new writing
Jenny Gilbert
God makes few appearances at the modern playhouse – so few that the Finborough Theatre saw fit to print a glossary in the programme for its latest production. What begins with Agnostic, Annunciation and Aramaic runs all the way to Spirit Guide, Utopia and Vespers, which gives some idea of the breadth of reference to be found in this tightly constructed three-hander by New York writer Keith Bunin.Hannah (Kazia Pelka) is an Episcopalian minister (the US equivalent of Anglican), wont to accessorise her clerical collar with combat pants and sneakers. She may be a fervent Bible scholar, but she is Read more ...
Heather Neill
Bold and fearless are adjectives that might describe playwright Rory Mullarkey as accurately as any chivalrous knight. He made his name in 2013 when, at the age of 25, his play Cannibals, part of which was in Russian, took to the main stage at the Manchester Royal Exchange and went on to win the James Tait Black Prize. He has written opera libretti, a play about revolution for the Royal Court, The Wolf from the Door, and a version of The Oresteia for the Globe. And now here he is filling the Olivier’s wide spaces with an epic modern folk tale.Saint George and the Dragon comes, in proper Read more ...
Elyse Dodgson
The autumn season of plays at the Royal Court leads with international work. B by Guillermo Calderón (from Chile), Bad Roads by Natal'ya Vorozhbit (from Ukraine) and Goats by Liwaa Yazji (from Syria) have a long history with our international department. We probably have to go back over a decade to look at the seeds of this work and the connections they have to one another and to each of us.THE ROAD TO BAD ROADIt is June 2008 and I am sitting around a table in Natal'ya Vorozhbit's new flat in Kiev with her mother Masha, her baby daughter Pasha and our co-collaborator and translator, Sasha Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Simon Stephens and director Marianne Elliott are hyped as a winning partnership. Their previous collaborations include The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a massive Olivier award-winning hit, and her sensitive revival of his early play, Port, at the National Theatre. Now they are in the West End again, this time with a two-hander starring Anne-Marie Duff and Kenneth Cranham. Despite the title, this is not a play about science, but about love, but it does concern chance. And uncertainty.Inspired by a vague notion of the Uncertainty Principle, which suggests that Read more ...
aleks.sierz
What does it mean to feel contemporary? Feel. Contemporary. According to theatre-maker Chris Thorpe, whose new play Victory Condition has just opened at the Royal Court in tandem with Guillermo Calderón’s B, being contemporary is a really disturbing mixture of feeling all-powerful and completely powerless. In a short two-hander, Thorpe emphasises that something is very wrong at the heart of daily life. We all know this; we all feel this. But what is it? Well, it’s the sense that everything is on the verge of breakdown.Set in a modern new-built flat, Victory Condition is basically two Read more ...
Marianka Swain
A year after premiering acclaimed French playwright Florian Zeller’s The Truth, the Menier Chocolate Factory now hosts The Lie – which, as the name suggests, acts as a companion piece of sorts. Once again, we’re in a slippery Pinteresque realm, the seemingly conventional domestic set-up teasingly deconstructed as Zeller challenges our conception of honesty and morality.This latest Lindsay Posner-directed import is similarly light-hearted – compared with the weightier Zeller double of The Mother and The Father – and once again features two affluent couples, with the same names, plus Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Prolific playwright James Graham aspires to be nothing if not timely. His latest, a play about the Labour Party, was originally due to open during the week of that party’s conference, when our ears were once again ringing to the chant of “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!” Unfortunately, the play’s TV star Sarah Lancashire had to pull out, so its West End opening was delayed until tonight. Her replacement, Tamsin Greig, joins Martin Freeman in this epic comedy about a Labour MP in an era of change. It’s a starry cast, but does the play’s content live up to its billing?Opening with familiar chords of the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
In the 1960s, we had the theatre of commitment; today we have an attitude of non-committal. Once, political playwrights could be guaranteed to tell you what to think, to describe what was wrong with society – and what to do about it. Now, as Chilean playwright Guillermo Calderón’s new play, B – which was developed by the Royal Court’s international programme – makes clear, the keynote is ambiguity and an ironic detachment. It sets the tone for this venue’s autumn season, in which “emerging writers from across the world make radical new work for Britain”.B starts innocently enough with Marcela Read more ...
David Eldridge
My friend, the playwright Robert Holman, says that the writing of a play is always “the product of a moment”. Of course, he’s right, but sometimes you have to pick your moment.In autumn 2015 a TV writing gig hadn’t worked out in the way that I’d hoped it might and I had a gap. Sometimes as a writer it’s great to find you have little to do but walk a lot, read a lot and think a lot, but I was in no mood to reflect. I had itchy fingers and needed to write. I’d had the idea of making a very detailed naturalistic play, beginning with a man and a woman looking at each other, for years; literally Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Location, location, location. Jim thinks he lives in the “shittiest” small town in Scotland. It’s Mallaig, on the west coast, and he’s a deeply troubled 32-year-old, working for a fish merchant and as a nature guide, but having no friends. His flat is tiny and messy, and it smells bad. Still, he enjoys his own company, and has a great collection of crustaceans in formaldehyde. It’s his hobby. As actor Sophie Wu shows in her 80-minute debut play he has good reason to feel depressed. It’s because of what happened to him 15 years ago.Yet Jim is not totally solitary. He has a girlfriend, 19-year- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jack Cardiff was one of the all-time greats of cinematography, the man who shot such Powell and Pressburger classics as The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death, worked on John Huston’s The African Queen with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, and lensed Marilyn Monroe in The Prince and the Showgirl. He was renowned as “the man who makes women look beautiful”, but despite this he didn’t shrink from shooting Sylvester Stallone in Rambo: First Blood (Part II).Terry Johnson’s new play for Hampstead Theatre depicts Cardiff in his twilight years, reliving chunks of his past while his Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As with life, so it is in art: in the same way that one can't predict the curve balls that get thrown our way, the American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins defies categorisation. On the basis of barely a handful of plays, two of which happen now to be running concurrently in London, this 32-year-old Pulitzer prize finalist seems to embark upon a fresh path with each new venture. Starting with its entirely unanticipated structure, Gloria at Hampstead Theatre confounds expectation to a heady and exhilarating degree, if one can apply those adjectives to so ferocious a vision of American life. Read more ...