Theatre
David Nice
For those who never saw Samuel Beckett’s favoured performer Billie Whitelaw on stage as indomitable, buried-alive Winnie, peculiarly happy days are here again with another once-in-a-generation actress facing what Dame Peggie Ashcroft called “a ‘summit’ part”, the female equivalent of Hamlet. Juliet Stevenson makes you think not so much “what a great performance” as “what a towering masterpiece of a play” – and how often do star interpretations even of the big Shakespeare roles prompt that kind of reaction?This is, in short, the works: 90 plus minutes of perfectly modulated near-monologue in Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Has there ever been a successful dinner party on stage? It seems no sooner has the table been set than domestic disharmony erupts: opposing personalities obligingly clash, the veil of marital bliss is torn asunder, and terrible secrets are spilled along with the wine. In other words, dinner parties are the playwright’s bread and butter.Torben Betts pays homage to mentor Alan Ayckbourn with his 2012 serving of darkly comic metropolitan angst, although the Seventies menu adds a soupçon of Mike Leigh. Uptight accountant Jess (Annabel Bates) and failed novelist Mat (Jack Johns) are the doomed Read more ...
Bill Knight
We are sitting in the lobby of the National Theatre in the early afternoon waiting for the photocall for Dara to begin. Six or seven photographers, one woman, all dressed in jeans and dark jackets with large camera bags, some on wheels. There is not much conversation. As a relative newcomer I don't normally speak, but on this occasion I venture a remark.“I have seen this play.”After a pause one of the company says, “You're keen.”I explain that I went to a preview. Another silence then, “In one sentence, what's it about?”“It's about Sharia law.”Complete silence.Then Susie arrives and ushers us Read more ...
fisun.guner
As Shakespeare is to these native isles, so Pushkin is to Russia. And Eugene Onegin, Alexander Puskin’s enduring verse novel first published in serial form in 1825, is the most honoured and beloved of all Russian classics. Outside Russia, the story is, of course, most familiar to us through Tchaikovsky’s great opera. We also have John Cranko’s 1965 ballet, set to other music by Tchaikovsky, a production of which is currently selling out at the Royal Opera House. Now a rare spoken-word adaptation is setting the bar. Presented in two acts, and running at nearly three and a half hours, it Read more ...
mark.kidel
Turning John Cleland’s 18th-century erotic classic Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure into a convincing stage play is a tall order. The book, a product of male fantasy, is a catalogue of sexual feats of every order, rich in euphemism and with a dash of poetry. April de Angelis’s adaptation – originally written for Red Shift in the early 1990s – is more of an appropriation, with a post-feminist reversal of roles, in which the stories we are told on stage are the product of women’s rather than men’s imaginations.A fictional Fanny Hill, middle-aged madam and whore, is commissioned by a Read more ...
Gary Raymond
The casual theatre-goer may be forgiven for thinking that, in Wales at least, serious theatre is going through a phase of chronic disregard for the audience. Yvonne Murphy’s all-female Richard III, performed in the rafters of the monolithic Wales Millennium Centre, is as serious as theatre gets, but finally crippled by its seeming disregard for the audience experience.This bleak-as-hell interpretation of one of Shakespeare’s most masculine plays was delivered in a detached, flat monochrome, a vision of a rotting industrial world, specked with hints of Fascistic uniforms, hard surfaces and a Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
There is indeed something of Frankenstein’s monster about the handsome young gardener, with his flat-top haircut and gym-bulked torso, who has come to mow James Whale’s lawn. The retired Hollywood director, now plagued by a series of strokes, is pathologically alert to remembrances of his earlier life, and it’s Whale’s state of mind, rather than the game-changing films he made in 1930s Hollywood (Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Man in the Iron Mask), that forms the locus of Russell Labey’s new play.The material comes from a speculative novel by Christopher Bram, which in turn Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is there such a thing as New Writing Pure? By this I mean plays that not only have a really contemporary sense of character, plot and dialogue, but are also written in a distinctly individual language whose texture is singular and personal. Call it fine writing, call it literary, it doesn’t matter. The point is that this kind of theatre is about plays that are not only beautiful to look at, but beautiful to hear as well. After all, words are an essential part of the overall theatre experience.Ever since her early plays, such as By Many Wounds (1999) and Further Than the Furthest Thing (2000 Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Casting existing partners is no guarantee of artistic success – for every Burton/Taylor, there is a Bennifer. Hannah Price has taken a risk, too, by pairing the revered Dame Harriet Walter with her comparatively unfamiliar American husband, Guy Paul, in Clara Brennan’s exposing two-hander. But it’s a risk worth taking, as the couple’s deep-rooted rapport lends a frisson to this stroll down memory lane.It’s 30 years since their first meeting, and troubled transatlantic lovers Louis (Paul) and Boa (Walter) are interrogating their shared history to uncover truths. The couple (pictured below) Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The Orange Tree’s renaissance continues with this searing piece from playwright of the moment Alice Birch, who will shortly follow up last year’s subversive Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again with an interrogation of the porn industry for Rufus Norris’s debut National season. Her fearlessness is also in evidence in deceptive early work Little Light, an initially typical domestic drama that furiously erupts in a bruising, bravura 90 minutes.The beachside converted barn of Teddy (Paul Rattray) and Alison (Lorna Brown) is the setting for an annual Sunday lunch ruled by ritual, but this year is Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Kay Adshead’s new play about the Arab Spring has a beguiling premise: to tell the human stories behind the headlines. We all remember the news footage of the Arab Spring in 2011, from Tunisia to Egypt, with their huge crowds and mass protests. Contrary to the West’s clichéd view of passive Arab women, many of the protestors who took to the streets were female. They may have been veiled, but that didn’t prevent them from being radical activists.In this trilogy of shorts, Adshead celebrates these women in a variety of different texts, many of which are refreshingly unnaturalistic. The first Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Even the most begrudging acquaintance with thematic foghorn Downton Abbey will have affirmed that the Edwardian era heralded momentous social change. Provocatively embedding this revolution in his work was largely forgotten “New Drama” exponent St John Hankin, whose suicide Shaw described as “a public calamity”; Granville-Barker dedicated his first volume of plays to him.The Orange Tree rescued Hankin from obscurity with multiple revivals, and now Jermyn Street attempts to demonstrate why this unfamiliar name was once held in such reverence. Debuting director Joshua Stamp-Simon has selected a Read more ...