Theatre
Ismene Brown
The word “people” of the title of Alan Bennett’s new play is to be spat out, like a lemon pip. People, who invade your space, boss your values, make you be what they want. So does the beleaguered Lady Dorothy Stacpoole feel about the stark options facing her as her fantastically grand mansion leaks and crumbles over her smelly, freezing feet, while under it groans ancient mine workings like a whale with toothache. The options are to auction off the contents and house to who-knows-who, to sell via a slimy salesman to “The Concern” (a bunch of invisible super-rich who buy top works of art and Read more ...
David Benedict
Confession time: I’m a sucker for a romantic reunion. When lost-presumed-dead twins Sebastian and Viola finally rediscover one another alive and well at the end of Twelfth Night, you’ll find me in tears. And, yes, the late, great Nora Ephron’s New Year’s Eve climax in When Harry Met Sally works every time. All of which makes me more than well-matched for the musical-theatre version of the epistolary romance Daddy Long Legs. Dear Reader, I remained dry-eyed.For their musical version of Jean Webster’s 1912, Anne of Green Gables-tinged bestseller, composer/lyricist Paul Gordon and bookwriter/ Read more ...
David Nice
Hot on the heels of the latest English uncle over at the Vaudeville comes Dyadya Vanya from Moscow, bringing with it no samovar or old lace. Rimas Tuminas, the Vakhtangov Theatre's artistic director since 2007, has chucked out the Stanislavsky tradition of Chekhovian naturalism and in his own singular attempt to render what he thinks the characters feel as well as say serves up a stylised ritual that nearly suffocates the humanity of the drama.There's no problem in daring a radical re-think: Benedict Andrews's contemporary take on Three Sisters at the Young Vic mostly made sense on its own Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
The Russians are coming next week, when the Moscow company Vakhtangov bring their production of Anton Chekhov’s tragi-comic drama of dissipated lives and squandered love to the West End. But first, London has Linsday Posner’s staging, with a mouthwatering cast and a poised, ruefully witty translation by Christopher Hampton.There’s nothing here to startle, and in some ways that’s rather to the endeavour’s detriment. Christopher Oram’s set, of a timbered dacha that vaguely resembles a giant Swiss cuckoo clock, is so hefty and literal that in the opening scene it seems on the verge of crushing Read more ...
theartsdesk
The National Theatre’s highlights for the winter up until Easter 2013 include Antony Sher in The Captain of Köpenick, Marianne Elliott's revival of Simon Stephens’ Port, the transfer for This House to the Olivier and of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time to the West End, while One Man, Two Guvnors continues its UK tour and three plays are shown as part of NT Live.NEW PRODUCTIONSThe Magistrate, Olivier Theatre. Timothy Sheader’s production of Pinero’s law-breaking farce set in Victorian London stars John Lithgow and Nancy Carroll and is designed by Katrina Lindsay. NT Live Read more ...
aleks.sierz
London theatre loves plays about the media. Is this because we spend so much time flicking through magazines, visiting websites or watching television? Or is it because this venue’s trendy metropolitan audience is as cynical and world-weary as a media ad buyer? Either way, Lucy Kirkwood’s lively new play is both a hilarious account of lads’ and girls’ mags, and an indictment of their effect on all who come too close to them. But is her argument so obvious that anyone would agree with it?First, the title: NSFW stands for Not Safe For Work, which means online material that you might not want to Read more ...
judith.flanders
The famous count could not have a more theatrical pedigree if he tried. The great actor-manager Henry Irving – tall, preternaturally thin, with a fixed glare (due, apparently, to extreme myopia) and a grand manner which gave way, said Bernard Shaw, to "glimpses of a latent bestial dangerousness" – was, said everyone at the time, the obvious source of the Transylvanian Undead aristo as he was created on the page in Dracula by Irving’s business-manager Bram Stoker.TR Warszawa, too, has a theatrical pedigree. In London the company appeared two years ago to acclaim in Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Oh, how it’s raining. Streaming down the windows of the dry goods store, Torrance Mercantile, in the Deep South, where Lady Torrance is marooned in a stiflingly small town and a loveless marriage with an awful secret. Depressing. “We’re under a lifelong sentence to solitary confinement in our own lonely skins,” says 30-year-old drifter Val Xavier in his snakeskin jacket, holding onto his only companion in his wanderings, his precious, celebrity-signed guitar.Life is bleak, but we know there’s escapism – and disaster – waiting to burst out. There’s Lady’s repressed sexuality, smothered by 15 Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Finding the mythic echoes of the ancient Greeks in stories about the modern world is not just confined to past greats such as TS Eliot, but is also used by contemporary adapters of old tragedies. Yet Colin Teevan’s new play, which shadows the lives of Irish navvies working in England with echoes from Greek tragedy, goes one better. Asked by the director Lucy Pitman Wallace to rewrite the Oedipus myth through the lens of Krapp’s Last Tape, the playwright has come up with The Kingdom.Teevan’s ambitious idea is to marry stories from the great migrations of Irish workers to England, from the 19th Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Henry Goodman, Imelda Staunton and Aidan McArdle won the big acting prizes while Akram Khan and Opera North carried off the dance and opera gongs at the annual Theatrical Management Association awards - now called Theatre Awards UK. Held yesterday at the medieval Guildhall in the City of London, the awards highlight the best of theatre, dance and opera in Britain's touring theatres selected by panels of critics. They attracted a small red carpet of press photographers as eminences such as Howard Brenton, Michael Ball, Janie Dee, Culture Minister Ed Vaizey, Timothy West and Prunella Scales Read more ...
Laura Silverman
Set at the start of the US and UK invasion of Iraq in 2003, Clare Bayley's Blue Sky follows an old-school journalist pursuing justice at the cost of neighbours and friends. Jane, played with careerist resolve by Sarah Malin, is convinced she has uncovered a case of extraordinary rendition. She believes the CIA are involved in the kidnap of a man seen being bundled on to a private jet in Islamabad so that they can question him under torture. “People,” she says, “don't just disappear.” Now she needs proof.Jane contacts an old flame, Ray (Jacob Krichefski) to help her trace the plane, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Still waters run deep, but that truism barely hints at the quiet power of The River, the eagerly awaited new play from Jez Butterworth (writer) and Ian Rickson (director) whose collaboration yet again gives cause for cheer. The converse in almost every way from their immediate Royal Court predecessor, Jerusalem (2009), this latest work is as small-scale, intimate, and compressed as that epoch-defining transfer to the West End and Broadway was rangy, anarchic, and feral.Don't let the fuss about how to get tickets - there is no advance purchase possible, only day seats - put you Read more ...