Theatre
Matt Wolf
The play that lost the 2011 Tony Award to War Horse is now receiving its British debut at the very address where War Horse premiered. But such theatrical coincidences won't register in most circles as much as a title, The Motherf**ker with the Hat, that sent newspaper copy desks into a tailspin (the New York Times didn't print the M word at all, even with the asterisks). Such hoo-ha, one feels, makes a certain kind of sense given the perpetual tailspin in which the characters in Stephen Adly Guirgis's high-octane theatrical universe exist.If that primal energy seems a tad muted on this Read more ...
aleks.sierz
One of the most talented playwrights to emerge in the 2000s, debbie tucker green is a law unto herself. The best word to describe her is uncompromising. When I interviewed her in 2003 she refused pointblank to answer any questions about her West Indian background and since then she has steadfastly declined to discuss her work in the media. Like Caryl Churchill, she doesn’t do publicity. So that just leaves the work, which is always provocative, original and written in an unmistakable voice.Her latest, Hang, is a short 70-minute piece about a middle-aged black woman whose family has been the Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“We’re completely pro sex.” Rashdash, who collaborated with Alice Birch on this anarchic challenge to pornography, are not objecting on prudish grounds – their concern is the corrosive impact of degrading, dehumanising material. We are all affected, and we all need to seek a solution.The potential of this rallying cry is never quite fulfilled by their 75-minute piece. The militant yet weirdly naïve central pair (Abbi Greenland and Helen Goalen, pictured below with Bettrys Jones) adopts extreme positions to illustrate the scope of the problem, but in focussing on the difficulty of Read more ...
theartsdesk
Punchdrunk entered the world of theatre through a side door in the basement. The company navigated a strange path around abandoned warehouses on the edge of town, via the odd wrong turn and sundry culs de sac, and fetched up two years ago at an old Royal Mail sorting office next to Paddington station. It was here that they performed The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable.The company has been going since 2000, but it was in Faust (2006), inspired by Edward Hopper’s images of alienation and set in a warehouse in Wapping, that they attracted their biggest plaudits and audiences so far. Later came Read more ...
Jasper Rees
If the honours system is used to award deserving individuals, its other job is to provide an aspirational marker for the country as a whole. This, it tells us twice a year, is who we want to be: inclusive, non-sexist, colour-blind. From the look of the awards dished out in the arts for the Queen’s birthday honours list, in the summer of 2015 it looks very much as if we want to be a society which favours male privilege. Don’t hold the front page.So arise, then, Sir Van, Sir Lenny and, even if it’s only an honorary knighthood, Sir Kevin. There’s no arguing with any of these gongs. The great Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Seldom has there been such impassioned debate about whether a play has a right to exist. Writer Jonathan Maitland faced a barrage of criticism, with many accusing him of exploitation; others felt it was too soon for freshly unveiled horror to re-emerge on stage. Lead actor Alistair McGowan disagreed, noting Savile’s victims feel the telling of this tale comes “30 years too late”.Maitland’s 90-minute docudrama, set in 1991, juxtaposes Savile’s public and private personas in an attempt to understand how the monster hid in plain sight. On a This Is Your Life-style show, he’s the roguish “court Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Football is a subject close to Patrick Marber's heart. He's a lifelong Arsenal fan and during his sojourn away from London (and writing, as he was suffering from writer's block for much of it) in Sussex, he became involved with his local non-league team, Lewes, helping to establish it as a community-owned club in 2010.His beloved sport has inspired Marber's return both to the National and to playwriting (his last stage work was 2006's Don Juan in Soho and his most recent project was script-doctoring the film version Fifty Shades of Grey, which was rejected by the book's author EL James).Non- Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Titles can be warnings as well as come-ons. In Gary Owen’s new play about a teenager growing up in the Welsh Valleys, it’s not difficult to guess what the main theme of the play is. Stumbling out of the performance tonight I had the distinct impression that this is the most disturbing, even chilling, play of the year. Not only is it written with enormous skill, but what it has to say about men, and boys, feels both emotionally true and morally repellant. It’s a drama about truths that maybe I just don’t want to know about.The central character in this four-hander is 17-year-old Liam, a mummy’ Read more ...
Marianka Swain
In a peculiarly Beckettian development, the creative team of this Sydney Theatre Company production spent several weeks of rehearsal waiting not for Godot, but for their director. Tamás Ascher – who spotted the casting potential of Uncle Vanya co-stars Hugo Weaving and Richard Roxburgh for the 1953 absurdist classic in which nothing happens, twice – was eventually forced to withdraw, leaving company director Andrew Upton to work within the set already developed by Ascher and designer Zsolt Khell.That striking monochromatic set places the action in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, blasted tree Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Few cities have been so central to the European imagination as Berlin in the 20th century. At the centre of imperial power, then of Weimar, next the hub of Nazi Germany, then for some 50 years a symbol of a divided Cold War world. In Rose Lewenstein’s new play, Now This Is Not the End, the city is remembered with a touch of nostalgia by Eva, an old German lady living in London. But these memories are under threat: she is beginning to suffer from dementia so her vivid recollections are becoming cloudy – can anyone help her preserve her past?Living with her second husband Arnold, Eva has sold Read more ...
David Nice
There are two fundamental ways to fillet the untranslatable poetry and ritual of Aeschylus, most remote of the three ancient Greek tragedians, for a contemporary audience. One is to find a poet of comparable word-magic and a composer to reflect the crucial role of music at the Athenian festivals, serving the drama with masks and compelling strangeness, as Peter Hall did in his seminal 1980s Oresteia at the National Theatre (poet: Tony Harrison, composer: Harrison Birtwistle, peerless both). The other is to cram it into modern dress and language, hoping that the eternal verities stick, which Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Many matches are made in Fiddler on the Roof but the matchmaking prize goes to Grange Park Opera for getting Bryn Terfel to take on the role of Tevye. Having only recently played Sweeney Todd, and indeed throughout a varied career, Terfel has proved that he can treat lighter music with respect and sincerity, not to mention plenty of good humour. He is superb as the beleaguered paterfamilias, intoning aphorisms at his family, god and anyone who’ll listen with more than a nod towards the cinematic Tevye which made a household name of Chaim Topol – who was actually in the Read more ...