Theatre
Demetrios Matheou
When it was first produced in 1982, The Real Thing was a turning point for Tom Stoppard, the play that added to the existing perception of him as an immensely witty, intelligent, very theatrical crafter of dazzling conceits, albeit perhaps a little cold, as someone who could also touch people’s emotions: clever, still, but cutting to the heart. The difference was simple, really: Stoppard had always been driven by the desire to explore ideas; this time his idea was love. The Real Thing is a consideration of what it means to be in love – the exhilaration of it, the pain Read more ...
aleks.sierz
I live in Brixton, south London; in my street, for many years, a pair of trainers were up in the sky, hanging over the telephone wires. They were there for years, getting more and more soggy, more and more decayed. Urban myth called them a tribute to a dead gangster.There are similar urban legends aplenty in Tife Kusoro’s 75-minute new play, G, which won the George Devine Award last year, and now gets its premiere in the upstairs studio at the Royal Court. Its bare traverse staging features a pair of luminous white trainers hanging above the action. But, unlike the ones in my street, these Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The signs in the Peacock’s foyer warn that this show features "very loud music”. Exactly what Janis Joplin fans want to hear. This is an evening for them, more a concert than a piece of musical theatre.As a gig-musical, it is a five-star belter, with more talent onstage than is decent. Not just the singer who plays Janis, Mary Bridget Davies (Sharon Sexton will cover at some performances) but a trio of backing singers, dubbed the Joplinaires, who are the spit of singers from the glory days of this tribe in every move, sway and sashay. They are also called upon to pay tribute to the musical Read more ...
David Kettle
L’Addition, Summerhall ★★★★ Bert and Nasi – or, more fully, writers/directors/actors Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas – are virtually Fringe royalty, having carved out a niche in recent years with playful, provocative shows that question theatrical conventions alongside often serious real-world topics (the Syrian conflict in 2017’s Palmyra, for example, or the EU and Brexit in 2016’s Eurohouse). This year they’ve almost transformed themselves into a meta-theatrical Morecambe and Wise, however, for a show (first seen at last year’s Avignon Festival) created with Tim Etchells, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Pete Waterman, responsible (some might prefer the word guilty) for more than 100 Top 40 hits, said that a pop song is the hardest thing to write. Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl back – all wrapped up in three minutes. Benedict Lombe’s Shifters takes longer – 33 Kylies longer – but it pulls off the same devilishly difficult trick and, as with the best earworms of the 1980s, it’s likely to stay in your head for years. Dre(am) is at his Nana’s wake when, late and unannounced, Des(tiny) is suddenly in the room, the impact of her arrival akin to his being hit in Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Before the Plays That Went Wrong and the multi-role six-hander Operation Mincemeat, there was Patrick Barlow’s adaptation of The 39 Steps: four actors on a collision course with feasibility.Barlow is a comedy hero for creating the National Theatre of Brent in 1980, where as preening thesp Desmond Olivier Dingle he performed two-handers with a rotating door of partners that included Jim Broadbent. They considered no topic too epic, from the Zulu Wars to the Greatest Story Ever Told. Barlow’s 2005 version of John Buchan’s 1915 spy thriller, filtered via Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 film, Read more ...
David Kettle
REVENGE: After the Levoyah, Summerhall ★★★★★ The Jews have had enough. After decades – centuries, in fact – of suspicion, name-calling, finger-pointing and violent persecution, they can’t even leave their Gants Hill or Barkingside flats, where London smears into Essex, any more. In 2019, though, things have really come to a head thanks to one figure: Jeremy Corbyn. Something needs to be done.Step in twins Dan and Lauren, plus dodgy ex-gangster Malcolm Spivak, who steals the show with his wide-boy pronouncements at their granddad’s funeral. Have the unlikely siblings got the balls to act Read more ...
David Kettle
Òran, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★ Glasgow-based theatre company Wonder Fools are having a particularly busy Fringe. Alongside a revival of their excellent football drama Same Team at the Traverse Theatre, their far smaller, more intimate show Òran has company co-artistic director Robbie Gordon deliver a blistering solo performance inside a shipping container at the back of the Pleasance Courtyard. It’s far better than that probably sounds.And while Òran might open with smiles and camaraderie – with audience members greeted and assigned micro-roles, for example – things quickly get far Read more ...
Gary Naylor
On opening night, there’s always a little tension in the air. Tech rehearsals and previews can only go so far – this is the moment when an audience, some wielding pens like scalpels, sit in judgement. Having attended thousands on the critics’ side of the fourth wall, I can tell you that there’s plenty of crackling expectation and a touch of fear in the stalls, too. None more so than when the show is billed as a new musical.By the interval (much before that if it’s a hit), you’re locating the production on a multi-dimensional spectrum, assessing its component parts (acting, plot, design), its Read more ...
David Kettle
Ni Mi Madre, Pleasance Dome ★★★★ Philip Larkin offered a famously pithy assessment of parents’ impact on their offspring’s future lives. It’s one that Brazilian/Ecuadorian/Italian/Dominican writer and performer Arturo Luíz Soria would no doubt sympathise with – at least partly – in the solo show he’s built around memories of his mother. In fact, Ni Mi Madre is very much the older woman’s show: Soria transforms himself into Bete, the larger-than-life diva, harridan and force of nature who raised him, taking us through her three husbands and countless kids, her extravagant neediness and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
More surely than any other London stage, the Globe has opened up our theatrical perspective on different languages. Its triumphant “Globe to Globe” 2012 season presented the Shakespeare canon in 37 different linguistic interpretations.Among those varied treats from, literally, across the globe, the British Sign Language (BSL) production of Love’s Labour’s Lost, from London’s Deafinitely Theatre, was the only one that did not cross national borders; instead, it crossed the boundaries of theatre itself.It’s a direction that the Globe has continued to explore over the years, with the opening Read more ...
David Kettle
Bellringers, Roundabout @ Summerhall ★★★★ Dystopian climate-crisis dramas seemed ten-a-penny at the Fringe a few years back, but they’re far thinner on the ground in 2024. Which makes this deliciously elusive, oblique debut drama from Daisy Hall all the more intriguing, and valued.Clement and Aspinall appear in monk-like cassocks in a church belfry, apparently summoned by a fast-approaching storm. It’s their job to ring the tower’s bells, perhaps to alert residents of their Oxfordshire village to the impending deluge, or even act as some kind of community-protecting talisman simply by Read more ...