Theatre
philip radcliffe
Street of dreams? The people who lived in the real-life inspiration and location for Coronation Street, Archie Street in Salford, hand-picked by the soap’s begetter Tony Warren, would be flummoxed and flabbergasted to hear it called that. I walked down Archie Street several times when the TV soap started. The two-up, two down, back-to-back terraced houses, separated by a three-foot alleyway, had no baths, no hot water, no inside lavatories and were dubbed “a disgrace to society”. But the people who lived in them when the TV version started on 9 December 1960 were genuine enough folk. One of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
David Cameron could hardly wish for a more apt musical to pep up the people’s spirits than Irving Berlin’s Top Hat, with its wheedling entreaties about the advantages of being caught in the rain, or putting on your best front, and all. Matthew White’s staging of Top Hat - said to be the first-ever theatrical version of the immortal 1935 Astaire and Rogers movie - is finely timed for a grim (and rainy) summer, with a smart and spirited production that pretty much puts the film on stage, making the best of what look like austerity budgets. If you manage to quell the thought that a Fred 'n' Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Simon Stephens is not only one of our most talented playwrights, he’s also the one most open to influences from German theatre. In 2007, he collaborated with director Sebastian Nübling on the world premiere in Hanover of his innovative play, Pornography, which took more than a year to be staged in the UK, in a superb version by Sean Holmes. Holmes is now head of the Lyric Hammersmith, which hosts Stephens’s latest collaboration with Nübling.Three Kingdoms is a dark thriller about sex trafficking. It begins with two British detectives, the botany-loving Ignatius and the German-speaking Charlie Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This music crept by me on the waters. Bangladesh’s Dhaka Theatre’s version of The Tempest took the musical route, and why not? It was always Shakespeare’s most musical play (with extant music for “Full Fathom Five” and other songs written by Robert Johnson). Four centuries after its premiere, probably over the river in Blackfriars, the play has been done in myriad incarnations around the world, including numerous sci-fi accounts, and bounced back to London last night courtesy of Rubayet Ahmed’s version.The adaptation included snippets of well-known Bengali folk tunes – drinking songs for Read more ...
josh.spero
The demands of Titus Andronicus are probably at odds with the constraints of the Globe to Globe season: a travelling troupe would find it hard to get 80 gallons of fake blood through Customs. Nor are they likely to be furnished with the sort of special effects – removable hands, slittable throats – which the play needs.The solution the Tang Shu-wing Theatre Studio, a company from Hong Kong performing in Cantonese, initially seemed to have to devised was perfect. For the first act, in which Roman general Titus demands that a son of the captured Tamora, Queen of the Goths, be killed, and the Read more ...
bella.todd
If you weren’t already aware that the Guest Director of the 2012 Brighton Festival is acting royalty, the preponderance of fop fringes and artfully flung scarves at the Dome Concert Hall on Saturday night was a good clue. Vanessa Redgrave is the figurehead for this year’s reliably eclectic (if a little conceptually convoluted) programme. And judging by the opening Q&A, dotted with as many grassroots political activists as members of the Redgrave clan, she’s going to be a busy one.Would she come to a meeting next Saturday? asked a hopeful man from the Labour History Movement. Alas, she Read more ...
joe.muggs
The masterstroke of this take on Othello was to draw its focus away from race. It might seem odd to say that of a production in the rhyming vernacular of hip hop in which the Moor was African-American and the rest of the cast were not – but it was deftly done, and as a result avoided any number of crass parallels that could have been drawn, instead focusing on the meat of the play: love and betrayal among men.Acted and narrated, and occasionally sung and danced, by a cast of four men (plus DJ) taking all roles, the action was transplanted from the original's military campaign far from home to Read more ...
graham.rickson
Feeling apprehensive about opera companies tackling Broadway musicals is understandable. So if you’re still wincing at the memory of Leonard Bernstein’s excruciating 1980s recording of West Side Story, relax - director Jo Davies’s intention was to cast “opera singers who can really, really act” and avoid the potential pitfalls of a fully-fledged operatic approach. And the singing in this new production is consistently good; brilliant in places.There’s also the luxury of hearing James Holmes’s full orchestra play Richard Rodgers’s score, though you can’t help feeling that Don Walker’s recently Read more ...
fisun.guner
Mention that a Palestinian theatre company are performing Richard II and the play’s themes are immediately thrown into sharp relief: usurpation, homeland and banishment, and the idea of a literally God-given mandate to rule amongst a resistant people. It is the hope of great art that it brings peoples and nations together, but not at the expense of highlighting issues that tear them asunder.And such controversies haven’t been confined to the play: Mark Rylance, the Globe’s former artistic director, was among a number of signatories to an open letter calling for the boycott of Habima, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
One day soon Beatles scholars and Professors of Fabology will emerge from their caverns and their ashrams to inform us that it was 50 years ago today. On 5 October 1962 “Love Me Do” was released and, to recycle a phrase often appended to lesser earthquakes, the world would never be the same again. There will be celebrations, doubtless, across the universe. Tribute bands will perform bootleg gigs in the likes of, probably, Indonesia and the Baltic, all booted and suited and moptopped up and harmonising like the Everlys etc etc. American Fab Fourists will, in the slightly imperialistic way that Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Einstein on the Beach was meant to be one of the jewels in the crown for the Cultural Olympiad. The celebrated 1970s collaboration between Philip Glass, Robert Wilson and Lucinda Childs - which Susan Sontag claimed to be one of the greatest theatrical experiences of the 20th century - was receiving its UK premiere at the Barbican Theatre last night, thirty-six years after it was first created. And what we got was a technical shambles.Pretty much everything that could go wrong technically did go wrong. Lighting cues were botched. Drop cloths rose prematurely. Stage hands wandered on from the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Life was altogether richer when Dennis Potter was around to provoke us, to make us look queasily at the corrupt, hypocritical or despairing aspects of our lives, ever entertainingly, with a wink and a song. Whenever a Potter play or serial was to air on television, one knew there would be plenty to talk about.The talking points of Brimstone and Treacle when it was made for the BBC in 1976 involved the devil, a rape, and the fact that we couldn’t actually watch the play – it having been banned by the Beeb’s director of television, who described it as “brilliantly written and made, but Read more ...