Theatre
alexandra.coghlan
“Where once was certainty is now only void.” The age of John Donne was also the age of Galileo, Milton, of Hobbes, Francis Bacon and, of course, the King James Bible, whose 400th anniversary we celebrate this year. At the intersection of politics, religion and scientific philosophy, Donne’s life under James I holds up a mirror to the conflicted age that produced this extraordinary work of scholarship. Meshing the poet’s biography, his work and social history, Jonathan Holmes has produced a play whose scholarship and subject matter may be serious, but whose theatricality is poignantly, Read more ...
james.woodall
If a great whorl of bubblegum were plonked on Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth all summer long, would there be any point in complaining about it? How do you criticise the uncriticisable? A new Much Ado About Nothing at Wyndham's is Shakespeare-by-television: failsafe. As theartsdesk has recently pointed out, there is the "other production" at the Globe, which celeb chatter over and vast publicity for this brassy West End one have conspired to relegate to a sideshow somewhere obscure south of the Thames. Chances are, the latter's more like a Much Ado people will want to see and be moved by Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Everybody’s talking about Much Ado About Nothing. At dinner tables, the pub and on the Bakerloo Line the only cultural conversation to be overheard having is whether David Tennant and Catherine Tate will be as wonderful as we all want them to be as Shakespeare’s feuding lovers Beatrice and Benedick. Their West End show opens next week, and among all the hype and headlines another production (and it was always going to be the “other production”) has quietly opened down at Bankside – a show with such warmth and knockabout energy that if Tate and Tennant are not very brilliant indeed they may Read more ...
theartsdesk
The inaugural year of National Theatre Wales included an immensely ambitious body of work which tested to the limit the definition of what a national theatre can and should be. In new venues and old, found spaces and open spaces, it staged several freshly created plays, some retrieved ones, as well as adaptations, devised pieces and, in Aeschylus'sThe Persians, the oldest play of all. The year was capped at Easter by the widely hailed The Passion of Port Talbot starring Michael Sheen. Now NTW has announced its second season and it looks to be just as boundary-pushing as the first. Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
With The Cherry Orchard just opened at the National Theatre and The School for Scandal at the Barbican, summer is quickly proving itself the season for classic theatrical revivals. The latest to join the London line-up is Shaw’s perennially beloved comedy of love and the English language, Pygmalion. Debuted at at the Chichester Festival Theatre last July, Philip Prowse’s traditional production returns a year on with a West End home and some starry new cast members, hoping to charm fresh audiences with this oldest of theatrical fairytales.Paying homage – as Shaw’s title so pointedly does – to Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Dropped trousers, audience participation and an onstage skiffle band fronted by a singer/songwriter boasting specs by way of Buddy Holly: what has become of the National Theatre's Lyttelton auditorium? Well, let's just say that for the entire first act of One Man, Two Guvnors, it's got to be easily the giddiest theatrical address in town. And when the momentum flags, as it does somewhat after the interval, not to worry. By that point, Richard Bean's Goldoni rewrite has generated enough goodwill that you all but float home.That is, if you even feel like leaving, given a show so full of high Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The tiny Kussuluk airport, halfway up the jagged eastern coast of Greenland, caters mostly for intrepid climbers. Like all airports it sells mementoes and knick-knacks that nobody needs, including in this case a set of classic polar pipes. No matter that it’s the pole at the other end of the Earth they’re talking about. The pipes are named after famous explorers: the Scott, the Amundsen, the Shackleton and - a good one, this, for Antarctic trainspotters - the Crean. Unless you know your polar literature, it’s likely that the name Crean will have passed you by, and with it his remarkable story Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Anya Reiss must be the most precocious playwright in London. Her 2010 debut, Spur of the Moment, written while she was just 17 and still studying for her A levels, won two Most Promising Playwright awards, from the London Evening Standard and the Critics’ Circle. Now her follow-up, The Acid Test, which opened last night at the Royal Court in this new-writing flagship’s upstairs studio, prompts me to ask whether she was just a one-hit wonder - and can she avoid the second-album syndrome?Three young women, barely out of their teens, share a messy London flat. Dana, Ruth and Jessica are nice Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
"There’s no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature,” preaches the Gospel according to Richard Brinsley Sheridan. What the playwright omits to mention, however, is that it is possible to be ill-natured without in fact being terribly witty, a flaw that proves almost fatal for Warner’s acerbic, alienated new production of The School for Scandal. Overstyling Sheridan’s most stylised of comedies, Warner turns what Hazlitt described as the most “finished and faultless” play into a mass of tensions, exaggerations and contradictions. The result can be exhilarating in the moment, but Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Which came first? The low national self-esteem or the shit national football team? Is it possible, in the interests of blending in with one’s countrymen, to stimulate in oneself a love of the beautiful game? And can Britishness be boiled down to an application test? Total Football, from the two-man company Ridiculusmus, is a fleet-footed comedy which investigates the shifting parameters of what it means to belong in a country where symbols of national pride are hard to come by. Unless you count Wayne Rooney.The drama, to be reductive about a playful, shape-shifting think piece, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If your heart breaks a continent or more away from home, does it make a noise? Very much so in the scintillating Royal Shakespeare Company/Filter collaboration Silence, the second in a series of three RSC premieres at the Hampstead Theatre. Wedding Filter's interest in the synergy between technology and text with a subset of Shakespeareans who have been wandering the Forest of Arden on and off for the past two years, Silence plunges its expert ensemble into the forest of metal that makes up one aspect of Jon Bausor's set. Will the result be as you like it?Technophobes may moan, even as Read more ...