Theatre
Steve Clarkson
Wife. Mother. Yorkshirewoman. Cyclist. Legend. Beryl Burton was perhaps the greatest sportswoman this country has ever produced, and we ought to be ashamed of the fact that many of us will have to Google her to find out what her achievements were.Born in Leeds in 1937, she dominated women’s cycling in the 1950s, '60s and '70s – becoming five times world pursuit champion, 12 times national champion, and best British all-rounder for 25 consecutive years. She won nearly 100 domestic titles, and her 12-hour distance record – of a staggering 277.25 miles – has never been broken. Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The posters all over the Underground scream Richard Armitage. As far as they are concerned The Crucible is the finest one-man-show since Clarence Darrow. But what we get in performance is something much more thrilling (if less pin-uppable): a ferocious ensemble piece, fresh and urgent, that turns the moral and emotional screw over three and half exhilarating – yes really – hours.If ever there was a play worth gutting the Old Vic to turn it into a theatre-in-the-round then it’s Arthur Miller’s The Crucible – a work which invites us all to judge and be judged, to gaze suspiciously at our Read more ...
Marianka Swain
For those who believe spin is if not a modern invention, then at least a modern fascination, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar offers a sharp rejoinder. Interpretation, manipulation and persuasion pervade this incisive drama about the assassination of the Roman ruler, with the company donning layers of pretence as actors playing politicians whose lives unspool upon a stage; those who do not choose their lines with care are doomed to failure. Dominic Dromgoole’s traditional production, with Elizabethan dress and straightforward staging, is a tad unadventurous, but by eschewing gimmicks, it places Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Since 1982 it’s been open season on the great and the good of Broadway musicals. It was in that very year that a chap called Gerard Alessandrini created Forbidden Broadway and from the hitherto innocuous sidelines of the fringe set out to cut any and everything with ideas above its station down to size. No show, no star was off limits. It was all good clean fun (sort of) but a sense of humour among those targeted was certainly recommended. They tried in vain not to recognise themselves but eventually learned to smile through the pain.On opening night of this now familiar British incarnation Read more ...
aleks.sierz
When, before the great miners’ strike of 1984-85, Britain still had a coal industry, the miner was at the centre of a never-ending class war: you saw him either as an honest proletarian, in the vanguard of the struggle for better pay and conditions, or as a uppity worker, whose union held the country to ransom. Since the dismantling of the coal industry, an element of sentiment has entered the equation. Now, we miss the horny-handed sons of toil — and shed discreet tears when we watch Brassed Off.So Beth Steel’s new play, Wonderland, which looks at both the personal and political lives of a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The National Theatre delayed the opening of this play about newspapers for two weeks as it waited for the results of the phone-hacking trial. Is this what a tabloid would call “legal health and safety gone mad” – or what a broadsheet would characterise as “a sensible precaution”? Either way, in the wake of last week’s verdict on former News of the Screws editor Andy Coulson, who was found guilty of phone hacking, Richard Bean’s new play is certainly timely. And it stars the charismatic Billie Piper, who can make a legal dictionary sound interesting.Piper plays Paige Britain (geddit?), Read more ...
Elin Williams
Mametz Wood was the objective of the 38th Welsh Division during the First Battle of the Somme in World War One. Numerous failed attempts to capture the wood were made, during which much Welsh blood was spilt. Mametz therefore holds a great deal of significance for the Welsh and their contribution to the First World War.Welsh writer Owen Sheers attempts to see the battle through the eyes of the soldiers in his poem on Mametz Wood, and now on a farm near Usk in Monmouthshire he has joined forces with National Theatre Wales to bring his poignant, powerful words to life. Drawing on the works of Read more ...
Marianka Swain
How do you solve a problem like a musical? Rodgers and Hammerstein's ambitious Carousel seems tailor-made for expansive venues like the National Theatre, where Nicholas Hytner memorably revived this show in 1992: diminutive spaces need not apply. But conventional wisdom gets a robust refutation from Morphic Graffiti's reimagining of the 1943 classic at east London's intimate Arcola, proving that, with creative thinking, small venues can pack a mighty punch. This emerging company's dynamic interpretation also goes some way toward resolving the tension between the show-stopping numbers and Read more ...
Robin Soans
A still Sunday morning in late October… the sky monotone grey… my friend and I are on a fact-finding mission in Jackson, Mississippi. We drive to the outskirts of the city, take a left onto Hanging Moss Road, and see ahead of us, in isolation among the pines, the Word and Worship church where Bishop Jeffrey Stallworth will be conducting morning service. For the next two hours I listen to the words and music which will, five years later, form the basis of my thinking for Perseverance Drive.The two most vivid memories of that service were the preaching, which struck me as being retrogressive Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
For a play that involves a lot of movement, it is the freeze-frame stillnesses in Athol Fugard’s Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act that linger before the eyes once it is over. Six times bright photographic flashes capture the two protagonists, trapping them, their illicit affair, and their shame, in our gaze for an endless moment. These images are both the climax and the starting point for the drama – it was real-life police photographs of this kind that initially inspired Fugard to tackle this subject.As in all the best drama, we are aware of the doom that awaits the lovers Read more ...
Naima Khan
Let's say Greek tragedies exist in a multiverse where the same stories play out simultaneously in thousands of ways. And let's say we're given free rein to argue over those stories, debate their morals and characters and disagree fundamentally over the story arc itself. This is what the German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig explores in his take on the Greek general Idomeneus, who led the Cretan armies to Troy and also inspired a Mozart opera (Idomeneo). His 70-minute play embraces the possibilities of story-telling rather more than the story itself. Translated by David Tushingham and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
As of next year, John McGrath will be the most senior artistic director of a national company in the land. Rufus Norris will be freshly installed at the National Theatre of Great Britain on the Southbank. Laurie Sansom started at the National Theatre of Scotland in 2013. McGrath launched National Theatre Wales in 2009. Since the first production, A Good Night Out in the Valleys, toured the old Miners’ Institutes of the South Wales coalfield in March 2010, McGrath has set about staking out new notions of what a national theatre can be. That first season offered 13 productions which Read more ...