Theatre
aleks.sierz
Playwright Nina Raine has a gift for evocative play titles. Her 2006 debut was called Rabbit, and her sellout success at the Royal Court last year was Tribes. This time, we seem to be on safari with Tiger Country, but appearances can be deceptive. Raine's titles conceal as much as they reveal: Rabbit was not about furry creatures, but about chatty women; Tribes was not an anthropological study, but an account of the deaf community; and Tiger Country is located not in South-East Asia but in a busy London hospital.Playwright Nina Raine has a gift for evocative play titles. Her 2006 debut was Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Now go we in content. To liberty and not to banishment.” A touchstone to productions of As You Like It, Celia’s wishful recasting of the Forest of Arden can rarely pass unchallenged by directors. In 2009 we saw Michael Boyd’s RSC production go head to head with Thea Sharrock’s unexpected and beguilingly sunny interpretation at the Globe – a contest in which Sharrock proved a comfortable victor. Returning once again with his conventionally darker-hued take on Shakespeare’s comedy, the question was always going to be whether Boyd could grasp the authority that so slimly eluded him last time. Read more ...
aleks.sierz
At a failing secondary school in Tilbury, Essex, Zoe arrives as an ambitious, newly qualified teacher who hopes to make a difference to her unruly pupils. But although she impresses her learning mentor, Maz, and Harry, the soon-to-retire acting head, she gradually gets into an emotional tangle. Neither her attractive manner, nor her will to succeed, nor her teaching skills are able to prevent her from making some bad mistakes: she wants to be friends with her pupils; she sleeps with Maz; she overplays her hand, in both classroom and staffroom.As the impeccably plotted story — which spans one Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Joseph Mallord William Turner - Billy to his intimates, such as he had - is the notional centre of The Painter, a snapshot of the great British landscape artist as a young iceberg. Toby Jones is the main draw in this world premiere of Rebecca Lenkiewicz's new play, and he emanates quiet charisma and sardonic wit. But it's the women in his life who get the better scenes and who steal the show.Success came early to Turner. In 1799, when the play begins, he was still in his mid-twenties but had been exhibiting watercolours at the Royal Academy for nearly a decade – possibly buying his paints Read more ...
carole.woddis
Do Stanislavski and Lee Strasberg have a lot to answer for? Or can we place the blame, if blame it is, elsewhere? I’m referring to the steady, insidious advance of theatre mumbling. You may have noticed it at a theatre near you. It’s the art that disguises itself in “naturalism”, a kind of quasi “Method” style of acting.It’s not always easy to detect. At first you think you may be mistaken. Isn’t this “great acting” I see before me, the eyes furrowed towards the floor, the voice low, even a little seductive? You blink – and blink again. You wait for something to happen on stage. But wait a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Twenty-odd years ago, on the eve of the break-up of the Soviet Union, the country’s cultural world was anticipating cardinal changes – anything from a series of closures to a radical alteration in which the way art would be produced under new economic circumstances. Nowhere more perhaps than in theatre, where the established universal nationwide system of repertory companies faced potential implosion.Despite a subsequent decade of considerable uncertainty, such fears would prove largely unfounded. This month’s visit by Moscow’s Sovremennik Theatre to London offers a chance to see the very Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In 2011 the Barbican offers eminent theatre directors Robert LePage and Peter Brook along with the diversions of London International Mime Festival. Music includes composer focuses on Unsuk Chin, Brian Ferneyhough and Peter Eötvös, and high-profile visits by great conductors Sir Simon Rattle, Bernard Haitink, Sir Colin Davis and Barbican resident guest Valery Gergiev. Joan as Police Woman, the Waterboys, Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Marianne Faithfull are among contemporary music performers while video and media art is featured from Ryoji Ikeda and Cory Arcangel. Full season listings below. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Toby Jones’s cameo in Notting Hill – he was cast as an over-eager fan of Julia Roberts - was deposited on the cutting-room floor. Most actors would have chalked it up as one of life’s bum raps. Jones, who while on set for his short scene was also failing to rent a flat in Notting Hill, fashioned a drama out of a double crisis. To perform Missing Reel he obtained permission to show the suppressed material. Anyone attending the play, or listening to it on Radio 4, would have laid long odds against the actor once cast as a stalker of stars eventually landing the lead in a Hollywood film Read more ...
aleks.sierz
We remember JM Barrie as the creator of Peter Pan, that quintessentially English fairy story which features Neverland, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, and where “to die would be an awfully big adventure”. Generations have embraced this mythical tale as an expression of the spirit of upper-class Deep England. Here the Victorians are us. But James Matthew Barrie himself was the child of a Scottish Calvinist working-class family, and is the subject of Alexander Wright’s play — a hit in Edinburgh last year — which aspires to be a kind of anti-myth.The Boy James is staged in an evocative crypt-like Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Toby Jones’s cameo in Notting Hill – he was cast as an over-eager fan of Julia Roberts - was deposited on the cutting-room floor. Most actors would have chalked it up as one of life’s bum raps. Jones, who while on set for his short scene was also failing to rent a flat in Notting Hill, fashioned a drama out of a double crisis. To perform Missing Reel he obtained permission to show the suppressed material. Anyone attending the play, or listening to it on Radio 4, would have laid long odds against the actor once cast as a stalker of stars eventually landing the lead in a Hollywood film Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Problematic in performance in a way that the “problem plays” simply aren’t, Shakespeare’s Roman plays remain some of his hardest to stage satisfactorily. Updated versions too often turn into Magritte-esque fantasies of identikit, suited politicos, while the togas of more traditional approaches can feel absurd, unavoidably laden with satiric or Hollywood associations. Courting rather than rejecting evocations of the latter, Lucy Bailey’s 2009 Julius Caesar for the RSC brings cinematic scope and contemporary gore to its treachery, demanding that its audience lend not only ears, but eyes, Read more ...
carole.woddis
I suspect there is a different production waiting to be unveiled for Witold Gombrowicz’s 1938 black comedy Ivona, Princess of Burgundia. Under the arches at Waterloo, tucked beside the station down a dark and dank service road is the Network Theatre. Home for half the year to amateur theatre, it also now hosts professionals such as Sturdy Beggars, a fledgling group set up by post-grads from The Poor School drama training space at King’s Cross. A complete surprise to me, the Network Theatre boasts one of the finest pair of red velvet stage curtains you’re likely to see in London, Read more ...