characters play out – the setting is the peaceful French countryside, 1921. Around the stage edges, however, is a very different environment, a dark space of silent, agonising memories.Lesere moves between such light and dark, the latter coming to dominate the action. An English couple, Jane and John, have settled in rural France to put Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Musicals are cheesy by nature, aren’t they? If not cheesy, then picturesque. The cast of Les Mis may be grimy and poor, but they’re picture-postcard poor. Even modern musicals play by the rules.But Aemonn O’Dwyer and Rob Gilbert break most of them in their new musical, The House of Mirrors & Hearts. Forget exotic settings: this type of family terrace house can be found by the thousand off the Kingsland Road. And forget happy families: this one’s falling apart. What’s more, the climax of the first act is a grisly accident involving a character we haven’t even met. And two of the key Read more ...
aleks.sierz
In the age of austerity, it’s getting harder and harder to avoid cliché. Especially well-meaning cliché. For example, all cuts to welfare are bad; we must defend government support of the needy at all costs. But clichéd ideas rarely make good drama so when I first heard about Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s new play, whose theme is the cuts in the legal aid budget, I must confess that my spirits dropped. Was this going to be another case of theatrical journalism?Things didn’t really improve when I read the programme note: in this, Andrew Caplen, President of the Law Society, attacks the Legal Aid, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The reason that Caryl Churchill is Britain’s best living playwright is that her work is endlessly enquiring and peerlessly intelligent. When she wrote this play about the subject of human cloning – which had its premiere at the Royal Court 2002 with Michael Gambon and Daniel Craig as its cast – she avoided the obvious option of writing about how bad the idea of cloning is, and instead opted to explore its individual consequences. By doing so she came up with an unforgettable image of humanity in all its pain and anger.The story is a family drama of a bizarre kind. Set in the near future, A Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Frank Sinatra is back in London in the centenary of his birth. His disembodied voice is returning in a show called Sinatra: The Man & His Music. At the London Palladium, where he made his British debut 65 years ago, there’s to be a 24-piece orchestra, 20 dancers and video effects galore in a multi-media concert featuring many of his best-loved songs. At the heart of it will be footage supplied by the Sinatra Estate. For those who never saw Sinatra live, the idea is that this will be the next best thing, at least since the last time he was exhumed.In 2005 Sinatra at the London Palladium Read more ...