new writing
aleks.sierz
The Royal Court has been finding and developing young writers for four decades. Its Young Writers Festival has helped launch the careers of a variety of talents such as Simon Stephens (winner of the 2005 Olivier for Best Newcomer), Christopher Shinn (nominated for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize), Bola Agbaje (winner of an Olivier in 2008), as well as Michael Wynne, Chloe Moss and Alia Bano. This year, along with a full programme of readings, short plays, workshops and talks, it hosts two full-length plays. The first, which opened last night, is actor Luke Norris’s London debut.In a series of rapid Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is there a more evocative location than Essex? In his 2000 play Under the Blue Sky, one of David Eldridge’s characters shouts the unforgettable words: “I’m from Essex and I’m dancing!” Now back at this venue for the first time since that play, Eldridge proves that he is much more than the common characterisation of him as “the writer as bloke”. But can his new play, which opened last night and is set in his favourite county, dance as well as his previous ones?Sixtysomething Len is dying of prostate cancer. Gathered around his bedside are his two sisters, Doreen and Maureen, but this picture Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Science rocks. In the theatre, this is a subject that offers to provide powerful experiments in metaphor. Most recently, in Nick Payne’s Constellations - and most classically in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen and Charlotte Jones’s Humble Boy - the world of quantum mechanics, cosmology and chaos theory suggests ideas about the randomness of our daily lives. And there is nothing quite so random as love.In the appealingly titled Mathematics of the Heart, Dr Paul MacMillan – a bearded boffin from Middlesex University – has a problem. He is a professor of chaos theory, and his Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Can you replace a wife with a doctrine? Under normal circumstances, the question would be absurd, but given that Joe Penhall’s new play, which opened last night, is the latest of a crop that have explored belief, spirituality and religion, the conundrum is a very real one. And it’s here presented with unforgettable force in a compelling and stimulating play which itself seems guaranteed to haunt you.In a terraced house in outer London live Douglas and Julie, who have been married for a while. They have a young son, Thomas, and are trying for another. Then Douglas goes missing. For weeks and Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Some plays are so weird they defy description. Well, almost. One of these must surely be the late James Saunders’s deeply absurdist play, whose first outing in 1963 launched the career of the young Michael Caine. Soon after, its author won a promising playwright award. The current revival, part of the Orange Tree’s 40th-birthday season, gives us a chance to look again at a writer whose innovative work has been consistently promoted by Sam Walters, artistic director at this address.Darkness. A man lies under a starry night. Actors, and other creatives, arrive on stage. Who are they and what Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Spooky coincidences make good drama. Mike Bartlett’s epic follow-up to his highly successful 2010 play Earthquakes in London begins with a mind-bogglingly weird situation: every morning in the metropolis, dozens of people wake up and they’ve all had the same disturbing dream. The play, which opened last night, then goes on to examine what happens when citizens rise up to challenge the system in an era of foreign war and economic austerity.The story is set in a UK that's a bit like a parallel universe, where a Conservative government is led by a woman prime minister who seems bent on Read more ...
aleks.sierz
“Why does anyone ever have kids?” By the time a character in April De Angelis’s new comedy utters this exasperated exclamation, there are many in the audience - whether parents or children, or both - who must have had the same thought. And more than once in the evening. For this exceptionally hilarious and perceptive play, which opened last night, not only tickles the insides of your arm, but also lights up the senses and then gives you a quick cuddle, too.Hilary is 50; she lives with her husband Mark and 15-year-old daughter Tilly. It’s a nice middle-class family. So when Tilly brings home Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
“Go home. This is not your business. This is not your war.” So a Congolese warlord tells Sadhbh, an Irish human-rights defender, in Stella Feehily’s new drama for Out of Joint. Has the arrogance and exploitation of colonialism been replaced by the interference of aid organisations? Are the motives of those drawn to troubled countries purely altruistic? And what real hope have they of making a difference, after the media has lost interest in a conflict and left?Feehily’s drama is painstakingly researched and it asks some big, discomfiting questions about the West’s relationship with nations it Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Can an ordinary wooden chair be an instrument of torture? Of course, every brute investigation makes use of such furniture, whether as a place to tie the victim down, or as a weapon to attack them with. But, as Debbie Tucker Green’s new play so eloquently shows, the wooden chair can also be a more subtle and unexpected instrument of fraught emotion: at every meeting of a truth and reconciliation commission, the wooden chair is there in the hall, itself a dumb witness to the clash of old enemies.Dealing as it does with the horrors of genocide, war and violent conflict, Truth and Reconciliation Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
A monolithic slab, like a giant incarnation of a Biblical tablet of stone, dominates Mark Thompson’s set for Jamie Lloyd's production of the third play by Alexi Kaye Campbell. Nothing else is so solid in this big, weighty work, which wrestles with abstract notions of faith, the human soul and the myths and narratives by which we choose to live.It’s an ambitious piece of writing, and at times Campbell trips over his own verbosity. In an evening of nearly three hours’ duration, carved up by two intervals, it’s difficult not to wish at times that he had more full-bloodedly dramatised his Read more ...
aleks.sierz
For a couple of years now British theatre has been harvesting a new crop of young female talent. Market leaders such as Lucy Prebble (Enron) and Polly Stenham (That Face) have made a splash in the West End, and where they led many others have followed. Earlier this week, Lou Ramsden’s excellent horror story, Hundreds and Thousands, premiered at the Soho Theatre. And last night Penelope Skinner’s superb new play, which stars Romola Garai, opened at the Royal Court Theatre.Becky (excellently played by Garai) is pregnant. According to John, her husband, she is therefore hormonal, and a bit weird Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Anya Reiss must be the most precocious playwright in London. Her 2010 debut, Spur of the Moment, written while she was just 17 and still studying for her A levels, won two Most Promising Playwright awards, from the London Evening Standard and the Critics’ Circle. Now her follow-up, The Acid Test, which opened last night at the Royal Court in this new-writing flagship’s upstairs studio, prompts me to ask whether she was just a one-hit wonder - and can she avoid the second-album syndrome?Three young women, barely out of their teens, share a messy London flat. Dana, Ruth and Jessica are nice Read more ...