Theatre
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 ...
alexandra.coghlan
Alan Bennett’s The Madness of George III has enjoyed something of a royal progress around England over the past year. Touring in Christopher Luscombe’s slick production for the Peter Hall Company, the show has finally arrived in the West End. The part of the ailing and eccentric monarch (“a catalogue of regal non-conformities”), and indeed the play itself, may have become synonymous with Nigel Hawthorne, but after an evening spent getting to know David Haig’s altogether more robust King George, there are surely few who would question him as the role’s legitimate heir: no hint of a troubled Read more ...
Lisa Dillon
I have never seen another Kate so I didn’t have any preconceived ideas about the role. I was incredibly excited to play this woman in a play which is regarded as so heavily misogynistic and very much a battle of the sexes - to make this Kate very specific and individual and not just a sweeping generalisation of what it is to be a “woman” living in a patriarchal society.How do you go about doing that? I do believe it’s in the play, that she is as much a victim of her own behaviour as she is of the society she lives in. She has to take responsibility for that. Nobody can exist in a patriarchal Read more ...
graham.rickson
You approach the theatre via a cobbled side street and you’re harangued by a Salvation Army officer, pleading with you not to go inside this house of ill-repute. The City Varieties is an under-appreciated jewel of a venue, a Victorian music hall recently reopened after an expensive refit. The carpets are no longer sticky underfoot and the seats are slightly comfier. Fortunately, not much else has changed. This is an extraordinary time capsule of a place.A two-minute walk from the garish delights of 21st-century Leeds, and it feels as if you’ve stepped back in time. Which is the point. Big Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Alfie’s back. The eponymous scallywag from the late Bill Naughton’s picaresque yarn set in London’s so-called Swinging Sixties is at it again, canoodling the women and cuckolding their husbands. “Keep them all happy,” he says in cavalier style, “Happiness is transitory, of the moment.” He takes no responsibility other than helping to arrange the odd back-street abortion. Never get attached and never get dependent - these are his watchwords. Life’s a giggle. His attitude to women is expressed by his dated vocabulary – “bint”, “bird” or just “it”. And he’s always on the fiddle.Half a century Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
An interfering producer, an accountant who keeps trying to cut corners and costs, even a casting couch – making movies was never easy, according to this amiable new play by Nicholas Wright. Set in 1930s Hollywood and, in flashback, in turn-of-the-century Eastern Europe, it is a kind of celluloid fantasia that charts a path from the shtetl to the stars. Films, for young Motl and the people of his village, are flickering, silvery dreams; a way of capturing a moment in time forever, of preserving memory, of drawing a connective thread between the present and the future. And they are emblematic Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Suddenly, it seems as if the brawling youngster that was once new writing for the British theatre has grown up. Now, all it wants to talk about is the family, about having babies, and about what it’s like to be a parent. In Nancy Harris’s new play, which opened last night, the dubious joys of parenthood in an upper-middle-class family are eclipsed by the unexpected arrival of a new nanny. The inevitable question soon comes screaming at you: whose hand will be rocking the cradle?Opening with an unforgettable image of a child in danger, the play swiftly tumbles into a scene of awkward Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Till death do us part: love and death are, like the fingers of a couple holding hands, perfectly intertwined in this play by Abi Morgan, which has been touring the country since autumn and opened in London last night. For about 90 minutes, we watch the ups and downs of the marriage of Maggie and Billy across four decades and through several leaps into the unknown. In its ambition, beauty and delicacy, this is a ravishing piece of work.The plot is very simple. In the 1960s, a British couple meet, fall in love and marry. They emigrate to the United States; he then borrows money from the bank to Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The National Theatre's summer highlights include Simon Russell Beale directed by Nicholas Hytner in Shakespeare's Timon of Athens and Julie Walters as an ageing society dropout in the debut stage play by TV writer Stephen Beresford, The Last of the Haussmans. Spring 2012 Preview 11 Jan, press night 18 January, Nicholas Wright’s Travelling Light (WORLD PREMIERE), Lyttelton Theatre, on tour & NT Live 9 February. Antony Sher stars as Jacob in a comic tale about the Eastern European background of a Hollywood film director. Set designs by Bob Crowley, costumes by Vicki Mortimer, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Of all the 20th century’s literary dystopias, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has proved most tenacious, epitomised by its sinister promise: “Big Brother is watching you.” But what happens when he stops watching? What becomes of us when the all-seeing eye of civil authority blinks shut for good, leaving us gazing, alone in perpetuity, at one another? It’s the unsettling question posed by Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos. Written some five years prior to Orwell’s novel, the play’s existential vision of Hell (famously defined here as “other people”) might not have claimed the same place in the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
London's Barbican Centre is 30 this year, and with a special Olympics subsidy boost as the world's eyes turn to the British capital this summer, it aims to be as lovely inside as it is famously unlovely outside. Film beauties Cate Blanchett and Juliette Binoche appear live on stage and theatre giants Pina Bausch, Philip Glass and Shakespeare are celebrated in a season of prominent internationalism. Peter Sellars, Toni Morrison, Yukio Ninagawa, Krzysztof Penderecki and Chick Corea are among many other world names invited to EC2 over the season. Three key British theatre companies are Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Siân Phillips (b 1933) belongs to a remarkable generation of British actresses. They include Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins, Vanessa Redgrave, Joan Plowright and Sheila Hancock. Although just as indomitable a presence on stage and screen, Phillips is set apart from them not only by dint of her Welshness – Welsh was her mother language as a child – but also by the curious shape of her career.As she has detailed in two memoirs – Private Faces (1999) and Public Places (2001) - Phillips was originally called Jane, but a schoolteacher Cymrified her name for her in class and it stuck. She Read more ...