Theatre
theartsdesk
Revivals of Ibsen’s greatest plays come round thick and fast, and audiences may sometimes need an extra incentive to re-enter his world. A new staging of Ghosts supplies just such an inducement: a mouth-watering double dose of iconic Norwegians.This production, presented by Rose Theatre Kingston and English Touring Theatre, will draw on designs for the play by Ibsen’s compatriot Edvard Munch. The artist, subject of a hugely popular exhibition at Tate Modern last year, supplied set designs for a production of Ghosts in Berlin in 1906 by the great director Max Reinhardt. Read more ...
David Nice
Shallow in its cartoonish whizz through the tergiversations of a troubled reign, hugely energetic in its language and structured storytelling, Marlowe’s horrible history is never less than compelling and challenging at the National. It may have found its best match yet in the collapsible bric-à-brac pageantry of Joe Hill-Gibbins’ vivid, in-your-face production.Another director who’s found a theatrical niche down the road at the Young Vic, where Hill-Gibbins is an Associate Artist, likes to call it "the art school" as opposed to the National’s "grammar school". Well, this is definitely art- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Who is Terry Johnson? For a period of two decades between, say, 1982 and 2003, he was predominantly a playwright. He was sufficiently successful at it that for a period in 1995, three of his plays were on in the West End at once. But the plays have slowly dried up – the last was in 2006 – and nowadays he is very largely a director. His latest gig as a director is a 20th-anniversary revival of his play Hysteria!If the plays have stopped coming it’s because Johnson's enthusiasm for writing about deceased cultural icons has run out of steam. Much of his best work exhumes dead geniuses and/or Read more ...
Jasper Rees
David Frost, who has died at the age of 74, was a character. The obituaries will tour the entirety of his career as swinging young presenter of TW3, as the first transatlantic celebrity of the gogglebox who gave his name to a sugary brand of Kelloggs cereal, and as a lifelong thorn in the side of Peter Cook. Then there was Through the Keyhole and the TV-am cataclysm later followed by his Sunday morning resurrection on the BBC. Above all, though, it falls to vanishingly few interviewers to see themselves fictionalised as a character onstage. And it was in this capacity that I once had the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Hysteria is back. Terry Johnson’s comedy was written for the Royal Court in 1993, and for its 20th anniversary it is being revived at Hampstead Theatre. It is a homecoming in a sense: the play is set in the Hampstead home of Sigmund Freud, where he receives unexpected visits from Salvador Dalí and a young woman who cannot keep her clothes on. Freud will be played by Antony Sher.The intimate nature of a psychoanalytical exchange would seem to make Doctor Freud an ideal subject for theatre. In fact he has many more screen than stage credits. Indeed, if you scroll through this edition of Listed Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
Could you choose between love and knowledge? Between a life of acceptance and affection, and one of self-improvement and learning? These are the questions that Jessica Swale's new play Blue Stockings poses again and again.For the women who provided the inspiration for this play – the students of Girton College, living on the cusp of the twentieth century – this is not a hypothetical question. To choose to study at Cambridge is, for them, to choose the life of an outcast over the possibility of marriage and a family. In 1896, when the action takes place, a campaign is underway to attempt to Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
It’s as dazzling as a neon-lit cityscape and nearly as sprawling: Lucy Kirkwood’s epic new drama is rich, riveting and theatrically audacious. A co-production with Headlong, the tirelessly inventive touring company founded by Rupert Goold, it feels like an early statement of intent for Goold’s upcoming tenure as artistic director of the Almeida, which begins this September. Fizzing with wit and intelligent ideas, it’s handled with impeccable flair by director Lyndsey Turner. The results are stunning.The play’s title is drawn from Niall Ferguson’s book The Ascent of Money, in which he Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is there such a thing as a gay play? As opposed to a play by a gay writer, or one which has some gay content or is about gay characters. The programme to this atmospheric and moving revival of Alexi Kaye Campbell’s 2008 play contains Edward Albee’s complaint that the gay play is “such an imprecise term”. You can see his point. Whether The Pride is gay or not matters less than the fact that it is an excellent account of self-knowledge, emotional truth and personal honesty.Set in two time zones — the 1950s and the present — the play tells the stories of two love situations, both involving two Read more ...
David Nice
Sicilian location, Irish populace, Balkan Roma music: Richard Eyre’s production of a Pirandello bagatelle could easily have turned into the kind of Europudding more common in cinema. That it fairly dances over the pitfalls is due partly to a well-calibrated ensemble, but above all to the fact that the great Italian playwright made an exception to social commentary and searching examination of the human condition, coming up instead with a piece of fluff about babymaking village-style.Happy-go-lucky local stud Liolà (Rory Keenan) – the name translates as “here or there” – breeds too many Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The Events, Traverse Theatre **** Writer David Greig has been at pains to make clear that The Events is not about Anders Breivik’s slaughter of 77 people in Oslo and Utoya in July 2011, even though he and director Ramin Gray researched extensively in Norway Sadly, it could have been about Dunblane, Hungerford, Columbine - or any number of mass killings in the United States - and they have produced a powerful examination of why disaffected men on the edge of society (but seemingly part of it) commit such atrocities.It’s essentially a two-hander in which Neve McIntosh is Claire Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Britain today: while the total of car crashes is falling the number of whiplash claims is rising by 25 per cent. Yes, the compensation culture is speeding ahead. In Nick Payne’s follow up to his immensely successful West End transfer, Constellations, a firm of personal injury claims lawyers is the setting for a scam in which a money-spinning lie goes wrong. It’s the stuff of many a Newsnight report, but can he make a social issue interesting as a drama?We arrive at the offices of Scorpion Claims, based in Luton and run by Barry, or Bazza, a fiftysomething plodder who has little light on his Read more ...