Theatre
mark.kidel
The thing about puppets, as those who have handled them know all too well, is that they take over. They have a life of their own. This is all fine and good as long as the puppet-masters don’t get swamped by the magical power of supposedly inanimate objects.Much of the fun and originality of Tom Morris’s restlessly inventive take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, made in collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company - his co-directors for War Horse - derives from the playfulness that toys encourage in us all. But the astounding array of mechanical inventions, from the simple miniature Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Is Steptoe and Son the platonic ideal of the British sitcom? Two men trapped in eternal stasis, imprisoned by class and bound together by family ties as if by hoops of steel, never to escape: it’s what half-hour comedy should be. Posterity would seem to agree, because since the sitcom ended in 1974 the two rag and bone men have never been out of work, appearing in the cinema, on stage and radio. For 30 years they made and reran the show on Swedish television, underpinning the widely held theory that Steptoe is but a step from Strindberg.Half a century after its creation, last summer Steptoe Read more ...
David Benedict
Without wishing to get all Kirstie and Phil about this, theatre, more often than you’d imagine, is about location, location, location. One of the reasons why the National Theatre’s knockout The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was so potent was because director Marianne Elliott welded the audience to all four sides of the action. Transferred to a West End stage, the tension between stage and audience is undeniably different. Is the show still a triumph? Oh yes.A murder mystery with added maths – and a huge emotional kick in the telling – this is a stage version of Mark Read more ...
David Nice
Snow flurries outside, steam heat within. Writer-director Yael Farber’s transposition of Strindberg from a 19th-century Swedish estate to a contemporary farm in South Africa’s Karoo region on the eve of a storm is so painstakingly evocative that all worries about the latest publicity image – shades of blaxploitation, more Mandingo than Miss Julie – instantly evaporate.There’s much of the same giddying power-shifts and sexual violence that buffet the original, but Farber’s recent conception, fresh from acclaim at last year's Edinburgh Festival, recalibrates the context dramatically. The Read more ...
Heather Neill
If only there were more Chekhov! Theatregoers in England, for whom Anton Pavlovich is little short of a god, must have wished this often enough. The handful of great plays come round almost as frequently as Shakespeare. Yet, as well as a couple of lesser plays and some crude farces, Chekhov wrote almost 600 short stories, counting the comic squibs with which he helped to support his family as a very young man. Some of the more mature ones are masterpieces, works of extraordinary imagination and psychological insight. He occasionally adapted them himself and others have done since. Now William Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Catching rabies from a corgi, living on a council estate, becoming an uncommon book addict, painting the town red, incognito on VE Day, parachuting into East London on a date with James Bond... what a strange fantasy life our Queen has led.*Now Peter Morgan and Helen Mirren, the writer-actress team whose film The Queen remains a very high-ranking entry in this fictional league, enlarge the canon with The Audience, loosely inspired by the weekly confidential meetings between the Queen and Prime Minister, of whom there have been 12 (so far) over her six-decade reign.The reason to see it is Read more ...
Laura Silverman
Five male Filipinos in Tel Aviv live double lives. By day, they care for dying Orthodox Jews; by night, they are a drag act, the Paper Dolls. Based on real life, this play tells an incredible story that must be heard. Unfortunately, this production is not necessarily the one to tell it.The story conveys how connections can be forged between clashing cultures. Elderly Jewish men and young Filipino transsexuals can have the same values; the same need for a sense of home; the same longing for companionship. Somewhere here is a heartbreaking, poignant play, focusing on one of this drama's many Read more ...
Heather Neill
Clybourne Park won Bruce Norris a slew of awards on both sides of the Atlantic a couple of years ago. His fearless, shocking, very funny response to Lorraine Hansbury's classic A Raisin in the Sun tackled hypocrisy in racial matters brilliantly and in language blithely free of political correctness. It is not surprising that Purple Heart, written eight years earlier, in 2002, falls somewhat short of the later play.Where Clybourne Park has a clear social and political target, Purple Heart's subject is less well-defined: the nature of love, kindness and grief. Norris indicates in a programme Read more ...
David Nice
Given a fair few strange and languishing Brecht-Weill pieces that The Rest is Noise Festival’s Berlin strand might have explored, Vladimir Jurowski and the LPO had a tough time of it by piecing together a performing edition of the most familiar one. Stagings of Die Dreigroschenoper with singing actors and a deft director can knit this celebrated hybrid together. But a concert performance that tries to be true to the 1928 premiere’s mixture of balladeers and fairly hefty opera singers to fill out the updated, jazz-meets-Bach riff on John Gay’s thieves-den Beggar’s Opera will be very lucky to Read more ...
David Nice
It’s Weimar Berlin time as the Southbank Centre’s The Rest is Noise festival moves through the 20th-century music scene – so it must be Liza Minnelli time too. Or must it? Though she’s immortalised through her Americanisation of Sally Bowles in Bob Fosse’s film of Cabaret, the Kander and Ebb torchsong for which she is most famous, “Maybe This Time”, belongs very decidedly to the 1960s (it was written for Kaye Ballard, not for the 1972 movie). Well, we heard that, and how - a number in itself worth the top ticket price of £100. We also had Liza singing Cole Porter and a starry-eyed Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Yesterday Kenneth Branagh was thanking Manchester – saying that he felt he had “come of age” the previous time he had performed Shakespeare in the city 25 years ago, the audience being so “generous, quick-witted and lively". He also thanked the city for having the determination and audacity, in the face of gloom and cuts, at the launch of its adventurous festival, to back to the hilt a biennial world-class arts extravaganza, which, among many notable headline acts has Branagh as lead in Macbeth (directed by Branagh and Emmy and Tony award-winning Rob Ashcroft). Tickets will be gold dust, but Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
It begins with a tall, thin man walking out of light and into darkness. There is much that remains murky in Barry McGovern’s adaptation of this novel by Samuel Beckett, written between 1941 and 1945 when Beckett, who had worked for the Resistance, was in the South of France on the run from the Nazis, and not published until nearly a decade after its completion. Like his later dramatic works, it is preoccupied with profound existential questions – the inconsequentiality of being, the endless groping for meaning – reduced to the simple, immediate and human: the everyday made extraordinary.This Read more ...