Theatre
theartsdesk
Keith Pattison took photographs of Richard Jones's new production of Annie Get Your Gun for the Young Vic. Read Matt Wolf's review here.Click on a photograph to enter full view. [bg|/THEATRE/young_vic_annie] All photographs for the Young Vic by Keith Pattison.
Jane Horrocks (Annie Oakley); Julian Ovenden (Frank Butler)
Jane Horrocks (Annie Oakley); Julian Ovenden (Frank Butler)
Liza Sadovy (Dolly)
Buffy Davis (Mrs Potter Porter); Paul Iveson (Ensemble); Matt Turner (Ensemble); Julian Ovenden (Frank Butler); Adam Venus (Ensemble); David Ricardo-Pearce (Ensemble); Michael Taibi (Ensemble) Read more ...
james.woodall
Beckett is less forbidding now than he might have seemed when he was alive, and certainly when his work was first performed. Over the last two decades, crueller and darker plays than his have been written, though none have matched his lyric ingenuity and his pained, sometimes devastating irony remains unsurpassed. Can Endgame, the bleak successor to Waiting for Godot and perhaps the oddest dramatic masterpiece of the 20th century, still hurt us? And what, I feel it legitimate to ask, might lie behind a desire to revive it in the West End?For Simon McBurney of Complicite, never shy of a tough Read more ...
aleks.sierz
What are the politics of comedy? The great thing about Trevor Griffiths's 1975 classic, Comedians, which opened last night in a solid revival directed by Sean Holmes, is that this subject is debated with grace as well as humour. As six apprentice comedians attend a night class run by the veteran stand-up Eddie Waters, they find that their hunger for stardom clashes with his desire to use comedy to make a difference, to change society. Is comedy just a piece of harmless fun, or can it be used as a tool for social engineering?Played by Matthew Kelly, Waters comes across as avuncular, hurt and Read more ...
james.woodall
A play featuring false imprisonment, family members losing and re-finding each other, fathers and sons, forgiveness and reconciliation: it sounds like late Shakespeare. Pedro Calderón de la Barca's Life Is a Dream is indeed just post-Shakespeare - from 1635 - and hails from a culture, Golden Age Spain, which determinedly pushed drama on from where Shakespeare left it, producing over decades a torrent of story-rich plays at a time when England seemed to have given up the dramatic ghost.Life Is a Dream is by far Calderón's best-known work, outside the Hispanic world at any rate, and in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
David Hare (b. 1947) has had three distinct phases to his career as a playwright. In the 1970s he was a satirist of the agitprop movement whose plays (Slag, Knuckle) smacked of youthful belligerence. From Plenty (1978) onwards, he devoted two decades to writing ambitious, wide-ranging plays about the state of the nation, most notably with the trilogy comprising Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges and Absence of War (1990-1993). Meanwhile, in Skylight (1995) and Amy’s View (1997) he pondered the nature of love (following marriage to his second wife, the designer Nicole Farhi). But when Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The sealed invitation was from the man himself: no, not Andrew Lloyd Webber (who can, as we know, work in mysterious ways) but the Phantom. Nightly (and twice on Tuesdays and Saturdays) he vanishes from his underground lair deep in the bowels of the Paris Opera House (aka Her Majesty’s Theatre) leaving only his familiar half-mask as a symbolic reminder of his continuing omnipotence on stages throughout the world.For 23 years Phantom fans have been wondering what became of him after that “final” exit? Frederick “The Jackal” Forsyth, no less, raised hopes for a sequel with his novella The Read more ...
aleks.sierz
David Hare is one of the giants of contemporary British theatre. His skill is to be the Balzacian social secretary who records the mood of the day. So his recent work has examined the state of the nation in a poetic rather than a literal way, and the result has usually been emotionally powerful and resonant. Whether the subject is Thatcherism in Skylight (1995) or New Labour in Gethsemane (2008), Hare is the man the National calls for whenever it feels the need to update us on the temperature of the times. But last night, as his new play, The Power of Yes, opened at the nation's flagship Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Theatre is the art of storytelling, and the best stories are those that constantly change their shape. In Dennis Kelly's storming new play, Orphans, which wowed critics and audiences when it opened in Edinburgh in August, the narrative morphs and flips like a bad conscience. And for good reason. Long before the final climax, you just know that something isn't right.The evening starts innocuously enough. Danny and Helen are a nice couple. If not exactly shining, happy people, they at least exude an air of comfort as they settle down to enjoy a quiet night at home. Nice room, nice furnishings, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Joe Orton's untimely death has often threatened to eclipse his life. On 9 August 1967, he was murdered by his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, who then committed suicide. Although Orton had completed the first draft of his masterpiece, What the Butler Saw, he'd never got around to writing a play called Prick Up Your Ears, whose naughty, innuendo-heavy title had been suggested by Halliwell. But the title lived on. First as John Lahr's 1978 biography, then as Stephen Frears's 1987 film and now as Simon Bent's new play. Starring Little Britain's Matt Lucas as Halliwell and Chris New as Orton Read more ...
Veronica Lee
As anyone who has ever had the misfortune to sit through a real court case knows, they can be deadly dull; but by golly when playwrights get their hands on them they usually become riveting. And so it proves here in Trevor Nunn’s pacy, funny and moving production of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E Lee’s 1955 play.Inherit the Wind is based on the 1925 Monkey Trial in Tennessee, when teacher John Scopes was charged with breaking a law prohibiting the teaching of evolutionary theory in the state’s schools. The great liberal thinker Clarence Darrow was Scopes’s defence lawyer and fundamentalist Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Play titles can acquire a life of their own. Playwright Joe Orton, who met a violent end in August 1967, didn’t have the chance to write the play that was to be called Prick Up Your Ears, but the title has lived on. And on. It was used by critic John Lahr for his 1978 biography of Orton, and by Stephen Frears for his 1987 film, which starred Gary Oldman. Now a new black comedy, written by Simon Bent and currently at the Comedy Theatre in the West End, uses the same title, with its naughty anagram - just shuffle the letters of the last word and you’ll see what I mean.The play, which stars Read more ...
Matt Wolf
You might imagine a cultural artefact on the topic of make overs, albeit primarily of the self, to be handled with particular care and attention when it is itself made over, as the Truman Capote novella Breakfast at Tiffany's has now been on the West End. Alas, Sean Mathias's second successive Haymarket production is an object lesson in how not to tamper with the pre-existing goods. Joseph Cross's leading man, William Parsons, sends us into the interval, his jaw dropped open in disbelief. He's not the only one.The misfire is all the more surprising given the abilities of those involved, Read more ...