Theatre
aleks.sierz
In the past few years, without any fanfare, the veteran playwright and Spooks script-writer Howard Brenton has not only made a comeback, but also become the chief chronicler of the nation’s past. One year he is telling the story of Harold Macmillan in Never So Good, then he’s doing a version of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. He might make a detour to pray with St Paul or to converse with Abelard and Heloise, but then he comes back to English history with the award-winning Anne Boleyn. His latest, which opened last night, is about the trial of Charles I. And it’s got Douglas Henshall Read more ...
Helen Meany
Irish theatre generates high expectations. So much so, that if there isn’t a premiere of a play by one of Ireland’s leading playwrights – Sebastian Barry, Enda Walsh, Marina Carr, Frank McGuinness, Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson or Mark O’Rowe – the annual Dublin Theatre Festival tends to be viewed by regular Dublin theatregoers as somehow deficient. But while this year’s festival didn’t offer a singularly brilliant piece of new Irish playwriting, in its range and diversity it posed a series of very provocative questions.Now in its 55th year, Dublin Theatre Festival 2012 ran for over two- Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If all of Loserville were as arresting and witty as its design, the West End would finally have what it hasn't offered playgoers in years: a buoyant British musical not reliant on a celebrated back catalogue or penned by Andrew Lloyd Webber and his various writing partners over time. As it is, the Elliot Davis/James Bourne collaboration, first seen over the summer at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, is cute and bouncy but also slightly dim; a tad of originality wouldn't go amiss in a show so busy referencing multiple sources that it sacrifices its own identity along the way. The Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Wow, what a lot of debuts. Adrian Lester (Hustle, Bonekickers, Merlin) makes his Tricycle Theatre debut in this new play about a black actor in Regency London, and it’s written by his wife, the actress Lolita Chakrabarti. The play is her first substantial piece, and it’s also the opener in the new regime of incoming artistic director Indhu Rubasingham, who directs. But is the play, which premiered last night, as redolent of greasepaint and plush curtains as its title implies?The story is certainly a revelation. I had assumed that the few black people in Britain in the early 19th century were Read more ...
Steve Clarkson
It’s not easy bringing the Mississippi delta to Leeds city centre – yet here its hanging moss and tea-coloured waters fill out every inch of the expansive Quarry stage. Indeed, all that’s missing from Francis O’Connor’s remarkable set is a hungry alligator or two, though in the drama for which it provides a backdrop – Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning classic about death, desire and deceit – the human characters are capable of inflicting quite enough damage on themselves.The fragmentation of the cotton-rich Pollitt family is presented with brutal clarity, beginning with the Read more ...
carole.woddis
Banking and the financial world may have gone into free-fall, but there are still killings to be made. Particularly personal ones. Nicholas Pierpan’s You Can Still Make a Killing is a morality tale for our time, a revenge tragedy without corpses, except for reputations. And, in the City, reputation – or rather perception - is everything.“Perception is part of the reality,” says Henry, working for the FRA – a public financial services body. That is presumably the means by which the playwright steers away from trouble: against a backdrop of modern City scandals, much talk of Lehman Brothers, Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Samuel Beckett recalled sinking into a "whirl of depression" while writing All That Fall. Audiences at this production - those, that is, who have managed to score a ticket for this short, sold-out run - are unlikely to emerge into Jermyn Street in a similarly gloomy frame of mind.Apart from the exceptional nature of the evening - a rarely seen piece and a superlative cast in an intimate, up-close, 70-seater setting - All That Fall is revealed here as a bawdy, bucolic comedy, and a perversely life-affirming one full of marvellous one-liners, even if they are, of course, also spiked with grim Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Pity the A-level English student: for them the “rarely seen masterpieces” that creep onto the curriculum and into the theatres. Judging from the frequently giggling reaction of the audience last night of around 100 17- and 18-year-olds, Eugene O’Neill’s tricky tragedy Desire Under the Elms isn’t going to be winning too many A*s among them next summer. Which is a pity, because this is a tough, gnarled play which strips human instincts to their bones. Hatred is its key emotion, loneliness its key condition.David Attenborough in his unputdownable book The Life of Birds tells of the female Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Spain's Golden Age turns unaccountably to dross in Damned by Despair, the Tirso de Molina play that is a good half-hour shorter than the running time given in the programme but won't (in this production, anyway) ever be brief enough for some. Fascinating for theatre buffs to see what the remarkable Bertie Carvel would choose for a follow-up to Matilda, the play itself comes across in Frank McGuinness's new version as tendentious, silly, and barely coherent, though it does suggest a new career for Carvel as a celluloid hard man should he ever tire of treading the boards of the major British Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Over the past few years, the 1970s have made a cultural comeback. On television, there’s been Life on Mars and White Heat, in the bookshops tomes by Dominic Sandbrook, in the theatre revivals of plays such as Abigail’s Party, all to the soundtrack of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The decade that time forgot has become the decade you can’t escape. But can a documentary about the Westminster politics of 1974-79 really make gripping drama?At first the signs seemed almost positive. After all, the cast includes Philip Glenister - Mr Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes - and the live soundtrack Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"All this hatred is exhausting," or so remarks Will Young's ceaselessly grimace-prone Emcee in Cabaret in a comment that encapsulates the evening as a whole. Returning to a show he directed to acclaim on the West End six years ago, the director Rufus Norris has reconsidered John Kander and Fred Ebb's song-and-dance classic with less nudity, stronger voices, and lots of stage business where its bite should be.Audiences will turn out for a show that features bigger names than were on offer on Shaftesbury Ave. in 2006, where musicals neophyte Anna Maxwell Martin played Sally Bowles opposite a Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Like several of Bill Naughton’s plays, Lighthearted Intercourse started life as a BBC Third Programme drama. When it was broadcast, in 1963, its title was, less provocatively, November Day. Subsequently, it was rejected for the stage by producer Binkie Beaumont, who apparently tried to get Michael Caine or Albert Finney for the lead role of Joe, considered an “Alfie-size” part by the author. “The setting might be poor, but the characters are rich, at least, so I think,” he wrote to Binkie. “A sort of high comedy in low places, yes, genuine kitchen mink.” Even Sir Bernard Miles, who was Read more ...