Theatre
Sam Marlowe
A stench of decay rises from Howard Davies's production of this 1903 drama by Anton Chekhov. Ranyevskaya’s wooden home, designed with characteristic visual eloquence by Bunny Christie, is quietly rotting. Weeds sprout through cracks, the windows are filthy; an ugly pylon raises its arms in the foreground, its wires stretching into a future of seismic political and social change for which the family – and Russia itself – are so ill prepared.This is a staging of admirable complexity, in which our sympathies are engaged only to be repelled, and tenderness and longing are often met with the most Read more ...
bella.todd
Persecuted Burmese freedom fighter Aung San Suu Kyi may be this year’s guest director, provoking a loose theme of "freedom of expression, liberty, and the power of the individual voice" that’s all the more powerful for her enforced absence. But a week in to the 2011 Brighton Festival and Brighton Festival Fringe, I’d say it’s the stewards who are this year’s under-sung heroes and heroines. As the craze for interactive performance burgeons, the tricky task is falling to them of reassuring wary audiences without giving the creative game away. Would there be room for a rucksack in Small Space? Read more ...
hilary.whitney
The Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre has always been one of London’s theatrical success stories, attracting luminaries from Flora Robson to Judi Dench, but over the past few years under the stewardship of artistic director Timothy Sheader, it has really come into its own. In 2010, its Olivier Award-winning production of Into the Woods became the highest-grossing production in the venue's history, whilst The Crucible by Arthur Miller attracted a whole new audience to the theatre – 72 per cent of those who attended the play had never visited the theatre before – and The Comedy of Errors became Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Has the King of Knotty Ash been usurped? I saw him embrace Shakespeare and play Malvolio here just 40 years ago. I’m talking about Ken Dodd, more used to playing the fool. Now, another upstart from Knotty Ash is even more ambitiously playing the King of Scotland. I’m talking about David Morrissey. No fool he. In Macbeth he returns to the cradle of his birth as a fledgling actor to grace the last production at the Liverpool Everyman before it closes for a two-year £28 million redevelopment.It all started for Morrissey when he turned up on spec at the Hope Street box office 25 years ago – and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Serenity hangs by a fraying thread in the thrilling Almeida Theatre revival of A Delicate Balance, Edward Albee's 1966 Pulitzer Prize-winner about remembrance, fear, and somehow facing a new day. This particular playhouse has long been associated with Albee, from its (overrated) Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? through to various UK and even world premieres. But James Macdonald's production of the play that follows Virginia Woolf in the Albee canon stands a league apart, perhaps in sympathy with the work itself. The audience last night laughed plenty, sometimes (if truth be told) strangely, Read more ...
David Nice
Don't go expecting the "But ya are, Blaaanche, ya are" Gothic of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. After all, crazy Bette Davis and even phoney Joan Crawford must have been human behind the sacred-monster facade. Anton Burge's new play tries to show us just that in a two-hander set during one day of rehearsals for Robert Aldrich's shlocky B-movie in 1962. The premise that while Crawford tried to project one-dimensional film-star niceness, Davis was a practical actress who kept it relatively real gives Greta Scacchi as Baby Jane's creator one hell of a part. Would you be surprised to learn that Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Today’s Britons are a minor miracle of globalised taste. Typically, we are amazingly eclectic: we eat curry and sushi, read Swedish novels or South American magic realists, dress like Italians, drive German cars, listen to world music. Our houses are full of Scandinavian design. Our favourite films are as likely to be made in China or Afghanistan as in Hollywood. So, watching the British premiere of a new play by Norwegian Jon Fosse directed by French theatre legend Patrice Chéreau, one is compelled to ask: why are we so suspicious of foreign drama?One reason must be aesthetics: we are so Read more ...
martin.white
John Ford’s tragedy‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, set in the Italian city of Parma, tells the story of a young brother and sister, Giovanni and Annabella, who discover a mutual love for each other and embark on a passionate sexual relationship. The challenges of family, church and society increasingly curtail their freedom to pursue their desires, and the play culminates in a terrifyingly brutal and bloody climax. When Ford wrote the play, probably in the late 1620s, he was in his forties and was nearing 50 when it was published in 1633. The play is so often talked about as if the work of a Read more ...
David Nice
Trust the "wooden O" to set the Shakespearean record straighter than usual. In John Dove's production, this is no problem play but a bright comedy where the immaculate plotting proves more admirable than its questionable characters. Its low cuddleability quotient will never make All's Well Everyman's favourite; the heroine has Rosalind's or Viola's resourcefulness and none of their charm as she pursues a callow, snobbish young man whom you can't at first blame for feeling cornered but who ends up an irredeemable cad. The figure of fun despised by everyone else in the play, the mouthy Parolles Read more ...
Matt Wolf
That’s the question New York theatre folk are asking this morning, following the announcement of the 2011 Tony nominations, honouring the best of the Broadway theatre season just gone. Radcliffe was thought to be a dead cert for a nomination for his performance as the careerist window washer in the smash-hit revival of Frank Loesser’s How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre. And there were many who thought Radcliffe would go on to win the trophy on 12 June, just as another visiting British film star, Catherine Zeta-Jones, did for her Broadway Read more ...
hilary.whitney
Christopher Eccleston’s performances have a raw-boned, visceral quality which makes him a sometimes unsettling - but always compelling - actor to watch. Since his big break in the harrowing Let Him Have It (1991), playing Derek Bentley who at 19 was the last man to be hanged in Britain, Eccleston has played Hamlet at the West Yorkshire Playhouse and worked alongside some of Hollywood’s biggest names including Kate Winslet (Jude, 1996), Cate Blanchett (Elizabeth, 1998) and Nicole Kidman (The Others, 2001).However, his best work has undoubtedly been reserved for the small screen. He is, of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
To begin at the end, this was an astonishing creation, a piece of street theatre of transcendental power which no one who was there at the death last night could or will ever forget. Those witnesses included what felt like the whole population of Port Talbot who filled the streets in their many thousands - 5000? Double it and then some - to witness one of their own drag a cross for two gruelling miles from the town centre to a traffic island on the sea shore, there to be crucified, there to achieve a genuine miracle: the resurrection of a condemned town. After this breathtaking act of Read more ...