Theatre
ash.smyth
I have to confess it was about five minutes in to Dennis Kelly’s DNA last night before I concluded, definitively, that I had seen it before. Four years ago, it was part of the Connections programme at the National Theatre – a scheme for generating short, double-billable, "youth"-friendly plays that, practically speaking, don’t require the operating budget and elephant-handlers of a Veronese Aïda.But Kelly’s star is now in the ascendant – he is better known, principally, as Mr Matilda – and his quietly simmering ensemble piece is embarking on a national tour, in a production by Hull Truck. A “ Read more ...
Patricia Cumper
When I lived in the Caribbean in my twenties, one of the books I found at the bottom of the remaindered bin of Kingston’s largest book shop was Theatre of the Absurd by Martin Esslin. I read it without any real sense of its context but there was something about its central idea that struck a chord with me. Perhaps it was living in a society where death and violence were part of everyday life, perhaps it was my own rather bumbling efforts at understanding existentialism that made it remarkable. Esslin talked a great deal about Waiting for Godot. Nearly 20 years later I sat in a Read more ...
james.woodall
In opening words cited in the programme for Primavera’s new production of Howard Brenton’s Bloody Poetry (1984) the playwright states he wanted to remind people of “England’s radical, republican tradition” as “Thatcher set about shredding it”. So he chose to dramatise sections of the lives of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley in self-exile, post-Waterloo, in Switzerland and Italy. It was an odd choice.The result was a play about poetry, dreams, idealism and personal depravity, not politics or public radicalism, or anything that engaged with early-1980s Britain. Byron and Shelley – along Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The murder drama is a staple of television schedules. And for every Miss Marple or Rosemary and Thyme there are many more trickling from the Lynda La Plante vein, whose currency of gore, horror and perversion seem to suffer permanently from inflation. Yet there’s little even in the grim likes of Messiah to equal the Jacobean capacity for horror, for incestuous, libidinous, blood-lusting violence and moral decay – T.S. Eliot’s “skull beneath the skin”. Middleton’s The Changeling spreads its fleshy veneer thinly indeed, and in Joe Hill-Gibbins’ new production the grinning death-mask beneath is Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Critics can also be historians. In my opinion, the great new wave of 1990s British theatre starts not with Sarah Kane’s Blasted in 1995, nor with Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking a year later, but with polymath Philip Ridley’s amazing debut, The Pitchfork Disney, in 1991. Now, with this long overdue revival which opened last night, we get another chance to sample a powerful and imaginative drama in all its glittering and eerie strangeness.Set in a dimly lit room in the East End of London, the play starts by showing the hermit-like existence of Presley and Haley Stray, a couple of 28-year Read more ...
Veronica Lee
With its mistaken identities, a meddling mother, a chest of precious jewels, gulling of fops and two pairs of thwarted lovers, it's easy to see Shakespearean overtones in Oliver Goldsmith's 1773 masterpiece. And because She Stoops to Conquer's witty and intelligent heroine, Kate, outsmarts her would-be suitor Marlow, it's even more tempting to see it as having shades of The Taming of the Shrew, only without the difficult bits for modern audiences.Whatever else it may be, She Stoops to Conquer is a delightful and warm-hearted comedy of manners that is as relevant today in its depiction of Read more ...
hilary.whitney
In 1992 Northern Broadsides, the Halifax-based theatre company founded by Barrie Rutter, staged its first production, Richard III. Rutter (b 1946), an established actor who had worked with some of the most distinguished names in theatre such as Jonathan Miller, Terry Hands, Peter Hall and Trevor Nunn, directed the show and also played the title role. However, what made this production unique was that it was performed entirely by a cast speaking with northern voices - note, not northern accents, more of which later.Admittedly that may sound far from innovative today’s theatre audiences who are Read more ...
Matt Wolf
No one can exactly accuse Federico Garcia Lorca's 1936 play of falling into neglect. From Howard Davies's National Theatre revival to this latest reclamation by the Almeida, The House of Bernarda Alba has received six separate airings in (or near) London within almost seven years. The various treatments include an American stage musical, an adaptation relocated to Pakistan, and a puppet play performed to a pre-recorded Farsi soundtrack. Bijan Sheibani's current production is live-action, to be sure, but follows the Middle Eastern motif: this is the first Lorca revival in my experience to Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Write what you know, the cliché goes, and in his new drama the playwright Chris Lee draws on his day job as a social worker to create a tense two-hander about a middle-class social worker and her client, a working-class single mother who kills her baby. Inspired by the notorious case of Baby P, the piece adopts an intriguing form in order to examine the realities behind the tabloid headlines about evil mums and monstrous sinners.Moira, the social worker, visits Dawn, the single mother, and discovers to her horror that she has abused her baby. As a consequence of the case, Dawn is imprisoned Read more ...
carole.woddis
The Old Vic Tunnels would seem to be the perfect place to set three of Eugene O’Neill’s three earliest plays about the sea, drenched as they are in the stench of life in the heavy engine room of merchant navy life. For the tunnels, secreted directly underneath Waterloo Station, shudder ceaselessly to the rumble of trains overhead and are saturated in their own heavy industrial atmosphere. Indeed as you enter you’re hit by the smell of dust and damp running at full blast. Come prepared. It’s dark and putrid down there. Wrap up warm.Waterloo Station’s converted railway vaults, barely two years Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Some theatre openings will be legendary for all time. One such was the Parisian evening of 10 December 1896 when Alfred Jarry’s character Père Ubu stepped onto the stage at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre and intoned “Merdre!” (roughly translated as Shittr!). The effect was electric, and the scandal outlasted the show's run. In Simon Stephens’s new version of the play, which opened last night, the original story has been supplemented with a longer second half that updates the action to today, and sees mad boy Ubu tried for war crimes.As an exponent of the imaginary science of pataphysics, which is Read more ...
theartsdesk
When the London theatre critics gathered to hand out their annual awards at lunchtime today in person, a notable percentage of the gongs were carried off by the National Theatre. There was no surprise, for example, that the best new play was One Man, Two Guvnors by former winner Richard Bean; in a thin year for blockbuster musicals, it was perhaps no surprise either that the best new musical was London Road, a rare foray for the genre into seriousness which dramatised in song the murder of five sex workers in Ipswich.The National also prospered with Frankenstein, which divided critics when it Read more ...