Theatre
aleks.sierz
It’s the star factor. Tickets for Big and Small, by the controversial German writer Botho Strauss, are selling fast because Cate Blanchett is in it. Her protean presence in this production by the Sydney Theatre Company, of which she is the co-artistic director, casts a glow over the whole event — she’s on stage for almost the entire running time of two and three-quarter hours. But there are other pleasures to savour here: chief of these is playwright Martin Crimp’s fresh, crisp and contemporary translation of the text.Strauss’s 1978 play — Gross und Klein — is about Lotte (Blanchett) and her Read more ...
Gwyneth Lewis
Like many students, I read the Oresteia by Aeschylus as an undergraduate as part of a compulsory Tragedy paper. A while ago I was asked would I do a new version of the Oresteia. I’m not a Greek scholar so I feel I have no authority to offer a "translation". However, I was up for writing a completely new play.Aeschylus’s Oresteia tells of Agamemnon returning from the Trojan war and being murdered by his wife Clytmnestra because he sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia as part of the campaign. In Aeschylus, Clytemnestra is a wicked man-woman who upstages her husband, takes a lover and is later Read more ...
aleks.sierz
When Madani Younis became the new artistic director of the Bush, some questioned his commitment to new writing, while others asked what he would bring to this small but high-profile venue. With this, his inaugural production, which opened last night, some answers suggest themselves: he’s chosen a solid new play, and he has introduced London audiences to a Lee Mattinson, a northern voice.Chalet Lines is set in Butlins holiday camp in Skegness. It’s 2010 and, every year for the past half century, the women of the Walker family have come down from Newcastle to stay in Chalet number 12. This year Read more ...
Ismene Brown
We’ve seen a few American film and TV actresses grace the West End stage with surprising potency, but no one surely will surpass Laurie Metcalf for profound emotional truth-telling in Eugene O’Neill’s shattering family drama, given an unbeatably cast new production in London’s West End. Metcalf's by no means famous over here now, so long after her brilliant stint in Roseanne Barr's Nineties sitcom, but this is one of those performances you won't forget, up there in the Vanessa Redgrave class.The play, set exactly a century ago, famously portrays O’Neill’s own family, so much so that he would Read more ...
philip radcliffe
The cultural triumvirate of the Hallé Orchestra, the Royal Exchange Theatre and The Lowry have joined forces for this new production of the 1953 hit musical Wonderful Town. Leonard Bernstein would surely have been a happy man to hear his score, dashed off in a mere five weeks at short notice, played by the 65-strong Hallé Orchestra conducted by Sir Mark Elder, who has been nursing the ambition to do the show here since he saw the 2004 Broadway production. Fisher has pizzazz and a gift for comedyOn The Town or West Side Story, written either side of it, it is not, but the rich score has Read more ...
philip radcliffe
The world premiere here of Monkee Business the Musical was planned long before the untimely death in February of Davy Jones, the Manchester-born member of the manufactured band that outsold The Beatles and the Rolling Stones half a century ago. The coincidence lends a poignancy to the event and the Manchester run has been dedicated to his memory. The little jockey did well, reluctantly giving up horse-racing as a teenager, at his dad’s insistence, to star as the Artful Dodger in Oliver! in the West End and Broadway before being signed up by NBC Television for the Monkees Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Edinburgh International Festival runs this year from 9 August to 2 September, with an energetically global look. Forty-seven nations - around a third of the world's countries - are represented in a conscious reflection of the focus of the London Olympics.A new unorthodox theatrical space has been added with the conversion of the Royal Highland Centre’s Lowland Hall for three unconventional stagings: Grzegorz Jarzyna’s Macbeth, Ariane Mnouchkine's Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir (Aurores) and Christoph Marthaler's comic adaptation of My Fair Lady, Meine faire Dame – ein Sprachlabor.Other Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A play of boundaries, limitations, barriers, one that gazes outwards while never crossing the threshold, Uncle Vanya is often betrayed by the physical space of major stagings. In a new production at Notting Hill’s The Print Room the audience find themselves trapped along with Vanya, Sonya and their dysfunctional family in a single room. Ranged around the four walls we crowd in upon the (in)action, waiting together with the characters for the rupture that will release the tension. This is Chekhov at his most intimate, and the truths that emerge are predictably painful, but also warm and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This is the Jacobean tragedy that probably gave Quentin Tarantino his best ideas - by the end of the night the body count is almost in double figures through stabbings and strangulations. But even as the fake blood flows and the gurglings mount, Jamie Lloyd's sturdy but sometimes sluggish production of John Webster's masterpiece (c 1614) isn't exactly gripping.Lloyd, who recently directed a romping version of She Stoops to Conquer down the road at the National to great acclaim, has fewer directorial flourishes up his sleeve here. Oh, he tries to sex it up – we first see the duplicitous Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Little more than a year since The King’s Speech hit pay dirt at the Oscars, David Seidler’s tale of a prince stuttering between duty and impediment takes to the stage. Rather than a speedy and cynical exploitation of the film’s success, the move actually reflects Seidler’s original ambition for his story; and while we might reasonably have feared déjà vu and a pale shadow of the film, what we discover is a thematically richer, yet equally delightful experience.For those who have been in a different realm these past 12 months, the king in question is George VI, who reluctantly replaced his Read more ...