Theatre
Laura Silverman
Affairs, arguments, accidents. Feminism, marital failure and a fear of ageing. Jumpy has plenty of conflicts and issues, dunked in a wonderful bittersweet humour. But while April de Angelis faces uncomfortable truths, she fails to deal with them with equal courage. This play gnashes its teeth – at the gap in communication between generations and at the eternal pursuit of youth – but it lacks bite.Jumpy, which was first on at the Royal Court last autumn, is worth seeing for Tamsin Greig alone. Greig plays Hilary, a middle-class, middle-aged mother having an identity crisis. As Tilly, her Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An erstwhile Broadway flop provides late-summer theatrical fascination in the form of Vieux Carré, the self-evidently flawed Tennessee Williams play from 1977 that nonetheless is worth seeing for anyone attuned to this playwright's singular articulation of abandonment and loss. Robert Chevara's production may be as variable in its casting as is Williams's play in both focus and tone, but when its characters give voice, collectively or otherwise, to the abrasions of life, one is drawn anew into the vortex of an artist acquainted at every turn with psychic pain.Williams scholars will Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The fright wig is instantly recognisable. Even with her back turned, it’s obviously Tina Turner on stage. Except it isn’t. It’s actress Emi Wokoma playing the singer in a performance virtually guaranteed to turn her into a star. Casualty and EastEnders will soon be distant memories for Wokoma. Good for her, maybe, but she’s the best thing about the otherwise wafer-thin Soul Sister.Soul Sister could have been a game of two halves. The first on the Ike and Tina partnership, his abuse of her and their divorce; the second beginning with her 1983 comeback and solo career. Instead, the solo years Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Since 2004, the Ambassador Group’s Trafalgar Studios has done sterling work in staging West End transfers for some of London’s most promising fringe talents. Kieran Lynn’s An Incident at the Border arrives in the centre of town from the Finborough Theatre, where it was seen in July. It has a good cast and, because of its sceptical attitude to the pervading aesthetics of naturalism in contemporary playwriting, lots of promise. But can it live up to expectations?One sunny afternoon, twentysomething couple Arthur and Olivia go to a park. They feed the ducks in the pond and have a cuddle on a Read more ...
carole.woddis
“Our Country’s Good, a play that proclaimed the power and enduring worth of theatre and that celebrated its centrality to our lives, was of importance in the third term of a government which deemed 'subsidy' a dirty word.” So wrote Max Stafford-Clark of the play he directed at the Royal Court in 1988. A titan of the British Theatre for over four decades and artistic director of the Royal Court for 14 of them (1979-93), ask Stafford-Clark if he feels the words are as relevant now as then and his answer is unequivocal. “Absolutely, yes. I think Cameron and Osborne collectively are more of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
I, Tommy, Gilded Balloon **** Everybody will be familiar with Tommy Sheridan's story, and not necessarily because they closely follow Scottish politics at their most internecine. Rather because the Glaswegian socialist went from being barely a paragraph in broadsheets to being plastered over the front pages of tabloids after a series of revelations – which he strongly denies – about visiting swingers' clubs.It was once all so different, as Rab C Nesbitt creator Ian Pattison shows us in this amusing essay of Sheridan's rise and fall. The extremely charismatic Sheridan was adored by men Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tam o' Shanter, Assembly Hall ****Scottish schoolchildren are brought up on Robert Burns but other British students aren't so fortunate. We may know snatches of the great man's work – “Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie”, “O, my Luve's like a red, red rose” and so on – but few of us could recite even a stanza of Tam o' Shanter.The long poem, in Scots and English and published in 1791, tells the story of Tam, who stayed too long in an ale house and had a vision of the Devil on his ride home on his mare Meg. In Communicado Theatre's inventive musical dramatisation, devised and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Accolades are due again for the tiny Finborough Theatre, whose production of JB Priestley's all-but-unknown Cornelius constitutes the most exciting reclamation from the English theatrical canon since the same venue produced Emlyn Williams's startling and welcome Accolade some 18 months ago. Funny and endearing in parts when not devouringly bleak, the play is as eccentric as a title character who can debate "this suicide business" one minute and lose himself in a story about the Incas the next, and the young director Sam Yates and his hugely accomplished cast do the occasion proud. Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jigsy, Assembly Rooms **** Les Dennis may have started his career as a comic, and then as a presenter of cheesy, family-friendly television game shows, but of late he has been plying his trade as a very decent actor. And so it proves again in Tony Staveacre's one-man play about a washed up Liverpudlian club comic.It's set in 1997 in a Liverpool working men's club, a beast that has mostly rolled over and died these days. Jigsy, florid of face and never seen on stage without a pint in his hand, does his two spots either side of the bingo. He has worked with some of the greats - Ken Dodd, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The ever-libidinous Guy (Jason Durr) is "as subtle as a fire engine" when it comes to sex, or so we're told during the course of Volcano, and it's difficult not to feel that this belated Noël Coward discovery could be similarly described in theatrical terms. Never performed during Sir Noël's life, the 1956 play will constitute essential viewing for completists of the Master who want a further sense of how this protean talent's singular career evolved. And yet it's hard not to feel that the keenly aware critic in Coward would have taken a blue pencil to some of the play's more pulpy, banal Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Mies Julie, Assembly Hall **** Miss Julie is pretty full-on at the best of times but in Yael Farber’s striking new version, Strindberg’s themes of class and gender are given a shocking modern makeover. In transposing the action to present-day South Africa, she has written a story about the divide that still exists between the haves and have-nots, and the crippling emotional history that has yet to be overcome by the young nation.Twenty years after the end of apartheid, things haven’t changed much on a veldt farm, which is owned by a white man and whose labourers and maids are all black. Read more ...
carole.woddis
It’s brave to take Shakespeare into the West End in midsummer – and in this of all summers. Greg Doran’s all-black, African Caesar certainly doesn’t lack for impact, colour, zest, urgency. It takes the audience by the scruff of the neck and rams the play down our throats. The concept is impressive. The set, half Roman amphitheatre, half Nazi bunker dominated by a giant effigy, its back towards us with arm raised in totemic salute, summons up TV images of dictators who eventually come crashing down, from Stalin to Mubarak and who knows how many more to come.Though a stark warning from history Read more ...