Theatre
Matt Wolf
Why ironic? Because this is one fella whose bad temper risks isolating him altogether from human company - except that misery, we're told, loves companionship, in which case William's entire family is going down with the ship. Whether audiences will go along with that descent depends upon individual tolerance for the sort of person we all know exists but whom we tend to prefer in some sort of redemptive or at least linguistically vibrant dramatic presentation, not the doleful termagant on view here.Bruce Alexander brings undeniable commitment to the part of a financially successful, self-made Read more ...
Veronica Lee
We are in Brooklyn in 1938 and Sylvia Gellburg, a middle-class Jewish housewife, is paralysed from the waist down. It’s a hysterical paralysis brought on by the shock of seeing newspaper pictures of the cruelty meted out to German Jews during the horrors of Kristallnacht (or the night of broken glass). She becomes obsessed with a picture of two elderly Jews forced to clean the pavement with toothbrushes - events several thousand miles away have caused the sudden numbing of her limbs. Or is it something else?In Arthur Miller’s play (written in 1994), Sylvia (Lucy Cohu) is married to Phillip ( Read more ...
james.woodall
The National Theatre’s new production of Hamlet is both a very good Hamlet, yet also a somehow disappointing one. For a work so rich in possibilities, with so much emotion, so much superb and intricate engineering, it is often like this, in England or anywhere else - inspiring and unconvincing at once.Of few works in drama can this be said, or, as it were, permitted. For Hamlet, every allowance can and should be made. The most galvanising one I’ve seen also happened to be at the National (in the Lyttelton), 23 years ago: in Ingmar Bergman’s guest Swedish-language staging, Hamlet was a punk - Read more ...
mark.kidel
When Tony Harrison transposed his version of Molière’s The Misanthrope from the 17th century to the early 1970s, he managed with his characteristic and brilliant combination of savagery and wit to make the play feel totally contemporary. For Andrew Hilton’s new production at the Bristol Old Vic, Harrison has tweaked the play into the 21st century, with characters clutching iPhones and boasting of their connections with Sarkozy. Molière’s masterpiece is about human failings and the reason this classic makes us laugh today is because we recognise ourselves in the characters' parade of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
When, earlier this year, Edward Hall took the reins at the Hampstead Theatre, some eyebrows were raised. It’s meant to be a new-writing theatre and Hall has had much more experience directing Shakespeare than in tackling new plays. On the other hand, this venue needed a clean sweep and Hall is certainly able to wield a new broom vigorously. His first show, Shelagh Stephenson’s thrilling play about the disappearance of a gap-year student, opened last night — and it’s an excellent debut.The first act is a textbook piece of exposition: Adam, a 20-year-old student, has gone traveling but has Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Theatrical conceits, much like London buses, seem these days to come in threes. Or so it is suggested by the Neil Bartlett/Handspring collaboration Or You Could Kiss Me, the third Cottesloe production this year to peer into the future, albeit only as far as 2036, whereas Mike Bartlett's Earthquakes in London leapt forward to 2525. (Completing the trifecta: Tamsin Oglesby's Really Old, Like Forty Five, set a comparatively imminent 40 years ahead.) And while Oglesby's play featured a robotic nurse, this latest opening puts some very singular puppets centre-stage, alongside a vision of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The news last week that Michael Grandage will step down next year as artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse feels like one of those moments when an era ends. His ability to programme not only the small Donmar but also to bring excellent productions to the West End — notably Jude Law in Hamlet — is exemplified in the current mini-season at the Trafalgar Studios, which opened last night with American playwright Beau Willimon’s new play about the New Orleans floods of 2005.The concept of the play is simple. Following Hurricane Katrina, two African Americans, Malcolm and EZ, find themselves Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There are any number of ways, it's increasingly clear, to approach A Number. Caryl Churchill's astonishingly prismatic and beautiful play about genetic cloning, nature versus nurture and the ineffable mystery of existence as amplified by Shakespeare in a certain well-known tragedy gets its latest London airing this week. To be (happy) or not to be (happy)? That's among the various questions raised in a two-hander (albeit with four characters) that runs less than an hour; any longer than that and your brain just might explode.Jonathan Munby first directed this play four years ago at the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Simon Callow is on the phone when I arrive at his five-star digs, booming his apparently considerable misgivings vis-a-vis appearing in some reality TV exercise in which he will be asked to tutor disadvantaged kids in the mysterious arts of Shakespeare. “They keep saying it will be great”, he rumbles, “but it will only be great if it’s great.” And Amen to that.All voice, gesture and bustle, Callow (b 1949) couldn’t really be anything other than a certain kind of actor. Indeed, if you could bottle the quite extraordinary way in which he wraps lips, tongue and molars around the phrase “post hoc Read more ...
james.woodall
It's hard to overestimate the importance of Goethe's Faust to the German soul, though I did once have a German friend who valued George Eliot's Middlemarch more highly. If there's a real English competitor to Goethe in the literary stakes, it is of course Shakespeare, but that doesn't really work either, because, when not thinking of Goethe, many Germans consider Shakespeare neither better nor worse; simply theirs.Goethe of course wanted to infuse his then fragmented culture - the late 18th century - with something as apparently unifying as Shakespeare, though the German writer's country, as Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Adultery has had a good press recently. Websites such as meet-to-cheat.com, illicitencounters.com and lovinglinks.co.uk have been in the news, and statistics suggest that more of us are being unfaithful than ever before. But although adultery is a staple of farce and mainstream drama, there are few plays that deal with the subject with quite the unsettling ambiguity and disturbing depth that characterise Martin Crimp’s modernistic play, first performed in 2000 and now beautifully revived by the up-and-coming Amelia Nicholson.Crimp’s love triangle is composed of a fortysomething couple, Read more ...
carole.woddis
Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong has reached phenomenon status: number 13 on a recent BBC Big Read competition, part of the school curriculum along with World War One poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, three million copies sold worldwide. Its lyrical, descriptive writing, dense and subtle in detail, consistently moves people to tears.It tells of a young 20-year-old Englishman, Stephen, who, finding himself in Amiens in 1910, falls passionately in love with Isabelle, the wife of his host, before being pulled into the horrors of the war and the Battle of the Somme. Somehow he survives Read more ...