Theatre
Heather Neill
There was a sense of nervous anticipation in the Maria, the Young Vic's studio space. Ninety minutes of torture was on the menu, and I'll admit to feeling some trepidation. But this show - and "show" is the right word - turns out to be a revelation. Writers Nicolai Khalezin and Natalia Kaliada, co-founders of Belarus Free Theatre, have pulled off an astonishing coup: their feast for the senses, directed by Khalezin, tells horrific stories without melodrama, without overstatement or buckets of blood - and it is all the stronger for its brilliant mix of matter-of-factness and lyricism.Acclaimed Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Githa Sowerby's play, written in 1912 and a huge hit at the Royal Court and then in America, has been described as having qualities of Ibsen or Chekhov, and its themes certainly echo those writers' examinations of emotional claustrophobia and thwarted ambition.How much of this is in the original, edited and translated by Blake Morrison and directed by neuropsychologist Jonathan Miller I confess I don't know, but if this is wholly her work then she was remarkably prescient; obsession with class and worker-owner strife, as well as a horribly dysfunctional family, are here. It could almost be Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
“My three men,” declares the deeply compromised heroine of this 1928 experimental drama by Eugene O’Neill. “I am whole.” Nina Leeds – hungry for love, ruthless with her own heart and those of others – burns like the sun at the play’s centre. She is given a portrayal by Anne-Marie Duff, in this fine production by Simon Godwin, so scorching that she all but self-immolates, while her men circle her like planets, helpless to alter their course. It is an impressive achievement – even if the work itself remains unwieldy and unsatisfying.Designs by Soutra Gilmour, intricate yet breathtaking in their Read more ...
aleks.sierz
I love poetic play titles, but even I would admit that sometimes they are difficult to remember. In this case, the name of Brad Birch’s new play has taught me a lesson that I’m happy to pass on. It’s this: if you go and see this show please spend a few minutes practising the words Even Stillness Breathes Softly Against a Brick Wall before arriving at the box office. It will help you save face. It will prepare you for the evening ahead.This is one of those plays that are best viewed after a boring day at work. It is a two-hander about a smart young couple, simply Him and Her, who have a work Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
We know that David Mamet doesn’t beat about the bush. He tackles sensitive issues and the least attractive aspects of human nature head on, while his characters use language as weapons against each other with such ferocity and guile that the audience is left with a sort of battered admiration.That’s Mamet at his best: American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed-the-Plough, Oleanna. But Race doesn’t see the playwright at his best. Some of this play’s failings are evident in the title – it’s too self-conscious, too obvious, too intent on nailing the big theme. At the same time, it falls short Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Midsummer’s Eve may still be a month away and the evenings more bracing than balmy, but despite a serious chill still in the air the Globe Theatre yesterday proved yet again that it exists in its own microclimate. It’s a theatre and a company made for comedy. Such is the laughter, the sense of occasion, the energy of the crowd, that you find yourself swept up in the joy of it all – enjoying a summer holiday, if only for the evening.Dominic Dromgoole’s new A Midsummer Night’s Dream offers no interruption to the Globe’s sequence of hit comedies. Who couldn’t love a production that comes with Read more ...
Gary Raymond
Almost before the dust has settled on their globe-spanning collaboration with New National Theatre Tokyo, National Theatre Wales embarks on a very different, if no less ambitious, partnership with the mercurial synth pop duo Neon Neon. The sometime project of Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys and producer and solo artist Boom Bip, Neon Neon have written their second concept album (the first, Stainless Style, was a biography of John DeLorean); this is another life story, another sharp, warm, joyous record filled with snappy bass turns and raise-the-roof keyboard riffs. On this night, Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Every May the townspeople of Monroeville, Alabama, the home of Harper Lee, perform Christopher Sergel’s theatrical adaptation of Lee’s acclaimed, much beloved novel, on the grounds of the county courthouse. It’s a potent, somehow ironic demonstration of the enduring regard for the novel, in the very part of America whose racial intolerance Lee exposed.It’s one thing performing, and seeing this story of the Deep South in its steamy locale, where even the shade is “sweltering” and “men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning”, another outdoors in a still painfully chilly London May. But Read more ...
aleks.sierz
There’s one big problem about being an Asian actor in America — you just don’t get the big parts. So the multitalented Ayad Akhtar put acting on hold, and turned to screen writing, producing The War Within, a film about jihadism. Then he tried playwriting and his debut, Disgraced, struck gold: after it was a big hit in Chicago and New York, it won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama.It starts really neatly: we are in a chic Upper East Side apartment, and the first sight we get of Amir, a successful corporate lawyer, is of a man in his underpants. He is posing for a drawing by his wife, Emily Read more ...
bella.todd
The absolute loyalty of a little boy to his under-deserving friend is what swells The Kite Runner’s heart and fuels its tragedy. So you can’t really blame Matthew Spangler’s stage adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s 2003 bestseller for sticking faithfully to the novel’s melodramatic side. But Giles Croft’s production, a joint venture between Nottingham Playhouse and Liverpool Everyman that’s playing in between as part of the Brighton Festival, hasn’t quite found a way to balance narrative drive and emotional punch. That tight grip on the storyline never loosens long enough to really let the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The pronouns have it in Alan Ayckbourn's career-defining comedy of spiralling misunderstandings, which has arrived on the West End 46 years after first hinting at the formidable talent of a dramatist who could make of many an "it" and "she" a robustly funny study in two couples in varying degrees of crisis. Far nervier than its study in middle-class mirth at first lets on, Relatively Speaking hands Felicity Kendal her giddiest stage assignment in years, and she is well served by a Lindsay Posner staging that once again gives Ayckbourn pride of place: the man of the moment (to co-opt one of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Circus is a broad church these days. It can be housed on the street, a grand proscenium stage and all points in between. For this latest incendiary reinvention of the form, it makes its way back into an intimate big top where the residual DNA of circus’s regular trappings seem all to be in situ. There’s bendiness and balancing, aerobatics and good old trapezing, fire-eating (pictured below) and sword-swallowing. But before you book for the whole family, be aware that the whole shebang is underpinned by something you never used to get at Billy Smart's: lashings - and I mean lashings - of sex. Read more ...