Theatre
Veronica Lee
Martin McDonagh's play, which premiered in 1997, here receives its first major revival as part of Michael Grandage's star-studded first season at the Noël Coward Theatre. It's a minor modern classic, full of the London Irish writer's trademark dark comedy and scabrous wit and, with its guying of Irish sentimentality and Ireland's obsession with the past, is a bravura postmodern reimagining of J M Synge's Playboy of the Western World, which is also set in the rugged Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland and has a misfit young man at its heart.The play is set in 1934 on Inishmaan. On the Read more ...
Ross Ericson
A few days ago I found myself sat in a Finsbury Park pub talking to a man who dismantled bombs for a living, who had completed two tours in Afghanistan fighting the unending war against Improvised Explosive Devices, and I will admit to being more than just a little nervous. You see, he had just read the script of my play Casualties.Casualties deals with the effect the pressures of fighting in Afghanistan have on the relationship between two members of a Counter IED team and the woman one of them has left behind. It is of course a dramatic fiction but I felt it was important for it to be based Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Doug Lucie's signature spikiness remains intact, and then some, in the Defibrillator production of Hard Feelings, which is sure to pack out west London's tiny Finborough and might well be a candidate for a transfer. Telling of the various meltdowns, betrayals, and shifting alliances in a shared house in Brixton while riots rage just beyond the front door (the year is 1981), the play serves as a reminder of the invaluable prickliness offered up by Lucie, who takes the measure of his Oxford colleagues and comes away as aghast as an audience is likely to be enthralled. The house belongs to Read more ...
Heather Neill
In Bracken Moor Alexi Kaye Campbell inhabits similar territory to J B Priestley, whose work he admires. Like his predecessor, Campbell combines social comment with the mystical and spiritual and even chooses to set the action in pre-war Yorkshire. Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937, quoted both in the dialogue and the programme, also contributes to the play's landscape.There are, of course, resonances here for the present, another period of austerity and economic upheaval in Europe during which right-wing parties threaten to come to the fore. (A chance encounter with an Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is no formula for creating a hit musical. If there were, the history of the West End and Broadway would not be haunted by the many ghosts of bygone disasters. Let us not list them here. The lack of a roadmap notwithstanding, the long-awaited version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is ticking all the right boxes.For a start, there’s the belt-and-braces title itself, much loved as a book but perhaps as widely known via two film versions from 1971 and 2005. It has a big-shot director in the form of Sam Mendes, and in David Greig a book-writer who knows how to entertain childen, having Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What to do with an old warhorse like The School for Scandal, a fantastic play written by Richard Brinsley Sheridan in 1777 full of smart lines and great parts, beloved not just of professional actors but amateur troupes too - and therefore performed with sometimes monotonous regularity? Well, if you're director Jessica Swale you cut a bit, add a bit and give it some musical numbers while remaining mostly faithful to the original.It's an approach that she used on another of Sheridan's comic masterpieces, The Rivals. Here, the actors, in period garb but making some pointed modern references, Read more ...
carole.woddis
Oh, how the mighty are fallen. Margaret Alexander (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is a storefront pastor in Harlem who leads her flock with absolutist conviction. No drinking, no smoking - the way to the Lord is through abstinence and clean living, and she herself embodies these righteous goals. So woe betide Sister Margaret when her far from clean-living ex-husband, a musician called Luke (Lucian Msamati), arrives at her door after many years.His appearance proves the catalyst for Sister Margaret's downfall in James Baldwin's influential debut play: a fall from grace which, in Rufus Norris's Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
A town called St Cloud, a girl named Heavenly and a faded star who feels she’s living on the Moon: the imagery of Tennessee Williams’s drama is celestial, yet he puts his characters through hell. Amid the clamour of church bells and self-righteous moral hypocrisy, this torrid play invokes castration, venereal disease and prostitution, with love and sexual passion colliding violently with repressive social strictures. It’s about as juicy and lurid a slice of Southern Gothic as anyone could have an appetite for – and this superlative production by Marianne Elliott savours every pungent mouthful Read more ...
aleks.sierz
One of the promises of artistic director Nicholas Hytner when he took the helm of this flagship 10 years ago was to stage new and innovative musicals. His problem, of course, is that these don’t grow on trees. So after the triumph of Jerry Springer: The Opera in 2003, we had to wait eight years for London Road, the venue’s next British hit. In the meantime, the United States has occasionally plugged the gap — and now provides this current musical, in the shape of a critique of American capitalism by New York’s the TEAM.First seen here in 2011, at Edinburgh, Mission Drift is about the pioneer Read more ...
carole.woddis
What kind of legacy will the Blair years lave on ordinary people? Some predictable answers but also some unexpected, haunting personal accounts emerge in a drama inspired by the spectacularly successful 1974 play Kennedy's Children from American actor-playwright Robert Patrick. Written for five characters in fragmented but interlinking monologues, Kennedy's Children caught all the thrill, madness, and contingent loss of innocence of the 1960s when the world seemed to turn on its axis. (The cast of its maiden London outing at the King's Head included Pat Starr and Deborah Norton.) And a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The last two years have seen the Tiger Lillies hit a prolific peak of activity, to be found as often on the theatrical as the concert stage, drawing on plenty of influences from outside the UK to boot. Mike Pickering came on board last year in place of drummer Adrian Huge, who’d been part of the trio’s line-up from its founding back in 1989, but there was no let-up in levels of intensity last night from lead performer Martyn Jacques, who gave his all to a 90-minute set drawn from numbers from their last four albums, from 2011’s Woyzeck & the Tiger Lillies through to this year’s Either Or. Read more ...
David Nice
There are two dances to unheard music in Howard Brenton’s pithy Strindberg reduction. One spells trouble for the interloper between the vampire couple who suck the blood of others to sustain their 30-year hell of a marriage; the other, in the rarely-performed Second Part, is a prelude to both liberation and death. The symmetries and the differences are cleanly underlined in Tom Littler’s production and the degrees of light admitted in to Jerwood Young Designer James Perkins’s sets. And in a performing space even smaller than Strindberg’s Intimate Theatre of the early 1900s, Michael Pennington Read more ...