Theatre
Tom Teodorczuk
Plays chronicling the unscrupulous collision of high finance and big tech seem 10 a penny these days. Some writers, such as Joseph Charlton, seem to have built entire careers around telling glossy tech morality tales (for my money the best in this burgeoning genre is Sarah Burgess's Dry Powder staged at Hampstead Theatre in 2018 starring Hayley Atwell).Disruption, which is receiving its world premiere also in North London at Finsbury’s Park Theatre, is yet another slick tech show. Written by Andrew Stein and directed by Hersh Ellis, Disruption tackles the seemingly unstoppable rise of AI. Read more ...
David Nice
Came for the music, returned for the theatre. I oversimplify: Riccardo Muti’s Roads of Friendship events, meetings of his Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra with players from other places – since 1997, they have included Sarajevo, Lebanon, Kenya, Iran and this year Jordan – will always be the big cornerstones of the Ravenna Festival.Yet since I joined Teatro delle Albe’s big collaborations with local citizens in 2019’s Purgatorio, second instalment of their Dante Divina Commedia triptych finally completed, after Covid interruptions, last year, this unique, highest level dramatic experience has Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Historically, the Royal Court is the venue for cutting-edge new writing – you know, the kind of plays that have something urgent to say about contemporary life. Like what? Well, let’s see, something important to say about digital alienation, climate catastrophe, teenage discontent and family breakdown.And, indeed, these are some of the themes of Michael Wynne’s new Scouse comedy Cuckoo, directed by this venue’s outgoing head Vicky Featherstone, in a co-production with the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse, where it can be seen later in the summer. But the play has two problems: it isn’t funny Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
As an actor, Mark Rylance specialises in outsiders and eccentrics, outliers of one kind or another. He identified and developed his latest character himself, based on the real-life, mid-19th century Hungarian doctor whose pioneering, lifesaving discoveries were long ignored by the medical Establishment – who in his lifetime was a tragic pariah rather than the hero he should have been. A perfect fit, perhaps. And yet the challenge of dramatising Semmelweis’s story is a tricky one, given a central character who was his own worse enemy and appears to have lacked anything like Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Trauma is the source of identity politics. In the case of African-Americans, the experience of brutal slavery, exploitative colonialism and violent racism are defining experiences in their history.Although many recent black dramas have contested this with images of a more celebratory kind of identity, it remains a standard trope, as proved by Kwame Kwei-Armah’s 2013 play, Beneatha’s Place, which he directs himself at the Young Vic, where he is artistic director. In it he channels, among other things, his own experiences of living and working in the United States between 2011 and 2018.An Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Whether you believe that Ellen Brammar’s play, Modest, newly arrived in London from Hull Truck Theatre, succeeds or not, rather depends on your criteria for evaluating theatre. On storytelling, character development and nuance, it is two and a half hours that goes nowhere. On representation, audience appeal and addressing past injustices, well, the reaction in the house to this Middle Child and Milk Presents collaboration will confirm that the job is done.Elizabeth Thompson’s The Roll Call was the sensation of the Royal Academy’s 1874 Summer Exhibition. Owing something to Gustave Courbet and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Who says you can't go home again? As proof that you can, and to giddy and gorgeous results, along comes the current West End revival of Crazy for You, which reunites Broadway name Susan Stroman with the Gershwin-inspired title that launched this singular talent on her career ascent more than 30 years ago. I saw that production in New York, as I saw its London original with Ruthie Henshall and also the (unrelated, in creative terms) Regent's Park revival that followed, and can report without hesitation that this current iteration is very much the best of them all. Back at the show's Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Can things change, or must they always stay the same? The latest history play by Jack Thorne, a man of the moment whose Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is still in the West End and whose National Theatre hit The Motive and the Cue will transfer in December, revisits the early history of the BBC to show how current tensions between public service impartiality and political expediency have a long backstory.With a title that evokes the past, When Winston Went to War with the Wireless is a lively play of ideas that sits comfortably in the Donmar Warehouse’s intimate surroundings. But is this Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The revolution in the title of AJ Yi’s new play at the Bush is the one activists hoped to set in motion in Hong Kong in 2019, when China’s stewardship was increasingly restricting their civil liberties. The music on the playlist serves as an evocative backing track for the former colony’s 21st century makeover by China, a Western-influenced alternative. It’s also a call to arms. At least, that’s what Chloe Chang (Mae Mae Macleod) is hoping when she suggests creating a playlist to the young economics student, Jonathan Lau (Liam Lau-Fernandez), whom she meets on the last night of her visit Read more ...
aleks.sierz
There are some songs, and singers, that make your heart swell. One of them, for me, is Ani DiFranco’s 1998 single “Little Plastic Castle”, so I was delighted to see that Isley Lynn, in the playtext of her new show at the Orange Tree Theatre, has chosen, as an epigraph, a line from DiFranco’s song “Promised Land”: “And they say that the truth will set you free/ But then so will a lie.”I have to say that this captures, in all its suggestive complexity, the essence of this superb play about love, desire, deceit and commitment. The plot is classic: 27-year-old Annie is engaged to Bel, who’s Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Lucky Will Young: the production of the Simon Stephens monologue Song from Far Away that he is delivering at the Hampstead Theatre is directed by Kirk Jameson, not Ivo van Hove.The modish Dutch director of the initial UK staging, seen at the Young Vic in 2015, stripped his actor naked for much of the performance. Young, though, is allowed a loose white shirt and black trousers throughout. Van Hove’s literal laying bare of Willem was presumably a visual aid to what he thought the monologue was setting out to do. Willem is a hollow man: a determinedly private individual, a hedgie and Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
If you are going to see A Strange Loop, the new American musical trailing a Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize that has arrived at the Barbican, here’s a checklist of topics to make sure you are on top of first: intersectionality, Harriet Tubman, Marcus Garvey, gospel plays, James Baldwin, the Chitlin’ Circuit, bell hooks, the back catalogue of Tyler Perry. Especially Tyler Perry.Perry is the Black American actor who has become a billionaire through film comedies featuring him as Madea, aka a middle-aged Black housewife called Mabel Simmons, and the rest of her family. He is the anti-Christ to Read more ...