Theatre
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 ...
alexandra.coghlan
“How I do love a steely sting in my fairytale ending,” croons Meow Meow, eyes glinting even more brilliantly than her eyeshadow. When she says “sting” a whole army of scorpions couldn’t equal her venom. As the title of this veteran “kamikaze cabaret” artist’s show makes clear, Meow Meow’s The Little Match Girl is an entirely idiosyncratic take on Hans Christian Andersen’s classic story, a piece of iconoclastic, bra-baring (if not actually burning) revisionist theatre – a “73-minute showbiz extravaganza on child poverty and social disenfranchisement.” Phew.It sounds like a lot to pack into Read more ...
Laura Silverman
It sounds unlikely but The Dance of Death makes the perfect Christmas play. Half a minute with Strindberg's squabbling couple makes the ordinary family row over underdone/overdone turkey seem like a parlour game. Need a reminder that your relatives are rather charming? This is the play for you.In Strindberg's unsentimental work, Edgar and Alice are approaching 25 years of marriage. Boredom with each other and their lives has intensified into bitterness: every observation has become an accusation, every remark a provocation. They are united only in their hatred towards everyone else. They are Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“You don’t put yourself into what you write, you find yourself there.” It’s a maxim that has guided a writing career that, insect-like, has made itself at home among the lived detritus of autobiography and memoir. In Alan Bennett’s 2001 Hymn and his latest short-play Cocktail Sticks the author sets out in search of himself once more, finding on his quest not only his own history but that of a generation and an age at an ever-increasing remove from our own. It could be cosy, it could easily be glib, but for the most part it’s just funny, and terribly, terribly poignant.To anyone familiar with Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s something off stage, something loud and threatening, pulsating in dark red, at the beginning of Julien Cottereau’s solo mime piece Imagine Toi. This is a show of fears and sweetnesses, and there’s no holding back on the former as we progress between rumbling giants and large dogs. The show is billed as suitable for ages four and up, and what a youngster might feel with real apprehension, adults enjoy as a stage show (though I’m not sure how well teenage attentions would be held).Cottereau was for years a lead clown at Cirque du Soleil, before bringing this solo mime act together (co- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In 1972 John Kander and Fred Ebb were invited by Bob Fosse to a private screening of his film version of their hit stage musical, Cabaret. The movie starred their protégée, Liza Minnelli, who at only 19 had won her first Tony in Kander and Ebb’s first show, Flora the Red Menace, and for whom they would go on to write “New York, New York”. “Liza was our girl, and we cared very deeply about her. We sat there afterwards and didn’t know what to say to these people whom we liked so much. Because we just hated it.”It’s not impossible to see why. When it eventually came in 2002, the movie adaptation Read more ...
Heather Neill
’Tis the season to be jolly. ’Tis also the season to dust off the stories of the Grimms and Perrault and present them as drama, sometimes transmogrified into panto. There are sometimes attempts to go back to source and eschew the tawdry delights of transvestite dames, sparkly leotards and lame rhyming couplets. The source, of course, is often really quite frightening.At the National Theatre, Katie Mitchell directs a sort of half-way house by Lucy Kirkwood “developed at the NT studio”. In this Hansel and Gretel There is no cartoonish dame with a suffocating bosom, but – the cast being small - Read more ...