Theatre
Demetrios Matheou
I’m sitting in the Olivier waiting for the show to start, comfortable in the knowledge that I’ve seen the original production of Mnemonic, one of Complicité’s most lauded plays, in 1999; but I struggle to remember anything about it, the detail is fuzzy. A play about memory is challenging my own faltering apparatus.Who did I see it with? Where? What was that audience participation? I sift through the gears, opening mental doors in an attempt to find a clue as to whether I did actually see it, after all. Meanwhile, the magnificent Kathryn Hunter, stalwart of the Complicité troupe, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The reinvigoration of Andrew Lloyd Webber continues apace. New York is now hosting a ballroom culture, drag-inflected Cats, and the Olivier-laureled Sunset Boulevard, a breakaway hit last year on the West End, hits Broadway in the autumn.And here is Lloyd Webber's 1984 large-scale caprice, Starlight Express, reinvented for the era of Power Rangers and Transformers, with women inheriting men's roles and the entire thing feeling as if the audience has landed inside a video game itself on overdrive.I was at the 1984 West End press night of the original Starlight, as it happens, and vividly Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The death of Marilyn Monroe is a wet dream for conspiracy theorists. Like the assassination of JFK in the following year there is plenty of material in the official accounts that doesn’t quite make sense – which opens the door to free-form speculation.Intrigued by the numerous theories about Monroe’s demise, actress Vicki McKellar and Olivier Award-winning West End and Broadway director Guy Masterson have teemed up to create The Marilyn Conspiracy, which was first staged at the Edinburgh Festival in 2018 and now comes to the Park Theatre in north London. The result is a cogent thriller which Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Nothing anybody over the age of 30 says about the new Mean Girls musical, spawn of Tina Fey’s witty script for the 2004 screen sideswipe of that name, will make any difference. As with all things Barbie, the pink madness seems deathless. Fey’s takedown of the human jungle that is the US high school has since been regurgitated as a film sequel, a film musical and now this stage musical, originally due here in 2018 but waylaid by lockdown. If you blindfolded me and played me a karaoke backing track of its score, minus lyrics, I wouldn’t be able to tell whether it was from Legally Blonde Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It's a bold move by Regent's Park Open Air Theatre to tackle Frances Hodgson Burnett's children's classic, a story that's been notably adapted into films that pile on the visual beauty of its magical settings. This enterprising venue may be surrounded by trees and foliage, but it offers essentially a big bare stage with few frills.So it's no surprise that the story's main location, Misselthwaite Manor, is going to be represented by a tall blank wall, in which niches hold lights. There's no sign of ivied walls hiding the little door of a secret garden. It soon becomes clear that feats of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Following the huge success of Benedict Lombe’s Shifters, which transfers soon to the West End, the Bush Theatre is riding high. Now this venue’s latest exploration of the Black-British experience tells a really lively and emotionally deep story about Nigerians in London.Faith Omole, whose first and as yet unperformed play, Kaleidoscope, won the prestigious Alfred Fagon Award last year, arrives with bang with My Father’s Fable. Since Omole is also an actor, and has appeared in the Channel 4 comedy, We Are Lady Parts, it’s no surprise that her debut is both a comedy and an acute look at the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Every day this week I’m watching a football match, and now – after April’s production of Lydia Higman, Julia Grogan and Rachel Lemon’s Gunter – comes another football stage drama to tear up the turf at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs.This time it’s the turn of Stewart Pringle’s The Bounds, which opened at Live Theatre in Newcastle in May and has now arrived in London. Set in 1553 in Northumbria, during the Whitsun football game which can last for days and has a pitch that is many miles long, this is a play with a high metaphorical content which not only articulates a distinctly northern Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Lincoln Center’s Bartlett Sher is back in town to direct the Barbican’s latest summer blockbuster, Cole Porter’s classic Kiss Me, Kate. It’s an energetic, largely intelligent production of what is at base a screwball comedy with great songs. With a book by Samuel and Bella Spewack, the main focus of this 1948 piece is a backstage will-they-won’t-they?, as a one-year-divorced couple, company boss / male lead Fred Graham (Adrian Dunbar, pictured below with Block) and his leading lady, Lilli Vanessi (Stephanie J Block), confront each other in a musical version of The Taming of the Shrew. Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
A recent Crime Survey for England and Wales estimated that 2.1 million people in the UK had been victims of domestic abuse in the year ending March 2023. So it makes sense that director Jude Christian has addressed this tricky, troubling Shakespeare play by amplifying the genuine trauma caused by Petruchio’s “taming” of his wife Katharina.What makes less sense is her simultaneous playing up of the script’s pantomime aspects, so that the stage is filled with everything from a giant teddy bear to a costume that makes Petruchio look like the Cookie Monster (pictured below). Often The Taming of Read more ...
Gary Naylor
You have to tiptoe around the edge of the set just to take your seat in the Park’s studio space for Lidless Theatre’s Miss Julie. There’s a plain wooden table, a few utensils on it, wooden chairs and a small cabinet – not much, but, we’re smack inside this 19th century country house kitchen, uncomfortably close to discomfiting passions. It may be the longest day outside, but we're in a dark, claustrophobic space in more senses than one.The cook, Christine, hair tied back ferociously, is cooking up poison to effect an abortion for the house dog, but there are sounds of revelry in the Read more ...
Heather Neill
It is a truth universally acknowledged that an actor tends to take a sympathetic view of the character he inhabits, however morally questionable. Adrian Lukis, who played the handsome, roguish militiaman, George Wickham, in Andrew Davies's (still delightful) 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen's most popular novel, is no exception.Looking back 30 years later at how Wickham was treated in Pemberley and Longbourn, Lukis allows him to put his own spin on events then and to give a glimpse of what he has made of life subsequently.Jane Austen's characters are so vivid they frequently jump off the page Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There are many women whose outstanding science was attributed to men or simply devalued to the point of obscurity, but recent interest in the likes of DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin and NASA’s Katherine Johnson has given credit where credit is due. Marie Curie was never diminished, the woman with two Nobel prizes and the discoveries of radium and polonium on her CV needs no such championing, a figure known by schoolchildren the world over. And yet there’s something that stirs in the back of the mind, something that complicates a story of stunning success often against the odds. When the Read more ...