new writing
Pandemonium, Soho Theatre review - satire needs a shot of Pfizer's finest to revive tired storylines
Gary Naylor
In 2020, throughout the country, many people’s lives were affected adversely by an ever-present threat to our already fragile society. Though most got over it, many people still bear the cost every day, sapping them of energy, making them cough and splutter frequently, instilling a longing that it would just go away and stay away. Like many, I have been suffering from “Long Boris”, the affliction reactivated last week with his appearance as the Covid Inquiry Variant spread far and wide. And such topicality ought to work in favour of Armando Iannucci’s first venture on to the stage, Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A sun deck with seven pale-green padded loungers is the latest setting for the latest National Theatre premiere from American playwright Annie Baker to people in her inimitable way. In her hands this banal space is as dramatically charged as any windowless Beckett cell. The set is lit to depict different stages of the day, from bright golden sunlight to crepuscular gloom. Time elapsing is announced by one of the characters: “22 minutes”, “25 hours”, and so on. Over five days, the chairs will be occupied by groupings of five women and a solitary man, the women in an assortment of Read more ...
Gary Naylor
It’s 2012 and the London Olympics might as well be happening on the Moon for Jen and Stacey. In fact, you could say the same for everyone else scrabbling a living in Bradford – or anywhere north of Watford – and we know what those left-behind places did when presented with a ballot box in 2016 and 2019.Not that such weighty matters concern our two girls, out for a banging (in more senses than one) £1 Thursday night out, living for the sex and booze and rock’n’roll that get them from one week to the next. (Writer, Kat Rose-Martin, wisely keeps other temptations out of arm’s reach, one of many Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“It’s nothing like Christmas,” Rachel (Amy-Leigh Hickman) hisses at her brother David (Kishore Walker). She’s trying to wrangle her family into their first ever Diwali celebration, but everything’s going wrong. Her dad Yash (Bhasker Patel) is getting on far too well with her boyfriend Matt (Jack Flammiger). And to top it off, mum Ruth (Catherine Cusack) has found everything but the most important item on Rachel’s meticulous shopping list: the matches.Passing, Dan Sareen’s new “family comedy-drama” at the Park Theatre, raises some interesting points about identity and belonging. But it goes Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A middle-aged man, expensively dressed and possessed of that very specific confidence that only comes from a certain kind of education, a certain kind of professional success, a certain kind of entitlement, talks to a younger woman. Despite the fact that she isn’t really trying, she’s attractive, bright and just assertive enough to weave a spell of fascination over men like him, with a tinge of non-dangerous exoticism evidenced by her East European accent to round things out. They are catnip to each other. And so it had been until almost two years ago. A torrid affair had been conducted, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Rarely has a play's opening been so opportune. Just when it looked as if the West End was slipping into decline, along comes the smart, shrewd Backstairs Billy to allay mounting fears of late that the commercial theatre had lost all sense of quality control. (The offending titles know who they are.)It helps, of course, that Marcelo Dos Santos's royalty-themed play is getting a luxuriant production whose visual allure is evident from our first sight of designer Christopher Oram's spare-no-floral-arrangement recreation of the Garden Room of Clarence House. But just when you think you've heard Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Penelope Skinner’s new play is one of the most eccentric things I’ve seen in a long time. It’s undoubtedly entertaining, with an engagingly bonkers attempt by Kristin Scott Thomas to navigate an almost impossible role, perched between victim, diva and madwoman, equally reminsicent of Norma Desmond and one of the posh recluses from Grey Gardens. But tonally it’s exasperating, undecided whether it wants to be a #MeToo drama, a Tennessee Williams-infused tragedy, a fable, or comedy, with one moment that is literally trousers-round-your ankles farce. And its message is depressingly Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A flea bites a rat which spooks a horse which kicks a man and… an empire falls?James Fritz has won writing awards already in his developing career, but he has set himself quite the challenge to weave a thread that can bear that narrative weight. Two and a half hours later in this retelling of the late 19th-century Cleveland Street scandal, the empire survives, the fall guy takes the inevitable tumble and we’re a little punchdrunk. Here is a play that beats you up with its sheer volume of artistic choices but also dips into stretches of unnecessary exposition that drain energy away: there’s a Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The Royal Court’s collaboration with Access All Areas (AAA) may not be theatre’s first explicit embrace of the neurodiverse community on stage: Chickenshed has five decades of extraordinary inclusive work behind them and Jellyfish, starring Sarah Gordy at the National Theatre, was one of my highlights of 2019.But Molly Davies's play, directed by Hamish Pirie, may be the most ambitious. Developed by AAA’s seven learning disabled and autistic Associate Artists, the five-year long project addresses many issues but sinks into a convoluted narrative that never quite resolves itself into plain Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Towards the end of the 18th century, Lady Emma Hamilton (like so much in this woman's life, hers was a title achieved as much as bestowed) was the “It Girl” of European society.They’ve always been around – women who have the combination of looks, intelligence and transgressive confidence fused by a rare alchemy into a concoction that a certain kind of powerful man cannot resist (and plenty of not so powerful men, too). Then, as now, such women were dangerous and the patriarchy exacted a price for the challenge not so much to its norms but to its hypocrisy. Such people burned bright, but Read more ...
Tom Teodorczuk
Plays chronicling the unscrupulous collision of high finance and big tech seem 10 a penny these days. Some writers, such as Joseph Charlton, seem to have built entire careers around telling glossy tech morality tales (for my money the best in this burgeoning genre is Sarah Burgess's Dry Powder staged at Hampstead Theatre in 2018 starring Hayley Atwell).Disruption, which is receiving its world premiere also in North London at Finsbury’s Park Theatre, is yet another slick tech show. Written by Andrew Stein and directed by Hersh Ellis, Disruption tackles the seemingly unstoppable rise of AI. Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Much of cricket comprises waiting – you wait on the boundary to hear news of the toss, you wait your turn to bat, you heed the call of your batting partner to wait to see if a run is on, you wait for the rain to stop. A friend once told me that he played cricket in order to make the rest of his life seem more interesting. There is something in that observation that would appeal to both principals in this play for sure.Two men bicker on the boundary as they wait their turn to bat. In at five and six, one is keeping score (and "working the telegraph", as cricket’s arcane argot has it), while Read more ...