Theatre
Laura Silverman
For all its ruminative merits, Richard Vergette's drama is not the “searing political thriller” it purports to be. It raises lots of interesting questions, but they get in the way of any deep emotive power.At the work's core is a relationship between a prisoner and the politician whose daughter he killed. The politician saves the prisoner from death row on the condition that he can educate him. The scenario has lashings of searing potential, but the play's overarching tone is distinctly pedagogical. There are messages about the value of education in reforming criminals; messages about Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Few productions give the sound designer absolute pride of place, but such is the presumably inevitable nature of a play called The Silence of the Sea that what isn't voiced counts every bit as much as what is. Gregory Clarke's aural landscape works overtime in a 95-minute piece (no interval) that couples speech with sustained silences, yes, but also with eerie ambient noises that suggest all manner of offstage activity complementing the brooding stillness on view. Engaging? Up to a point, and the acting is impeccable throughout, but even the most expert sound cues can't forestall a gathering Read more ...
Veronica Lee
A new Friday-night cabaret club opens tomorrow at the fabled Café de Paris in London's Leicester Square. The Grade II-listed venue's subterranean ballroom, where Marlene Dietrich, Frank Sinatra and Noël Coward once performed, will be home to Black Cat Cabaret, a weekly show of music, comedy, striptease and magic.Cabaret, and its close relation burlesque, is an artform that has undergone a rebirth in the past decade and, while critics may argue over what exactly defines cabaret, they at least agree that it's a suitably encompassing label for a gathering of acts with more than a touch of the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Here’s an elegant thing to do before eight o'clock dinner - stroll out for an hour’s recital of a rollicking story-poem done by a leading actress in a hip underground venue with judiciously hip application of modern dance, then go off and diss it over your sushi. Very London life.And if the pleasure potential offered by Fiona Shaw and Phyllida Lloyd in recounting Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s splendid 1798 horror yarn The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is any yardstick, there ought to be a future for a periodic series restoring dramatic poetry to the public at the cocktail hour.Shaw herself ushers Read more ...
Laura Silverman
“What should it matter to us if a few words, then a few more and then a language just go,” asks Iain Finlay Macleod’s richly textured play. Somersaults may end in a shrug of inevitability, but its thrust is that language defines identity. In losing a few words, we do not just lose sounds. We endanger traditions, memories and relationships.The play, which was first staged at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in March 2011, centres on James, an entrepreneur in his thirties from the Isle of Lewis, off the west coast of Scotland. James has a beautiful wife, a plush flat in Hampstead and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The London theatre looks to be awash in great women of the English (and Irish) stage in a 2013 line-up of star roles that disproves the often-held assertion that the men get all the great stuff. Those who missed Hattie Morahan's award-winning Nora last summer in A Doll's House will have a second chance at the Young Vic in April, while Kim Cattrall brings her singular glamour to Tennessee Williams's Sweet Bird of Youth at the Old Vic come the summer.In addition to those two women are a handful (well, six, in fact, since one of them is part of a tantalising double-act) of leading ladies all Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Mayan calendar recently suggested it was all over. It is now, almost. 2012 was, by anyone’s lights, an annus mirabilis for culture on these shores. The world came to the United Kingdom, and the kingdom was indeed more or less united by a genuine aura of inclusion. Clumps of funding were hurled in the general direction of the Cultural Olympiad, which became known as the London 2012 Festival, and all sorts leapt aboard. Just for a start, those opera companies who had been burning to perform a version of Vivaldi's L'Olimpiade could now finally proceed. At least three did.Not all of what Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In among the deluge of New Year Honours poured over Olympians (headed by Sir Bradley Wiggins, Sir Ben Ainslie, Dame Sarah Storey and Companion of Honour Lord Coe), there is a modest sprinkling over the arts world too. Roald Dahl's illustrator Quentin Blake becomes Sir Quentin, and another veteran entertainer, Jeremy Lloyd, co-writer of 'Allo 'Allo and Are You Being Served?, is made CBE. There are no arts Dames, but CBEs go to three well-known women, singer Kate Bush, artist Tracey Emin and choreographer Arlene Philips and to the less visible Cultural Olympiad chief, Ruth Mackenzie.Three other Read more ...
Matt Wolf
For much of 2012, London theatre seemed to celebrate the playhouse as much as the play, turning certain venues into essential destinations. I'm thinking, of course, of Shakespeare's Globe, whose mindblowing Globe to Globe season - its namesake's canon performed in as many languages as there are plays - redefined the concept of marathon well before the Olympic athletes came to town. Or the Royal Court, which traversed the year in high, heady style, setting established names (Jez Butterworth, Caryl Churchill, Martin Crimp) alongside gifted newcomers (Luke Norris, Hayley Squires) and fast-rising Read more ...
Laura Silverman
"Doors and sardines. Getting on, getting off. Getting the sardines on, getting the sardines off. That's farce. That's the theatre. That's life." So says one of Michael Frayn's characters in Noises Off. In Sam Walters's giddy revival of Georges Feydeau's classic farce, written almost a century earlier, the doors are imaginary (forget about the sardines.) Characters make plentiful entrances and exits, but as the Orange Tree is in the round, doors on set would present a logistical nightmare. Instead, actors mime opening and closing them, while the stage manager makes accompanying knocks and Read more ...
carole.woddis
If you have any young siblings, friends or relatives in need of burning off a little energy, send them directly to BAC. With their open-hearted style of rough, circusy-type theatre, Kneehigh are ideally suited to this circular barn of a room. Taking Cinderella and adapting it to their own special brand of popular theatre, Emma Rice, Mike Shepherd and the company have come up with a ridiculously raucous production, a seemingly ungoverned but highly controlled piece of Christmas chaos that couldn’t be the success it is without the skill and talent of a company who make it all look so Read more ...