Theatre
Jane Edwardes
When For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy first moved to the West End in 2023, it felt like a risky venture. It had started in the tiny New Diorama, and later packed out the Royal Royal Court, but was a transfer to Shaftesbury Avenue a crazy step too far?Not a bit of it. The run was a triumph, and now it confidently returns to yet a fourth theatre, with a new cast and all the trappings of a starry first night. It takes its place in a West End that is hosting a particularly adventurous season this spring and is trying to reach out to new audiences. Yes, I Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Sam Selvon’s 1956 novel about a flotilla of Caribbean migrants who came to London filled with expectations of a warm welcome by the Motherland, only to find a cold reception that extended beyond the weather, has been turned into an ingenious play. Playwright Roy Williams’ adaptation slims down the characters and beefs up the roles played by women but still captures the essentials of Selvon’s novel. Seven actors fill the tiny stage at the Jermyn Street Theatre and masterfully navigate Selvon’s creolised English. Moses (Gamba Cole) has been in London the longest and alternately advises and Read more ...
David Nice
“All discord without this circumference,” the Duchess of Malfi tells the good man she’s just asked to be her husband, “is only to be pitied and not feared”. Perhaps the villains should be more feared and less pitied in the imbalanced casting of Rachel Bagshaw’s clear and yet still atmospheric new production of Webster’s supposed shocker.It’s to Bagshaw’s credit and the riveting performances of Francesca Mills as the Duchess, Oliver Huband as her beloved Antonio and Shazia Nicholls as her faithful Cariola that good resonates more powerfully than evil here, even if two of them end up strangled Read more ...
Jane Edwardes
Can there be anyone from Sheffield who has not seen Standing at the Sky’s Edge, possibly several times? This is the once local show, opening at the Sheffield Crucible in 2019, playing at the National Theatre's Olivier in 2023, and now bringing a touch of Sheffield warmth and straight-talking into the West End, where it will no doubt worm its way into the hearts of a multitude of spectators wherever they are from; it also won a Best Musical Olivier Award along the way.Who would have predicted such success for a musical about the great brutalist block, inspired by Le Corbusier, which sits on Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Transgression was so deliciously enticing. Back in the Eighties when I saw Les Liaisons Dangereuses in the West End on three occasions, life was simpler – or so us straight white men flattered ourselves to believe. Consent was unproblematic for over-16s (unless you were young, gay and male), there was no social media, nor even any camera phones, and Britney was still a decade away from sucking on a lollipop and asking sweating middle-aged men how was she supposed to know on primetime TV. Things have become more complicated since, rightly so, and transgression’s darker side has Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Keeley Hawes onstage is something to look forward to, so rare are her appearances there. In Lucy Kirkwood’s new play, The Human Body, we are given a double treat: Hawes, plus her black and white screen image, projected all over the Donmar’s back wall from cameras roaming around the action. Up there she really does look as if she has just stepped out of Brief Encounter.Kirkwood toys with that 1945 film, and the look and sound of late-1940s British cinema in general, for what is from one angle a romance, from another a plea for the NHS. It’s 1948 and free health care is in the final stages of Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If Mark Twain thought that a German joke was no laughing matter, what would he make of a German comedy? That quote came to mind more than once during Patrick Marber’s production of Marius von Mayenburg’s 2022 play, Nachtland. I know it’s supposed to be funny (and it often is), but should I really be giggling? That's hardly an uncommon feeling watching a black comedy, but there’s something in the rhythms of Maja Zade’s translation and the bleakness of the Berlin period, Bowie inflected soundtrack that undercuts the guilty pleasure with an insistent Teutonic froideur. With Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Hot on the heels of Brigid Larmour’s updating of The Merchant of Venice to the East End in 1936, a spirited new musical across town at Southwark Playhouse is tackling the same topic: the impact of rising British fascism in the same era, culminating in the clash between locals with Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) on the streets of Bethnal Green.What Larmour couldn’t do as thoroughly as Cable Street does is give a kaleidoscopic view of the terrain. The East End of the 1930s presented here is home to two waves of immigrants in particular: Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe’ Read more ...
aleks.sierz
One island off the coast of Spain has more cultural oomph than all the rest put together. I’m talking about Ibiza, the sun-soaked, music-happy and drug-friendly paradise for anyone in their roaring luved-up twenties who wants a break that will fry their minds – and imprinting them with memories of sun, sex and ecstasy for years to come.Fair enough, but what happens when a group of guys decide to recreate this experience in their fifties? Well, that’s the subject of actor Neil D’Souza’s new comedy, Out of Season, which is currently playing in the Hampstead Theatre’s Downstairs studio.Set in Read more ...
aleks.sierz
For the past ten years, Black-British playwrights have been in the vanguard of innovation in the form and content of new writing. I’m thinking not only of writers with longer careers such as Roy Williams and debbie tucker green, but also of Inua Ellams, Arinzé Kene, Nathaniel Martello-White, Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini and Tyrell Williams.And every year they are joined by other talents. One such is Benedict Lombe, who won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2022 for her debut monologue, Lava, and now returns to the Bush Theatre with her latest, a 100-minute two-hander which is exquisitely written Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It’s an unhappy time to be staging Shakespeare’s problematic play, given its antisemitic content, so hats off to adaptor-director Brigid Larmour and actor Tracy-Ann Oberman for persevering with this updated version, now in the West End. Their ambition to make Shylock a female anti-fascist has been hard won, though.The choice of location (not Venice) and date for the update is crucial here – the eruption of violence in the East End occasioned by the rise of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), led by Oswald Mosley. Oberman’s Shylock lives on this frontline, a gutsy widow running a moneylending Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Is there a healthier sound than that of laughter ringing round a theatre? There are plenty of opportunities to test that theory in Tinuke Craig’s riotous revival of The Big Life, two decades on from its first run at this very venue. Much has changed in that time, specifically the coming to light of the appalling mistreatment of the Windrush Generation at the hands of a callous, racist state. What might have felt then like an unnecessarily heavy-handed political undertow now feels, if anything, underplayed. If that’s the grit in the oyster, the substance of this feelgood musical is a Read more ...