Theatre
Helen Hawkins
The National’s new production of Coriolanus has to be one of the most handsome to appear on the Olivier stage. But it has arrived minus a key item: a hero whose end is tragic.Maybe director Lyndsey Turner wasn’t aiming for that. Her protagonist, pugnaciously played by David Oyelowo, is more a fully functioning part of Shakespeare’s steel-trap of a play than a hero to understand and pity. In this fast-paced piece, Coriolanus rises, then falls, but there are no pit stops, no subplots, along the way. He has a family, but there’s virtually no family time to reveal a gentler side to this super- Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The clue is in the title – not Then in America or Over There in America or even a more apposite, if more misleading, Now in America, but an urgent, pin you to the wall and stick a finger in your face, Here in America.Pre-Trump 2.0, David Edgar’s new play tells us (at least twice, Edgar not shy of driving home a point) that we can learn from past trauma in order to guide current behaviour. So, 300 million+ Americans are to draw on Stanislavski's Method in the polling booths come November?The memories Edgar conjures are from the 1950s, when the House Un-American Activities Committee went Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Modernism is us. Today. For the past two decades plays by Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter – which once upon a time bewildered their audiences and gave critics apoplexy – have become big West End hits. The avant-garde is now commercial. The incomprehensible is our reality.How so? By casting celebrity stars in the main roles, and emphasizing the humour. So the current revival of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot – which premiered in Paris in 1953 and then got a London production a couple of years later – features Ben Whishaw, a national treasure since he voiced Paddington in the film series, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Iconic is a word the meaning of which is moving from the religious world into popular culture – win a reality TV show dressed as a teapot, and you can be sure that your 15 minutes of fame will be labelled iconic across social media. Not quite what Andrei Rublev had in mind 600 years ago.That said, few would deny that descriptor to the London Underground Map, not just a highly effective tool to navigate an ever-more complicated city, but perhaps the symbol of the metropolis. For something so ubiquitous and so useful, it is a surprisingly abstract work, owing more to Mondrian than Mercator Read more ...
aleks.sierz
British theatre has a proud heritage of science plays. From 1990s classics such as Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (1993) and Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen (1998) to more recent examples such as Lucy Kirkwood’s Mosquitoes (2017) and Marek Horn’s Octopolis (2023), the trick lies in balancing intellectual material about often complex scientific subjects with dramatic flair.As the Hampstead Theatre stages Stella Feehily’s new play, The Lightest Element, which was originally commissioned by the Manhattan Theatre Club, the question of how to entertain as well as inform gets a contemporary twist as the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We meet Joe first at the keys, singing a pretty good song, but we can hear the pain in the voice – but is that the person or the performance? When Ellie walks in, he leaps up like a cat on a hot tin roof, nervous as a kitten, and we know – it was the person.Barney Norris’s 2024 play comes to London and finds the right venue in the Arcola’s intimate studio space freighting just the right quantum of claustrophobia into a production that often suggests our eavesdropping on three real people who have hired the room to rehearse. You wonder if it would all just go on whether we were there Read more ...
Gary Naylor
One wonders what sitcom writers will do when supermarkets finally sweep the last corner shops away with nobody left old enough to buy cigarettes, nobody so offline that they buy newspapers and nobody eating sweets, priced out by sugar taxes. The convenience shop is already acquiring a patina of nostalgia, crowned by a warm glow of happier days. My mother used to send me out aged seven to buy her Embassy Number 1s with me levying a charge of one gobstopper in payment - see, I’m a victim already. Appropriately, that old-school shop is on hand when you want a setting for a gentle, heartwarming, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Platonic love should be simple – basically you’re best mates. And without the complications of sex, what could go wrong? Waleed Akhtar, whose big hit The P Word was also performed here at the Bush, takes this idea and complicates it – by making it about a gay boy and a straight girl.The playwright then adds further complications: family, ethnicity, religion, life chances and career choices. The result, which stars It’s a Sin’s Nathaniel Curtis as well as Mariam Haque, is a fascinating account of mixed emotions and a sad story about the gradual decay of youthful idealism. As such, it Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The latest Greatest Hit to land at the Lyric is Timberlake Wertenbaker’s 1988 award-winning play about a performance of Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer by British convicts in a New South Wales penal colony. It’s a piece about a true incident in the late 18th century that pulsates with contemporary resonances, a promising choice by the Lyric’s director, Rachel O’Riordan, who has been responsible for so many outstanding productions there. But for once her steady directing hand wobbles. What was impressive about the play originally, its bold mix of satire, social commentary, pathos and Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Going to the theatre can be a little like going to church. One communes on the individual level, one’s faith in the stories underpinned by a psychological connection, but also on the collective level, belief rising on a tide of shared emotions. Those complementary sensations, in an ever more individualised, screen-and-earplugs world, are rare – and an example of why people pay big bucks for Glastonbury, Taylor Swift and Oasis.There’s something theatrical, something devotional and even something Swiftie in the air during Why Am I So Single?, the follow-up (that isn’t really) to Six, Toby Read more ...
Gary Naylor
One of the Finborough Theatre’s Artistic Director, Neil McPherson’s, gifts is an uncanny ability to find long-forgotten plays that work, right here, right now. He’s struck gold again with The Silver Cord, presenting its first London production for over 95 years. Carla Joy Evans’ beautifully observed costumes set the tone. The styling is just so for upper middle class New England in the 1920s, a touch of Paris (Paul Poiret gets a namecheck), a cloche hat and shoes to die for darling. Once I stopped ogling the cloth (the weight of which reflects the personalities wearing it) and the cuts, Read more ...
Art, Theatre Royal Bath review - Yasmina Reza's smash hit back on tour 30 years after Paris premiere
Gary Naylor
For men, navigating through life whilst maintaining strong friendships is not easy (I’m sure the same can be said for women, but Yasmina Reza’s multi-award winning play, revived on its 30th anniversary, is most definitely about men). What brings blokes together – work, sports, pubs – is seldom founded on deep emotional connections, though it can be and sometimes does morph into that. Consequently in most cases, it doesn’t need much to upset the applecart, with a trivial contretemps blowing up unexpectedly.For longstanding pals, Serge, Marc and Yvan, that ‘not much’ is a painting Read more ...