Theatre
Jasper Rees
Last September Luc Bondy watched his name speed around the world, if not for the most desirable reasons. His Tosca opened the season at the Met, a more grounded, less opulent replacement for one of the opera house’s many much loved productions by Franco Zeffirelli. As Bondy walked onstage to take his directorial bow, a chorus of boos crescendoed from the audience. They do that all the time in Milan, now and then in Paris, both cities where Bondy's work is known and accepted. But New York?Last September Luc Bondy watched his name speed around the world, if not for the most desirable reasons. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The Vaudeville Theatre is turning into London's de facto playground for female icons from American TV. A few weeks ago, the venue hosted the misbegotten local cabaret debut of Will and Grace star Megan Mullally, who had scarcely set foot on stage before announcing that she had left her star-making role of Karen at home. (That's not all that was absent from the evening.) Now, along comes Kim Cattrall, in her third London stage appearance since becoming everyone's favourite glamour puss from Sex and the City, and guess what? Her Amanda in Private Lives brings with it more than a whiff of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Although our culture is obsessed with youth, very few adults can connect directly with teenagers. Instead teens have become the object of our fears — there’s even a posh word for this: ephebiphobia. In drama, teens are often portrayed as a problem to be solved, and deprived of their own voices. By welcome contrast, Philip Ridley’s Moonfleece, which opened last night in London and will tour the north of England, is unforgettably teenage in every way — it is young, young, young!Set in Ridley’s beloved East End, the scene is a derelict flat in an all-but-abandoned high-rise. This used to be home Read more ...
josh.spero
The thought of watching a filmed play is enough to make even the hardiest theatregoer flee screaming down the aisle. Recording the stage has a poor history, causing even the nimblest staging to seem thudding and deep performances transparent. But that was before Digital Theatre came along.Set up in late 2008 by theatre director Robert Delamere (Julius Caesar at the Manchester Royal Exchange, The Crucible at the Sheffield Crucible, among many others) and TV and radio producer Thomas Shaw, Digital Theatre films plays in front of their audience, edits them and offers them for download for £8.99 Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It is difficult for modern audiences to appreciate just how shocking Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts was when it was first published in 1881. Its sexual and syphilitic storyline - how the sins of the fathers are visited upon their sons - was considered immoral, loathsome even, and audiences must have felt deeply uncomfortable watching their Victorian, Christian hypocrisies laid bare. So how to make Ghosts relevant to today’s theatregoers?In Frank McGuinness’s rather pedestrian version, much of the play’s moral outrage becomes incidentally comic - a reference to unmarried couples living together brings Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Imagine a future, a near future, in which gangs of teenage boys roam the deserted streets of the metropolis, selling hallucinatory butterflies and organising parties in squats for rich clients who have extreme tastes in sexual abuse. Imagine. This is the vividly conceived sci-fi world of Philip Ridley’s Mercury Fur, first staged in 2005 and now revived in an old London office block by the thrilling fringe company Theatre Delicatessen.The story concerns two teenage brothers, Elliot and Darren, who help the gang leader, Spinx, organise extreme parties in which a Party Guest acts out his violent Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Over the past decade, much of the energy in new writing has come from black Britons. Homegrown talents such as Roy Williams, debbie tucker green and Kwame Kwei-Armah have sent us updates about the state of hybrid, streetsmart culture, and alerted us to the experiences of minorities. In doing so, they have reinvented punchy dialogue, with stage chat that zips along with dizzy humour and linguistic freshness. Hot on their heels comes Bola Agbaje, whose latest play has just opened on the main stage at the Royal Court.Before the play starts, Agbaje sets out her stall — the curtain has the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
American spiritual anomie, that beloved realm of cultural enquiry that has fuelled the likes of Revolutionary Road and Ordinary People and much else besides, gets its latest theatrical airing in the form of Serenading Louie, a Lanford Wilson play that is almost as infrequently seen States-side as it is here. Now, here it is at the Donmar, in a mournful, acutely pitched production from the director Simon Curtis (Cranford) that doesn't shrink from confronting head on the abyss into which the characters are falling fast. Hang on for what is a flawed but, if you stick with it, mesmerising ride, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Scottish playwright David Greig’s new play, for the Royal Shakespeare Company in their London season at Hampstead, picks up where Shakespeare’s Macbeth left off (almost). We are in 11th-century Dunsinane, the seat of power in Scotland. Macbeth (referred to here as simply “the tyrant”) is dead, his queen (Gruach) is very much alive, and Malcolm and Macduff are poised for power as the invading English army under Lord Siward attempts to install Malcolm as puppet king over a newly united Scotland. But really we could be in Whitehall discussing Iraq or Afghanistan as, historical drama aside, Greig Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
It’s the pretext that reunites Judi Dench and Peter Hall to collaborate on Shakespeare’s comedy nearly five decades after they first ventured into the Athenian woods together at the RSC. But the conceit of conflating the fairy queen Titania with Gloriana doesn’t come close to lending Hall’s workaday production the necessary sense of enchantment. It’s performed on Elizabeth Bury’s sparse and decidedly mundane monochrome set, with its cardboard cut-out trees and a shiny black floor, which lacks any flavour of the sylvan and, thumped across by heavy-footed, boot-shod actors, is sometimes Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What do you do for an encore at a theatre awards ceremony that several years ago featured James Corden locking lips with a mighty surprised Daniel Radcliffe? The unscripted moment that had spectators buzzing at Sunday night's whatsonstage.com trophy-bearing gala at the Prince of Wales Theatre involved one theatrical knight making a rather, uh, pointed reference to another.More precisely, scarcely had Sir Patrick Stewart accepted his supporting actor prize for playing Claudius in the Royal Shakespeare Company Hamlet before he was giving the affectionate finger to Sir Trevor Nunn, who had Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Looking at posters outside the Apollo Theatre, where the West End transfer of Jez Butterworth’s award-heavy Royal Court success opened last night, you might be tempted to start humming: “And did those feet in ancient time…” But such nostalgic sentiments are unlikely to survive the opening scene of this phenomenal play. Soon after the curtain, a symbolically faded flag of St George, rises, we see a familiar rural scene: under-aged kids stoned out of their minds, dancing in a thumping rave. It’s a nocturnal bacchanalia of house music, gyrating girls and drug-addled wildness.Yes, we are Chez Read more ...