Theatre
aleks.sierz
The popular image of the state-of-the-nation play is that of a large-scale, big-cast drama that has an epic time span and lots of highly articulate speeches that analyse the way we are. But sometimes a small-cast play with a much more modest range can be equally successful in saying something worth hearing not only about a handful of characters, but also about contemporary Britain. Such a play is Vickie Donoghue’s powerful debut, which was first seen at the HighTide Festival in May.Set on a tidal Thames wasteland, a secluded stretch wryly called “The Beach”, the story ebbs and flows around Read more ...
fisun.guner
Let one visual artist and one fashion designer loose on a theatre production and you may find both set and costumes upstaging the actors. Laurent P. Berger has designed a Miers Van der Rohe-type modernist glass box, with luxurious white surfaces and Dan Flavin-esque tube lighting, while Lanvin designer Alber Elbaz has dressed the star, Juliette Binoche, in a show-stopping full-length gold-sequinned number slashed to the thigh. Binoche certainly shines as a rather physically languorous Mademoiselle Julie, but not in the way one might have hoped for the Oscar-winning actress. Part of the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The St James Theatre has risen, phoenix-like, almost literally from the ashes of the Westminster Theatre, which was first a chapel, then a cinema and latterly a drama theatre that played host to productions of Oscar Wilde and Harley Granville Barker plays, among many others, and where Tyrone Guthrie once directed. In the 1950s and 1960s it was home to a production company run by producer Tony Furness and actor Alan Badel.The theatre, just around the corner from Buckingham Palace, burned down in 2002 and now, as part of a new commercial development on the site, a company led by Robert Read more ...
Laura Silverman
When Hindle Wakes opened in 1912 in London, the script was burned in the street. Stanley Houghton, a member of the Manchester School of playwrights, had exposed one of society's double standards: that it was fine for a man to have a guiltless fling before marriage, but it was not acceptable for a woman. The problem with Bethan Dear's earnest revival is that the play no longer holds the same moral force. Today, the idea that Fanny Hawthorn, a mill girl, goes away for the weekend with Alan Jeffcote, the mill owner's son, and then refuses to marry him is hardly shocking.Solidly constructed, Read more ...
bella.todd
There’s a vivid moment in this Joe Penhall revival when Christopher, a psychiatric patient suspected of suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, finds himself caught in the linguistic crossfire between his two rival care-givers. Oblivious to everything but their argument, the doctors continue to shout across their subject as he sinks to the floor, the tormented vertex in a taut dramatic triangle. Never mind the ones inside – it’s the voices outside Christopher’s head that seem to be doing the most damage.When Blue/Orange was first staged, winning the Olivier Award for Best New Play at the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
As long as Simon Callow is around, London’s theatre scene will never be short of one-man shows, nor of Shakespeare. A new pretender to the Shakespearian throne, a rival for the hollow crown (and, just occasionally, the hollow laugh) has however emerged in the form of Roger Rees’s What You Will – a brisk hour-and-a-half’s trot through Shakespeare’s greatest hits, with a little autobiography and a lot of accents thrown in.A veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Rees can spin an anecdote with style, has plenty to tell, and the elegant shamelessness to steal them when they are not his own. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
To revive a long-defunct play is dicing with death for a touring theatre company - was the play ahead of its time, or was it not good enough in any time? W Somerset Maugham was a commercial and critical giant in London theatre in the Twenties, but The Sacred Flame - an odd hybrid of whodunnit and (a)morality play - was one that didn’t make it out of its period. But its theme remains unsolved today: the family and medical dilemmas thrown up when a vivid young man is hopelessly crippled, his young wife now unsatisfied, he himself trying to be brave about a position that cripples him Read more ...
philip radcliffe
What’s in a name? Pinchwife, Fidget, Horner, Squeamish, Sparkish… William Wycherley labelled his characters blatantly. No one is hornier than Horner, the womaniser who puts it about (sorry) that he is impotent after surgery for the pox. Pinchwife’s wife gets pinched and no one is more cuckolded than he. Mind you, he takes the “if you can’t beat 'em, join ’em” approach in the end when he says “cuckolds, like lovers, should themselves deceive”. Lady Fidget has ants in her pants and her not-so-virtuous group of ladies can hardly move for sexual desire. They are the cougars of their day. Even the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
In the non-Olympic sport called “Name Britain’s greatest living playwright”, most of the contestants have always been men. Nowadays, that is all changed and the odds-on favourite would be Caryl Churchill, who has been creating provocative and boundary-busting drama for four decades. Her plays Top Girls, Cloud Nine and Serious Money are curriculum classics, and her recent work — Far Away, A Number and Drunk Enough To Say I Love You — triumphantly proved that her originality remains unimpaired with age.The same can just about be said of her latest. The play has no named characters, and consists Read more ...
David Nice
Updating Chekhov is nothing new, despite the preliminary flurries about this production. Yet the singular directorial take can only highlight the master’s modernity in the bigger issues. If Australian iconoclast Benedict Andrews had continued as he seems to begin, with a Stanislavsky-like realism for today, passing anachronisms like the optimism for a better life in centuries to come, the idleness of a servanted household and a shockingly abrupt duel might jar. But phantasmagorical moments keep breaking through until the tenuous security of the three sisters stuck in a provincial Russian Read more ...
mark.kidel
John O’Keeffe’s 18th century classic Wild Oats is a play about players and an uproarious love letter to the theatre: a perfect fit for the re-opening, after 18 months of massive refurbishment, of Bristol’s Old Vic, originally constructed in 1766 and the oldest surviving working theatre in the UK. When a group of players approached the city’s merchants at the end of the 17th century, seeking help with the establishment of a venue in which they might perform, Bristol’s plutocrats sent them packing, as theatrical activities were considered too subversive. Bristol’s first theatre was set up Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Hedda Gabler – the doomy tragedy, the one with the pistol, the “female Hamlet”. We all know the score when it comes to Ibsen. All, that is, except apparently for Sheridan Smith, who recently admitted in an interview that she hadn’t heard of the play before she was asked to take on the lead. It may be a world away from the buxom bar-maids and big-hearted bimbos that have become Smith’s trademark, but the double Olivier Award-winner makes light work of a role that carries the weight of theatre’s greatest actresses.Smaller than almost everyone else on stage, and disappearing into sofas, melting Read more ...