Theatre
Helen Hawkins
Who was Stefan Zweig? It's likely that it's mostly older folk who studied German literature at A-level who have encountered this superb Viennese writer in his native language, though his short story from 1922, Letter to an Unknown Woman, eventually emerged as a starry Hollywood film in 1948.Christopher Hampton, who was one such German student, has decided to bring this novella to the stage, first at Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna, where the story is set, and now at the Hampstead. It’s a bold move, but one that raises key questions about the material’s suitability for this treatment. Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Sarah Power, the writer of Grud, now in the Hampstead’s smaller space, is a self-confessed geek who excelled at science at school. She also had an alcoholic parent, and both autobiographical strands have turned up trumps in this, the second of her plays to be produced professionally. "Grud", we eventually learn, is the nickname Bo’s father (Karl Theobald, pictured below with Ashdown) has given his monster-self, a creature we see a lot of in the opening scenes. Bo (Catherine Ashdown), in the childlike play-world Grud has invented, where animals come to visit, is usually known as Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
For a long stretch of its first half, Dominique Morrisseau’s 2016 award-winner, Skeleton Crew, seems a conventional workplace drama, though in a much gentler key than Lynn Nottage’s Sweat. But this slow burn catches fire.The first sign that this is not a lightly comedic tale of an endangered urban workforce comes when a young worker called Dez (Branden Cook, pictured below, bottom right)) produces a handgun from his backpack and stashes it in his padlocked locker in the break room. But again, this is not Chekhov. The gun will not fire.Dez’s place of work is an ailing car assembly Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We open on one of those suburban American families we know so well from Eighties and Nineties sitcoms - they’re not quite Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie, but they’re not far off. As usual, we wonder how Americans have so much space, such big fridges and why they’re always shouting up the stairs.But this squabbly, stereotypical family is not what it seems. Soon the mother is behaving oddly, there’s a “Here we go again” look in her husband’s eyes and the daughter withdraws, somewhat traumatised. Only the son, who has taken on a Puck-like status as an unreliable observer, appears at ease – Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
I’m sitting in the Olivier waiting for the show to start, comfortable in the knowledge that I’ve seen the original production of Mnemonic, one of Complicité’s most lauded plays, in 1999; but I struggle to remember anything about it, the detail is fuzzy. A play about memory is challenging my own faltering apparatus.Who did I see it with? Where? What was that audience participation? I sift through the gears, opening mental doors in an attempt to find a clue as to whether I did actually see it, after all. Meanwhile, the magnificent Kathryn Hunter, stalwart of the Complicité troupe, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The reinvigoration of Andrew Lloyd Webber continues apace. New York is now hosting a ballroom culture, drag-inflected Cats, and the Olivier-laureled Sunset Boulevard, a breakaway hit last year on the West End, hits Broadway in the autumn.And here is Lloyd Webber's 1984 large-scale caprice, Starlight Express, reinvented for the era of Power Rangers and Transformers, with women inheriting men's roles and the entire thing feeling as if the audience has landed inside a video game itself on overdrive.I was at the 1984 West End press night of the original Starlight, as it happens, and vividly Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The death of Marilyn Monroe is a wet dream for conspiracy theorists. Like the assassination of JFK in the following year there is plenty of material in the official accounts that doesn’t quite make sense – which opens the door to free-form speculation.Intrigued by the numerous theories about Monroe’s demise, actress Vicki McKellar and Olivier Award-winning West End and Broadway director Guy Masterson have teemed up to create The Marilyn Conspiracy, which was first staged at the Edinburgh Festival in 2018 and now comes to the Park Theatre in north London. The result is a cogent thriller which Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Nothing anybody over the age of 30 says about the new Mean Girls musical, spawn of Tina Fey’s witty script for the 2004 screen sideswipe of that name, will make any difference. As with all things Barbie, the pink madness seems deathless. Fey’s takedown of the human jungle that is the US high school has since been regurgitated as a film sequel, a film musical and now this stage musical, originally due here in 2018 but waylaid by lockdown. If you blindfolded me and played me a karaoke backing track of its score, minus lyrics, I wouldn’t be able to tell whether it was from Legally Blonde Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It's a bold move by Regent's Park Open Air Theatre to tackle Frances Hodgson Burnett's children's classic, a story that's been notably adapted into films that pile on the visual beauty of its magical settings. This enterprising venue may be surrounded by trees and foliage, but it offers essentially a big bare stage with few frills.So it's no surprise that the story's main location, Misselthwaite Manor, is going to be represented by a tall blank wall, in which niches hold lights. There's no sign of ivied walls hiding the little door of a secret garden. It soon becomes clear that feats of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Following the huge success of Benedict Lombe’s Shifters, which transfers soon to the West End, the Bush Theatre is riding high. Now this venue’s latest exploration of the Black-British experience tells a really lively and emotionally deep story about Nigerians in London.Faith Omole, whose first and as yet unperformed play, Kaleidoscope, won the prestigious Alfred Fagon Award last year, arrives with bang with My Father’s Fable. Since Omole is also an actor, and has appeared in the Channel 4 comedy, We Are Lady Parts, it’s no surprise that her debut is both a comedy and an acute look at the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Every day this week I’m watching a football match, and now – after April’s production of Lydia Higman, Julia Grogan and Rachel Lemon’s Gunter – comes another football stage drama to tear up the turf at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs.This time it’s the turn of Stewart Pringle’s The Bounds, which opened at Live Theatre in Newcastle in May and has now arrived in London. Set in 1553 in Northumbria, during the Whitsun football game which can last for days and has a pitch that is many miles long, this is a play with a high metaphorical content which not only articulates a distinctly northern Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Lincoln Center’s Bartlett Sher is back in town to direct the Barbican’s latest summer blockbuster, Cole Porter’s classic Kiss Me, Kate. It’s an energetic, largely intelligent production of what is at base a screwball comedy with great songs. With a book by Samuel and Bella Spewack, the main focus of this 1948 piece is a backstage will-they-won’t-they?, as a one-year-divorced couple, company boss / male lead Fred Graham (Adrian Dunbar, pictured below with Block) and his leading lady, Lilli Vanessi (Stephanie J Block), confront each other in a musical version of The Taming of the Shrew. Read more ...