Theatre
james.woodall
The longest and most densely historical play by Georg Büchner (1813-37) is a potential monster. In German, Dantons Tod can run to four hours or more. There's little action and much speechifying. In plays by his equally wordy, history-obsessed predecessor, Friedrich von Schiller, there are at least fights, battles, a lot of love - and some sex. The latter admittedly crashes its way, somewhat psychotically, into Büchner's last and unfinished Woyzeck, one of the strangest yet most influential dramas of the 19th-century European repertoire; and the fairytale comedy Leonce und Lena aside, rarely Read more ...
carole.woddis
The Martin McDonagh phenomenon is a curious one. He burst upon the world in 1996, aged 26, born in Camberwell, the son of Irish parents. The quirk of fate that placed him in south east London may or may not have been the making of him. But by pure accident, and whether he actually knew the people involved or not, it aligned him with what was to become the abiding zeitgeist of the mid-Nineties: BritArt and Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. This may seem a red herring as an introduction to a review of the Young Vic’s revival of McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane, the play that set him on the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
How do you construct a compelling play about the greatest of fictional detectives without either mystery or reveal? The cryptic answer, in the form of Jeremy Paul’s 1988 theatrical two-hander The Secret of Sherlock Holmes, is far from elementary.Arthur Conan Doyle’s Laudanum-quaffing, woman-hating logician Sherlock Holmes is surely the original for every heroic-cop-with-troubled-home-life that has since washed up in our fiction with whisky on his breath and murder on his mind. Clad in a paisley dressing gown, violin in hand, Holmes might colour proceedings with an inscrutable elegance, yet Read more ...
bella.todd
Revivals of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion are generally too busy making an artistic case for the play over the My Fair Lady musical to worry about listening out for contemporary resonances. But in many ways Simon Cowell is the Henry Higgins of our day: betting with his fellow X-Factor judges that he can pass off such-and-such under-privileged teen as a pop star; putting them through their paces before a rigorous public test; and showing little regard for what will happen once they have been torn out of their reality and developed a taste for limos and red carpets, and Judgment Day has come Read more ...
carole.woddis
Political playwright Howard Brenton (b. 1942) is always in the process of being "rediscovered". Yet at the same time he has been at the heart of British theatrical life for the past 40 years, since his debut in 1969 with Christie in Love. True, he has spent the odd decade out of the theatrical limelight - a few years ago, he "went out of fashion" in his own phrase – and then he just happened to pen some of the liveliest scripts on television with the BBC’s spy drama series, Spooks (2002-2005).Brenton’s play tally now amounts to 40 plays, either alone or often in collaboration – David Hare and Read more ...
aleks.sierz
While films frequently spawn sequels and prequels, theatre — with the spectacular exception of the Bard’s history plays — tends to go for one-offs. In Peter Nichols’s new play, which opened at the tiny Finborough fringe theatre last night, the main character is called Steven Flowers — and yes, those of you who are paying attention have by now correctly guessed that is a follow-up to Privates on Parade, Nichols’s hit play of 1977 (last revived at the Donmar in 2001). But as well as being a follow-up, how does this new play stand up on its own?Inspired, like Privates on Parade, by Nichols’s own Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Last weekend we posted a round-up of the vast array of site-specific work happening in the theatre over the summer. Most of them are shows which are so boldly experimental that they haven't much realistic hope of a commercial future. Plays for an audience of one are not the producer's friend. But it turns out that it's not just the mighty Punchdrunk who can shift tickets by the skipload.This week Punchdrunk's production of The Duchess of Malfi opened in an abandoned office block opposite London's City Airport the day after The Railway Children chuffed into the disused Eurostar terminal at Read more ...
james.woodall
Shakespeare’s two-part Henry IV cycle locks together the first modern plays in English. They strive for something quite new in drama, retaining a structural boldness and complexity seldom encountered in contemporary theatre. That's how "modern" they are (or seem). And in reiterating what others must have said oft and better, I intend no abutment on that deadly phrase “early modern” into which historians, and most annoyingly many literary critics, now incorporate the word “Renaissance” - which Henry IV of course also magnificently is.Dominic Dromgoole’s new Globe production of both parts is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The Menier Chocolate Factory could scarcely be on mightier form, or so it seems, punching far beyond its weight as a small, out-of-the-way south London playhouse that is nonetheless responsible at the moment for five commercial transfers between London and New York.The other three are Broadway musicals of different vintages and of differing degrees of renown, ranging from an alternately plaintive and raunchy product of the 1960s (Sweet Charity) to an arty 1970s Stephen Sondheim favourite (A Little Night Music) and on to a 1980s crowd-pleaser (La Cage aux folles) that won a Tony for Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Jeff Goldblum is a big guy, 6'4" tall to be precise, and, though his character inhabits an improbably spacious, high-ceilinged New York apartment, he roves around it like a crazy caged animal in this intensely athletic and entertaining revival of Neil Simon's disturbing 1971 comedy. There's an unmissable topicality to the theme - the cataclysmic effect of redundancy on a high-earning executive - and, while the production doesn't underline this or update the story, it comes up looking as fresh as paint - fresher, certainly, than the overpriced, sweaty, crumbling hellhole where the action is Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
"Oh! My Daddy, my Daddy!" It’s a cry that has echoed through the childhood of generations of English children, reducing all but the very staunchest to tears. Whether encountered through Edith Nesbit’s book or the classic 1970 film, The Railway Children is a national touchstone, sitting alongside Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland at the core of a proper English upbringing. With the film celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, what better time to don your knitted tam o’ shanter and climb aboard the latest theatrical adaptation, currently hissing and chugging its way into the disused Read more ...
theartsdesk
There is no consensus about what site-specific theatre actually constitutes. Does it grow organically out of the space in which the theatre piece is performed, and can therefore be staged nowhere else? Or is it no more than any theatre piece which happens away from the constricting formality of the thrust stage or the proscenium arch?Please feel free to debate that at leisure in the comments section below. It suffices to say that, whichever way you slice it, site-specific work has sprouted in the oddest places over the years. Audiences have found themselves summoned to caravans and sent into Read more ...