Donmar Warehouse
Ismene Brown
In his later life Shakespeare, who never ducked ways to define a hero, offered the public a challenge: Coriolanus is a professional warrior, deaf to reason, patrician hater of people power. To beat all, this man’s man’s a mother’s boy. In a world trying to be newborn in democracy and a big society, Coriolanus sticks out like a sore thumb.The play’s action is hectic, wracked by war and famine, and the shining simplicities of the sword contrast with the writhing difficulties of words to fashion slow consensus and agreements between people of sharply different motives. Josie Rourke’s production Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Arnold Wesker has a theory that plays require a certain DNA to endure. When thoughts turn to the 1950s and the revolution in British theatre which allowed ordinary working-class life up onto the stage, the name which always comes up is John Osborne. And yet the game-changing Look Back in Anger now looks like a bloated and tiresome rant. Wesker’s work has stood the test of time far more robustly.Wesker’s plays from the late Fifties continue to be revived – most recently in 2011 The Kitchen at the National and Chicken Soup with Barley at the Royal Court. Those plays were first performed in 1957 Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Britain today: while the total of car crashes is falling the number of whiplash claims is rising by 25 per cent. Yes, the compensation culture is speeding ahead. In Nick Payne’s follow up to his immensely successful West End transfer, Constellations, a firm of personal injury claims lawyers is the setting for a scam in which a money-spinning lie goes wrong. It’s the stuff of many a Newsnight report, but can he make a social issue interesting as a drama?We arrive at the offices of Scorpion Claims, based in Luton and run by Barry, or Bazza, a fiftysomething plodder who has little light on his Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Can theatrical lightning strike twice? That certainly looks to be the case at the Donmar, which has followed Josie Rourke's expert revival of Conor McPherson's contemporary classic, The Weir, with the world premiere of McPherson's latest, directed with a deft finger on both the human and numinous pulse by the author himself. A play that extends the terrain of The Weir and can be seen to invert it as well, The Night Alive poses as many questions as it answers, though of the pleasurable kind that comes from the sort of investment in character that sets McPherson so richly and feelingly Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Conor McPherson’s 1997 play has become a modern classic, and it's not difficult to see why. It's a glorious evening of storytelling that allows the cast to display their wares, as the conversation between characters who have known each other all their lives flows and ebbs as they reminisce, josh and cajole each other with both affection and darker, underlying feelings. Such naturalistic conversation is, strangely enough, often hard to present with authenticity, but when it's done well - as it is here - one forgets this is acting. We could be eavesdropping on real people chatting.We are in Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
His recent film adaptation of Anna Karenina framed the action of Tolstoy’s novel in a theatre, so it seems only natural that director Joe Wright should follow it up with a return to the stage himself. Redolent with the smell of “gas and oranges”, Arthur Wing Pinero’s Trelawny of The Wells is not just any play, but a play about the business of theatre-making - a sentimental romance between life and art that hides its simpering blushes behind a veil of farcical comedy. It’s meta-theatre, Victorian-style, but can so period a piece really bear the weight of Wright’s high-concept passion for the Read more ...
Laura Silverman
It sounds unlikely but The Dance of Death makes the perfect Christmas play. Half a minute with Strindberg's squabbling couple makes the ordinary family row over underdone/overdone turkey seem like a parlour game. Need a reminder that your relatives are rather charming? This is the play for you.In Strindberg's unsentimental work, Edgar and Alice are approaching 25 years of marriage. Boredom with each other and their lives has intensified into bitterness: every observation has become an accusation, every remark a provocation. They are united only in their hatred towards everyone else. They are Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s no ignoring gender in Julius Caesar. Whether it’s Portia’s “I grant I am a woman” speech, an enfeebled Caesar likened to a “sick girl”, or Cassius raging against oppression – “our yoke and sufferance make us womanish” – the issue is written into the language and ideological fabric of the play. So all those who might be tempted to rage against the travesty of Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female production for the Donmar should take their complaints directly to Shakespeare’s door.Wherever there is political tyranny there are inevitably the silenced, the disenfranchised, so it seems only natural Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An expert cast delivers on their promise in Aleksei Arbuzov's triangular Russian drama from 1965 of the same name, which offers up war and peace and the shifting tides of love. There's so much of the last, in fact, that Alex Sims's production at times plays out like Design For Living set against a soundscape of shelling and the occasional nod to Hitler and Stalin. Spanning more than 17 years in the lives of two men and a woman who survive the ravages of war only to face the separate ambush that comes with passion, the play transcends its soupier soap operatics thanks chiefly to the Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
It’s not often that the works of 17th-century French classicist playwright Jean Racine make an appearance in the West End, and you can’t fault the ambition of the Donmar’s artistic director, Josie Rourke, in bringing us this new version of his romantic tragedy. But if it’s admirably courageous, truth be told, it makes for rather punitive viewing.The new translation of Racine's 1670 text, which was originally composed in Alexandrine couplets, is by Alan Hollinghurst, the Booker-winning novelist. In unrhymed pentameter, it is cool, pellucid, direct; what it is not, and perhaps does not Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Philadelphia, Here I Come! ends in its Donmar invocation with the roar of a plane taking off, which only amplifies one’s sense that the show has taken some while to take wing. Markedly better after the interval than during an abrasive first half, the director Lindsey Turner’s determinedly unsentimental take on Brian Friel’s breakthrough 1964 play comes at a price, and some may wonder whether the (very real) pay-off is worth the often snarky ride getting there.The impulse behind Turner’s approach is in every way sound: to jettison the potential cuteness inherent in the play’s celebrated Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
If you weren’t sick when you arrived at Les Cerisiers, the private psychiatric hospital in this satiric early Sixties drama by Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt, you probably would be by the time the institution had finished with you. Its all-female staff are either grotesque or pulchritudinous; and the latter category have a worrying tendency to wind up murdered.The former comprise the sanitorium’s head, hunchbacked, hollow-eyed Dr Mathilde von Zahnd (Sophie Thompson), and her butch, helmet-haired right-hand nurse, Marta Boll (Joanna Brookes). Together with their ill-fated subordinates, Read more ...