Theatre
Gary Naylor
There are better musicals in town, but can you find me a more spectacular show in a more comfortable theatre? I doubt it. Not that Jonathan Church's new production at Sadler's Wells is flawless. It's a 90-year-old blockbuster so, for all its references to breadlines, insecure employment and heat-or-eat decisions, one wonders if so much effort might be better expended on something a little more recent, a little less bound by the cliches of musical theatre? And there's also Les Dennis neither dancing nor singing. Why? If you set aside such minor gripes, one can delight in a show that Read more ...
Anya Ryan
Twenty-one years ago, critics were alarmed by Ben Elton’s deranged musical We Will Rock You. But, despite the "staggeringly awful" reviews, the show somehow went on to have 12 long (and painful) years of West End success. So, here we are again. The car crash of a show is back for a summer run at the London Coliseum. But has it made any progress in its nine-year hiatus? Sadly not.And in many ways, why should it? The Queen musical has collected more than its fair share of loyal devotees over the years. But, with a totally nonsensical plot, cringeworthy dialogue and songs shoehorned into the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The short story F Scott Fitzgerald wrote as a challenge, of a man born 70 years old whose body gets younger as the years pass, has already been blown up into a lengthy film of the same name starring Brad Pitt (and lots of CGI). Jethro Compton decided a bare-bones musical for six multi-instrumentalists and no special effects was what it needed to be, and how well it works.Four years on, for its second run at Southwark Playhouse, Compton is directing a cast that has ballooned to 12, who ably accompany themselves on a wide range of instruments (brass, wind, strings, keyboards, percussion) as Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The summer season at the Royal Court, London’s premiere new writing venue, features two plays which imaginatively explore the human condition using elements of the surreal and the dystopic as well as the real. Or, to put it more accurately, both Alistair McDowall (in All of It ****) and Tom Fowler (in Hope Has a Happy Meal ***) show us recognisable human emotions through the lens of highly original storytelling. The overall effect is an exciting contribution to contemporary playwriting – it’s art that seems to make your mind go woo-woo.The most mentally explosive experience, in the main Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Groundhog Day, appropriately, is back where it started. The hit film about a TV weatherman’s endlessly reiterated day in small-town USA moved to the Old Vic stage in 2016; but then its progress became bumpy, despite the awards showered on it and its lead, Andy Karl, on both sides of the Atlantic. Karl was injured during a Broadway preview and the show's US tour didn't happen.Leading it again, Karl is still a galvanising force, perpetually in motion and hardly ever offstage. And with Matthew Warchus back in the director’s chair, the piece is as full-on, raucous and tricky as before.Karl’s Read more ...
Ismene Brown
With apocalyptic floods pouring through the Kakhovka dam, and millions of Ukrainians displaced or bereaved, it doesn’t feel decent to be laughing at a witty black comedy about his rise from nonentity to full-blown tyrant. On the other hand, how can you not laugh when an oligarch injured in an assassination attempt sees it as a great way to get noticed in a crazed post-Soviet Kremlin?A year ago, premiering in the first months of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Peter Morgan’s crackling drama about Russia’s rich and powerful felt bang on topic. Now, watching the monstrous oligarch Boris Berezovsky Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Miles Malleson, known as an inter-war character actor who popped up in numerous small roles on stage and screen, was also a surprisingly prolific writer and adaptor. Mint Theatre Company of New York love truffling out work like his Yours Unfaithfully, a 1933 play on a topic that still resonates today, even if the social milieu of the piece doesn’t.The Jermyn Street Theatre is an ideal venue for this comedy of new manners. With deft touches, its pocket-sized stage can still suggest the era and class setting on show: genteel suburbia with intellectual ambitions, hence the artists’ busts and Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
It’s been more than 20 years since the premiere of The Shape of Things, Neil LaBute’s prickly drama about couples and friends and the ways we change each other. And boy, does it show. Director Nicky Allpress and a talented young cast try their best with a script that, though updated for this version at the Park Theatre, still feels behind the times.Evelyn (Amber Anderson) meets Adam (Luke Newton, of Bridgerton fame) at work. His work, that is – he’s a security guard at an art gallery, she’s an art student with a can of spray paint she eventually uses to draw a penis on a sculpture. She gives Read more ...
Jane Edwardes
We all need a break from time to time, especially now given the grim state of the world. So it’s not surprising that comedy is making something of a comeback in the West End: Operation Mincemeat; The Unfriend seen recently at this theatre; The Play that Goes Wrong and all its offshoots; and now Bleak Expectations, an affectionate send-up of the various tropes of Charles Dickens.Initially, a popular Radio 4 comedy, this dramatised version premiered at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury in 2022. For fans of the radio show wondering whether to go, there’s the additional attraction of a different Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Devoted fans may not learn anything that new about Noel Coward from Barnaby Thompson’s documentary Mad About the Boy, but they will doubtless see some new things. And those who know “the Master” only from his early plays, hardy perennials these days in British theatres, will marvel at the sheer range and volume of his output.Thompson has been given access to archive materials, including Coward’s home movies, by his estate, and these provide a welcome garnish to the bare bones of his CV. See Coward propelling himself on a lilo across the sea at the foot of his beloved Jamaican property. Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Lip-syncing has become the hobby of many a young TikToker, but only an intrepid professional would contemplate using the technique to play Hamlet. Or rather, to “play” some of the knighted thespians and stars who have portrayed him. Dickie Beau is that brave soul. He has brought his 2020 show, Re-Member Me, back to the UK after its progress abroad was rudely interrupted by the pandemic, and it has bedded in nicely. An amalgam of film, multiple recorded famous voices, some witty stagecraft and Dickie’s gifted brand of physical comedy, it has a scope beyond co-ordinating face muscles to Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The Bond film theme plays and the lights go up at the Bush’s Studio space to reveal, not a tuxedoed superspy, but a slim figure in casual clothes sitting on a raised platform. He starts his first speech, then stops, makes asides to the audience, then restarts it. Then wishes it was a film, “which it isn’t”.The figure is Nikhil Parmar, writer of this 60-minute play, who peoples the little stage with a whole neighbourhood: his family, cousins, friends and fellow tenants. Usefully, he has given them all different ethnic accents to help us work out who is who. Scenes rapidly transform, cued by Read more ...