Theatre
ash.smyth
Who does the PR these days for Middle Eastern extremists? Whoever it is clearly wasn’t on board when the Palestine Liberation Front decided to whack the Achille Lauro. Or wasn’t aware that chucking a wheelchair-bound pensioner into the Med was the sort of move unlikely to garner widespread international support for the cause.It’s bemusing to me that anyone could interpret The Death of Klinghoffer as in any way anti-Semitic (anti-Israel, maybe…) or, for that matter, that anyone could consider it offensive were the opera to be found stridently anti-Palestinian-extremism. But, y’know, whatever. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
“The lady from the sea” is what a remote Norwegian fjord town calls the young second wife of its good doctor, an elusive woman who seems to walk in the footsteps of the ghost of her well-loved predecessor. Joely Richardson is doing much the same by taking on an Ibsen role previously frequented by her mother and sister, Vanessa Redgrave and Natasha Richardson, and directed by her dad, Tony Richardson - and it’s hard to say whether it’s her comparative slightness of gifts or Stephen Unwin’s domesticated direction that make so little of an enticingly strange play.There are pre-echoes of Maurice Read more ...
aleks.sierz
What’s it like to be young, British and Muslim in the age of austerity? In an era of global financial crisis, high unemployment and shrinking pay packets, what can this country offer British Asian youth? New talent Ishy Din poses these questions in his storming debut play which takes a trip to the local snooker hall in the company of four blokes, plays a few rounds of pool, downs a few pints and then chats its way up and down the walls and across the ceiling of the place, before quietly staggering home.The play’s title refers both to players who can’t make a direct shot in a game of pool and Read more ...
ash.smyth
Zach Braff’s debut theatre piece begins with Charlie (Mr Braff himself), in an empty house, swinging from a noosed extension lead, attempting to do the big FO while f(l)ailing to extinguish a cigarette and listening to the bagpipes on a record-player. At which crucial moment he is interrupted by Emma, a flibbertigibbety-type Brit realtor; then Myron, the local drama-teacher-turned-fire-chief/drug-kingpin; and then Kim, a callgirl. All of whom seem hell bent on spoiling Charlie’s big day.So far, then, so full of comic potential – and indeed, with All New People, both as script-writer and as Read more ...
Dylan Moore
There is a simple explanation to why Cardiff-born Peter Gill has never directed in his home city, despite the fact that many of his own plays are set in the Catholic, working-class Cardiff of his youth. “I’d never been asked,” states Gill matter-of-factly; “it’s just a trade; it’s not a magical world. You have to ask me to do things.”There is something bracing about the lack of sentimentality with which Gill addresses the question of homecoming. It fits with the setting of our conversation too: a big, airy rehearsal room at the newly-rebuilt Sherman Theatre in the heart of Cardiff’s student- Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The Royal Court has been finding and developing young writers for four decades. Its Young Writers Festival has helped launch the careers of a variety of talents such as Simon Stephens (winner of the 2005 Olivier for Best Newcomer), Christopher Shinn (nominated for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize), Bola Agbaje (winner of an Olivier in 2008), as well as Michael Wynne, Chloe Moss and Alia Bano. This year, along with a full programme of readings, short plays, workshops and talks, it hosts two full-length plays. The first, which opened last night, is actor Luke Norris’s London debut.In a series of rapid Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Winsome” isn’t a word you hear very often these days. The taint of coy, simpering campery already hung about it in the 1920s when Noël Coward gave it a starring role in the after-dinner word-charades of his hit Hay Fever. Yet now (as then) it’s a word that speaks to precisely the brand of giddy, self-conscious charm Coward’s play so determinedly exerts. Howard Davies’s new production splashes gaily about in the work’s theatrical shallows, giggling, posing and romping with the skill of a Monte Carlo ingenue. The result is a show that’s seriously good without ever feeling the need to get Read more ...
philip radcliffe
“Am I for t’ see mi own lad bitted an’ bobbed? Theer’s more blort than bustle i’ this world - an’ ‘er’s a clat-fart”. Welcome to the old curiosity shop of English drama, from which Manchester Library Theatre director Chris Honer has dusted down one of DH Lawrence’s mining plays, written a century ago, around the time of Sons and Lovers, and not even published, let alone performed, in his lifetime. Lawrence didn’t have much luck with his plays, not being a la mode. Even today, they are not often seen. After all, who wants to sit for just over two hours in a collier’s kitchen listening to the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death is the misleading, jokey title of a play about Shakespeare in his ignoble last years, unable to write further, isolated from his beloved London, and hemmed in by local politics. Shakespeare is invited to become a town councillor! To take sides in a dispute about land enclosures! It’s a cracking re-visioning of the genius whom films and myth have preserved in the aspic of lusty, piratic eloquence.In Edward Bond's creation of 1974, Shakespeare is a middle-class capitalist literary squire, who sits in his big Stratford garden, rich, lionised and 52 (old, in those Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is there a more evocative location than Essex? In his 2000 play Under the Blue Sky, one of David Eldridge’s characters shouts the unforgettable words: “I’m from Essex and I’m dancing!” Now back at this venue for the first time since that play, Eldridge proves that he is much more than the common characterisation of him as “the writer as bloke”. But can his new play, which opened last night and is set in his favourite county, dance as well as his previous ones?Sixtysomething Len is dying of prostate cancer. Gathered around his bedside are his two sisters, Doreen and Maureen, but this picture Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Another week, another tragedy, and another wedding dance routine set to a thumping soundtrack. But while The Changeling buckled under the pressure Joe Hill-Gibbins applied at the Young Vic a few weeks ago, Cheek by Jowl’s ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore bleeds fresh and glossy under Declan Donnellan’s assured touch. This pop-culture remix of a Jacobean classic will pulse long in ears and eyes – a macabre delight that makes a first-rate evening out of a rather second-rate play.Bringing up the rear of the funeral cortege that is revenge tragedy, John Ford’s Tis Pity She’s A Whore finds the genre going Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Half-term may be nearly over for many, but there is no shortage of children’s theatre on offer in London at the moment. Long-running family favourites including Shrek the Musical and The Lion King have recently been joined by the mighty Matilda the Musical, and fans of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse (still stabled in the West End) will be delighted by the author’s latest stage adaptation – Twist of Gold – playing at the Polka Theatre. If it’s thoughtful, educational entertainment you’re after though, Island might just be the show of choice this February.Island is award-winning children’s Read more ...