Donmar Warehouse
alexandra.coghlan
“It’s easy for me to talk to you; we don’t know each other”. Robert Holman’s Making Noise Quietly is a work that, like its title, lives in the delicate push-pull of contradiction: intimate strangers; bloodless wars; silent screams. Not one play at all but three short pieces – panels in an inscrutable triptych – its process is oblique, its emotional momentum cumulative, the impact devastating.The clamour of war may provide the background hum through all three dramas, but this thematic pedal point scarcely anchors the dissonant roamings of Holman’s theatrical melodies. When Holman writes of war Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Drum rolls, fiddles and flutes were all in action last night at the Donmar Warehouse to herald the beginning of an era. After ten successful years under the direction of Michael Grandage, it was the turn of the theatre’s new Artistic Director Josie Rourke to step forward and lay her claim to the West End’s most intimate space. If Rourke was making a statement with her first production, Farquhar’s broad comedy The Recruiting Officer, then it was one loud with capital letters and laden with exclamation marks – an exuberant, joyous shout of arrival.We all know where we stand when it comes to Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Of all the 20th century’s literary dystopias, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has proved most tenacious, epitomised by its sinister promise: “Big Brother is watching you.” But what happens when he stops watching? What becomes of us when the all-seeing eye of civil authority blinks shut for good, leaving us gazing, alone in perpetuity, at one another? It’s the unsettling question posed by Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos. Written some five years prior to Orwell’s novel, the play’s existential vision of Hell (famously defined here as “other people”) might not have claimed the same place in the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The Mayans say 2012 is The End, so this may be the very last round-up of the year. I saw possibly the best Shakespeare I’ve ever seen – a chamber version of King Lear at the Donmar Theatre directed by Michael Grandage with Derek Jacobi as the mad old King, presenting a perfectly credible mix of vanity, vulnerability, craziness and tenderness. The final scenes with Lear and Cordelia were among the most affecting I’ve seen in a theatre.I don't actually have a TV at the moment and I'm not really missing it. The television I watch these days tends to be either news viewed on a computer – Al Read more ...
Matt Wolf
And what a year it was! Comedy was king on stages around town, while a variety of Shakespeare royals -- Richard III à deux courtesy Kevin Spacey and the lesser-known but far more electrifying Richard Clothier, Richard II in the memorably tremulous figure of Eddie Redmayne (pictured above) - kept the Bard alive, and how. That was literally so in the case of Michael Sheen's astonishing Hamlet at the Young Vic, a life force that wouldn't go quickly or gently into the good night, as the final image of Ian Rickson's production asserted to controversial effect: no problems in this corner whatsoever Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A recent newspaper article championed the topicality of Richard II, laboriously rewriting it from camp conservatism to a politically current meditation on the “sad stories” we still tell of the deaths of kings. Heads may have rolled and states collapsed this year, but thank goodness Michael Grandage felt no need to underline Shakespeare’s fragile lecture on kingship with gaudy contemporary markers. Uncluttered, direct, and tense with the energy of political unrest, this Richard II is a fitting farewell from the director to the theatre he has led for the past nine years.Everything in Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Many dramatists have taken their turn putting faces to Thoreau’s lives of “quiet desperation”. But the challenge in what Thoreau goes on to conclude – that it is therefore a mark of wisdom and the wise to avoid acts of desperation – has been taken up by far fewer. Salt, Root and Roe sees Tim Price transform an act of violence from one of apparently senseless desperation to one of humane intelligence and generosity. It’s quite the sea change, and one that makes for discomfiting viewing in the close quarters of Trafalgar Studios, but Price and director Hamish Pirie handle their subject matter Read more ...
aleks.sierz
John Osborne was the great founding father of contemporary new writing for the theatre. In 1956, his Look Back in Anger changed British drama for ever, and his subsequent work explored the subjects of failure and national identity in language that is both highly rhetorical and at the same time feels as if it is torn from the gut. His 1964 play about the washed-up London solicitor Bill Maitland, which opened last night in Jamie Lloyd’s revival, is one of his masterpieces.The story shows the mental disintegration of the middle-aged Maitland during two days of personal and professional hell. It Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The talented Mr Jude Law is back on stage in what must be the hottest ticket in the West End. Although not everyone warmed to his 2009 Hamlet, the mere presence in central London of one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars is enough to bring a touch of sunshine to a wintry summer. My main anxiety was that, as a reaction to the riots sweeping the capital, the Government would call a curfew and close the show, which was due to open last night. I needn’t have worried. It opened on schedule.And Law doesn’t disappoint. He has a real talent to surprise: here, he inhabits the bearded, brawny body of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Time lurches when you see a historical play. But is it a case of autre temps, autres moeurs, or of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose? Either way, the history needs to slap your face hard with recognition. Schiller’s Luise Miller is a 1784 play that clearly fires at its own vicious contemporary world, a catastrophically corrupt and unruly coalition of German states, and is its world just too far from our own to believe in the tragic young lovers at its core? By no means, in Michael Grandage’s stirring, lucid production at the Donmar, his penultimate before he steps down as artistic Read more ...
james.woodall
One wants to be antagonised by Harold Pinter. In his substantial early dramas (The Homecoming, The Caretaker, The Birthday Party), aggression and menace coil through the texts like rattlesnakes. He was, then, revolutionary. Maybe it's glib - critical shorthand - to suggest that there were, thereafter, two to three decades of falling away; but some of us might feel that much of his later work either became hijacked by his belligerent, unnuanced politics or, simply and contrastingly, softened.The latter charge cannot be laid against astonishing plays like No Man's Land (1975) and Betrayal (1978 Read more ...
Jasper Rees
I can tell you the year (1983). I can tell you the theatre (the newly opened Barbican), the actors (Gambon, Sher), and the speech (“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!”). Hell, I can all but tell you the seat number. Lear and the Fool in the storm stood on a platform mounted on a high pole. It was an arresting way of establishing their elemental isolation. Or it would have been if the gantry gaining the actors access to the platform had been withdrawn. “That’s not meant to be there,” said the person next door to me. And then louder, “They’ve got it wrong.” My father. I still remember someone Read more ...