Theatre
Veronica Lee
Sharon Gless is best known for her role as Detective Christine Cagney in Cagney & Lacey, and then to another generation in the American version of Queer as Folk and currently in the drama Burn Notice. Gless's sexy voice and feisty demeanour in several of her roles has prompted many a fantasy over the years – for men and women, gay and straight - so it's apt that the actress, now a very fit-looking 68 and still in possession of a throaty laugh, is playing a woman who discovers her sexuality in her late sixties.A Round-Heeled Woman is an adaptation of Jane Juska’s bestselling book of the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
John Osborne was the great founding father of contemporary new writing for the theatre. In 1956, his Look Back in Anger changed British drama for ever, and his subsequent work explored the subjects of failure and national identity in language that is both highly rhetorical and at the same time feels as if it is torn from the gut. His 1964 play about the washed-up London solicitor Bill Maitland, which opened last night in Jamie Lloyd’s revival, is one of his masterpieces.The story shows the mental disintegration of the middle-aged Maitland during two days of personal and professional hell. It Read more ...
sheila.johnston
So it's back, then. Garlanded with awards, lionised in London and on Broadway, Jerusalem starring Mark Rylance returns to the West End for a limited run, in the same production and with many members of the earlier cast(s). Is this an opportunistic, irrelevant, premature revival? On the contrary.First produced at the Royal Court in 2009, the new Jerusalem appears to have been lightly dusted with a top-dressing of topical references but, in an England that's even greyer and more unpleasant than it was two years ago, the play barely needs touching up to retain its urgency.There's a big, bawdy Read more ...
David Nice
Russia’s Shakespeare, Alexander Pushkin, has enjoyed imaginative treatment on the British stage and screen. Brighton Theatre’s now-legendary Vanity conjured the world of the verse-novel Eugene Onegin vividly with three actors and minimal props. More folk will remember the cinematic Queen of Spades, with Anton Walbrook’s crazed gambler terrorising the ancient Countess of Edith Evans to death for her secret of three winning cards. Could this sparest of tales, zooming between irony and fright, work equally well on a small stage?Well, yes, but only by forgetting the special qualities of Pushkin's Read more ...
carole.woddis
Sometimes theatre people do mad things. Like stay up all night and the following day to “celebrate” the King James Bible and a theatre’s house-move to new premises. Its 400th year has been a good year for that collection of stories currently being advertised elsewhere as “the book that changed the world”. And for the Bush Theatre's outgoing artistic director Josie Rourke, having moved into John Passmore Edwards’s elegant Victorian Library round the corner from its old Shepherds Bush Green stamping ground this weekend, “There’s no finer act than to open a new theatre - it’s the single most Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
“Go home. This is not your business. This is not your war.” So a Congolese warlord tells Sadhbh, an Irish human-rights defender, in Stella Feehily’s new drama for Out of Joint. Has the arrogance and exploitation of colonialism been replaced by the interference of aid organisations? Are the motives of those drawn to troubled countries purely altruistic? And what real hope have they of making a difference, after the media has lost interest in a conflict and left?Feehily’s drama is painstakingly researched and it asks some big, discomfiting questions about the West’s relationship with nations it Read more ...
David Benedict
Given that Edward Bond, that most austere of playwrights, has refused to allow a London production of his most notorious play, Saved, for over a quarter of a century, it’s neither surprising nor unwise that having been granted the rights, director Sean Holmes is respectful of the text. You can, however, have too much of a good thing. Long before the three hours and five minutes' running time is up, you realise that in this over-deliberate production respect has curdled into reverence.It’s not hard to see why. This, after all, is a rare opportunity to set the record straight on a play Read more ...
fisun.guner
Is there something remarkable about a group of working-class men learning to paint? You may think there is, or you may think there isn’t. You may think that anyone with very little formal education learning to do any of the things associated with High Art – even if the results are quite naïve – is, in itself, astonishing. Or you may not: give someone a brush, paints and a board and, your clear-eyed reasoning might tell you, either genuine talent emerges or it doesn’t. You may find yourself also wondering: is it a peculiar habit of English sentimentality to find the type of story embodied by Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s obviously a coincidence. Backbeat, the story of The Beatles’ Hamburg days, their ill-fated bassist and John Lennon's art-school mate Stuart Sutcliffe hits the West End the same week that Martin Scorsese's George Harrison documentary Living in the Material World comes out. Even ignoring comparisons between the two, Backbeat is an incoherent mess.Sutcliffe’s story has become a perennial, not limited to Beatle book shelves. Granada TV’s Midnight Angel covered it in 1990. The BBC’s Stuart Sutcliffe - The Lost Beatle did so in 2005. The film Backbeat came out in 1994. It was directed by Iain Read more ...
David Nice
The 1968 film at least has Beryl Reid, who could even have lit up the kind of third-tier Carry On affair Frank Marcus’s flat script often resembles, as well as documentary-value scenes of the famous lesbian Gateways club in Chelsea. Without anything of its Sixties weirdness and with every sign of catastrophic casting, director Iqbal Khan’s attempt to drag the drama out of its swamp is doomed. Worst of all, the biggest charisma bypass of all is Meera Syal’s in the leading role.How odd that a comedienne should lack an inch of Reid's consummate timing. Neither sacred nor monstrous, stumbling Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
This November, experimental theatre company Hydrocracker will bring The New World Order – a site-specific cycle of five Pinter plays – to a former government building in Hackney. Doubtless the immersive impact will add disquieting emphasis to Pinter’s dark tales of totalitarian power and abuse of authority, but if you prefer your Pinter a served a little straighter, briefer and with greater intimacy, then the Young Vic’s miniature double-bill One For The Road/Victoria Station offers a fairly devastating warm-up act.Not seen out in public together since Pinter himself directed their London Read more ...
David Benedict
You can accuse Alfred Uhry's 1987 play Driving Miss Daisy of many things – being overtly sentimental is top of the charge sheet – but you certainly cannot claim that it’s a case of false advertising. Even if, like this critic, you missed the original stage version or any of its revivals, not to mention the Oscar-winning movie, it’s painfully clear from the opening scene in which the heroine is forced to hire a chauffeur that this is not just precisely but wholly a play about Miss Daisy being driven. With the, excuse me, Rolls-Royce casting of Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones, it Read more ...