Theatre
Veronica Lee
After 12 years in the business, Dana Alexander, an ebullient and instantly likeable presence on stage, is still the only black woman on the Canadian comedy circuit. Not that her ethnicity is Alexander's pre-occupation – it most definitely isn't – but it does play a part in her act.New Arrival deals with being an outsider, primarily as a Canadian now living in London, but clearly also as someone who has had similar experiences in North America. As she says, she started out in Alberta – "the Texas of Canada" - and gets great mileage out of her extended Jamaican/American/British family. The Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The talented Mr Jude Law is back on stage in what must be the hottest ticket in the West End. Although not everyone warmed to his 2009 Hamlet, the mere presence in central London of one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars is enough to bring a touch of sunshine to a wintry summer. My main anxiety was that, as a reaction to the riots sweeping the capital, the Government would call a curfew and close the show, which was due to open last night. I needn’t have worried. It opened on schedule.And Law doesn’t disappoint. He has a real talent to surprise: here, he inhabits the bearded, brawny body of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Drop that long face," we're urged during the end of the giddy Regent's Park revival of Crazy For You, and if ever there were a time for such sentiments, it came during the lockdown that London remained under during the all too aptly cloud-filled evening that saw the Open Air Theatre not quite full. Nor was it lost on many spectators that the glorious George and Ira Gershwin score was giddily filling a night air punctuated at regular intervals by the distant (or maybe not) sound of sirens.But Timothy Sheader's production exerts its own siren song that functions as an escapist tonic Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
“There’s nothing worse than dirt in your tea,” opines one of the stoic officers in RC Sherriff’s First World War drama. It’s a pronouncement, emitted from beneath a stiff upper lip, of courageous cheeriness in the face of circumstances so brutal, so horrifying, so obscenely soaked in blood and suffering and futility, that taking refuge in mundane routine is one of very few available comforts. Small wonder that gentle, fatherly Lieutenant Osborne, seeking solace between the pages of Lewis Carroll, finds the absurdities there so familiar. Small wonder, too, that Sherriff’s 1928 play – in a Read more ...
David Benedict
It’s not much of an exaggeration to suggest that new plays by up-and-coming talents are something of an Achilles heel at the National Theatre. Even Mike Bartlett’s much lauded Earthquakes in London was a far more exciting production than it was a play, while Greenland proved so devoid of audience that it was pulled early from the schedule. The latter did no favours to anyone by yoking together four dramatists including the impressive Penelope Skinner. Now four more emerging playwrights have been given their head but this time their voices remain distinct in the two double bills that Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Rebecca Gilman is an American playwright who once made a big splash in London. After having work such as The Glory of Living, Spinning into Butter, Boy Gets Girl and The Sweetest Swing in Baseball staged at the Royal Court Theatre in the first five years of the new millennium, she then disappeared from view. Now she’s back in the capital with a 2001 play, whose UK premiere opened last night and which takes a peek at some close relationships between cops and hookers in a small Midwest town.Somewhere along Route 29 is a little whorehouse called Naughty But Nice. Two of the teens working there, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The phenomenal Eduardo de Filippo has no parallel in British theatre. Cross Olivier with Ayckbourn and you get a national institution who acted in and directed his own plays in his own theatre. Born in 1900, it seems odd that he had to wait until 1977 for his first honorary doctorate, odder that the award came not from his native Naples but from the University of Birmingham.De Filippo (or Eduardo, as he was universally known) first tied a bond with this country when he brought Napoli milionaria, his first mature postwar work, to the Aldwych in 1972. The bond was tightened by the National Read more ...
bella.todd
Halfway through Sean Mathias’s gripping new production of The Syndicate, Ian McKellen’s Don Antonio Barracano reaches for his hat, stick and gloves and heads out through the olive groves to "make [a man] an offer". He looks and sounds like a nice old gent setting out for an afternoon stroll. Unless, of course, you’re passingly acquainted with The Godfather.Set in the criminal underworld of Sixties Naples, Eduardo de Filippo’s dark-cornered comedy is a far, far better play than its performance history here in the UK (just one radio production with Paul Scofield) might have you believe. A Read more ...
kevin.madden
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If you thought Bible stories were just for Sunday school, think again. Shakespeare’s Globe - the open-air reproduction of the original “wooden O” on London’s Bankside where past and present collide and eager groundlings jostle in the Yard for the best view - is bringing them to vibrant life in this summer’s revival of The Mysteries. Based on medieval dramas created by guildsmen in York, Wakefield, Chester and Coventry, poet and playwright Tony Harrison Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A blackout, a snowstorm, a scream, and there you have it – the longest-running play of all time. The mystery of The Mousetrap is legendary, preserved by a code of silence that bonds all those who have performed and watched this classic whodunnit. Yet greater even than this is surely the enigma of how so generic, so unassuming a play should come to endure so persistently. Is it merely tradition that keeps Agatha Christie’s Mousetrap in business, or can this period piece really still have something fresh to say in its resolutely RP tones?Approaching its 25,000th performance, The Mousetrap is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In a recent article, David Hare complained about “a national festival of reaction” in the arts, exemplified by such supposedly Establishment-leaning works as The King’s Speech and Downton Abbey. His real target was Terence Rattigan, currently being hailed in many quarters as a national theatrical treasure enjoying a renaissance in this centenary year of his birth.Far from being neglected, argued Hare, Rattigan has rarely been out of the limelight, but his work now chimes with the “wheedling tone of self-righteous privilege” which he detects as a hallmark of the David Cameron era. I don’t know Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Terence Rattigan’s art of concealment is what makes The Deep Blue Sea so rich and true an observation of the way people behave. Being deprived of his concealing mask is the crucial idea of the interesting new play partnering it at Chichester to mark Rattigan's centenary: Nicholas Wright’s Rattigan’s Nijinsky, which incorporates an unproduced Rattigan TV script into a drama of why it was not produced.The two plays, acutely directed for Chichester by Philip Franks, make illuminating contrast, too, purely in theatrical method - Rattigan’s straight-up focus on people in a room and the things Read more ...