new writing
Joe White
Before I knew – or realised – I wanted to write about alcoholism in my play Blackout Songs (premiered last autumn at the Hampstead Downstairs and moving this weekend to the mainstage), I wanted to write about love and memory. I'd had three very close friends lose their dads to Alzheimer's in the space of about six years – all very young – and I'd seen how the deterioration of the mind and memory was in many ways as devastating as the physical.I saw how difficult it was for loved ones to process where they belonged in that person's mind – the joy Read more ...
Tom Teodorczuk
It never hurts the trajectory of a promising young playwright if they have a good eye for the zeitgeist, and the writer Joseph Charlton can certainly be said to possess that. His last play Anna X, inspired by high society scammer Anna Delvey and starring Emma Corrin, was a briefly-seen West End success post-pandemic and was staged several months before Netflix aired its phenomenally successful Inventing Anna series.Now Southwark Playhouse is reviving Brilliant Jerks, Charlton’s play chronicling the colourful history of a disruptive ride-sharing app (heavily based on Uber) five years to the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Can a play ever be a bit too much like real life? The thought came to me while watching Matilda Feyisayo Ibini’s entertaining new play Sleepova at the Bush. This latest opening is almost a bookend to the excellent Red Pitch, premiered at the same address last year: another intimate piece about teens in transition to adulthood, but this time featuring a sparky female quartet, not a football-mad trio of young men. It has more lightness of spirit, but less grit.Proceedings start before lights down, with the voices of girls chatting behind the scenes and singing along to tracks playing over the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
A man in modern garb reads a tabloid newspaper and makes smarmy wisecracks about the malaise of contemporary Britain – strikes, NHS waiting lists and the rest of it. But hang on a minute: isn’t this meant to be a period drama? Lulu Raczka’s new play at the Almeida, directed by Rupert Goold, declares its fundamental, gleeful tricksiness from the start. The aforementioned chap is the devil, no less, breaking the fourth wall with spoilers, and bemoaning the fact that, whereas once upon a time he was the accepted cause of the world’s ills, today “it’s structural, systemic, never evil Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Michael John O’Neill’s first full-length play, premiering at the Hampstead's studio space downstairs, is a puzzler. There’s the title, to start with, a Hebrew word that means “binding” and is a reference to the story of Abraham preparing his son Isaac, at God’s command, to be sacrificed.Spotting the reworking of this biblical theme in the text can be a challenge, even though O’Neill usefully has one of the characters treasure her toy lamb, Deadsheep, as a clue. The religion that features here, too, isn’t Judaism but a cultish kind of Pentecostalism, including speaking in tongues, led by a Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Who better to write a piece about the game-playing of a peace-talks negotiation than a former peace-talk negotiator, Daniel Taub? And who better to sprinkle some comedy oofle dust on the proceedings than the TV producer and writer Dan Patterson, begetter of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Mock the Week and many collaborations with Clive Anderson?And a tail-coated Anderson is our narrator-come-game show host for Winner's Curse, whose ambitions ever so slightly overreach themselves. The premise is that Anderson is Hugo Leitski, a former, yes, peace-talks negotiator for a fictitious Eastern European Read more ...
Andrew Mellor
“Silence,” Andrew Mellor contends, “is more prominent in the northernmost reaches of Europe.” Yet it is more like a texture or an apprehension of vacancy than a state of true soundlessness: sometimes “real and pure”, sometimes it “lingers despite the noise”.Against this muted backdrop, Mellor’s new book The Northern Silence - Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture follows the circuits of musical culture across Scandinavia, Finland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands, tracing the attempts to fill the quiet, asking why “the arts, and classical music in particular, occupy a different position in Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
We all have that friend. The person you met on holiday and couldn’t shake off. You added each other on Facebook, but they posted so much you’ve quietly unfollowed them. You can’t quite bring yourself to unfriend them, though. In The Unfriend, a new play at the Criterion Theatre after a Chichester premiere, Sherlock writer Steven Moffat asks: what if that friend was a murderer? And what if you had invited them to stay in your house?This is a true story – so true, in fact, that Moffat didn’t even change the name of the actual friend, Peter, to whom it happened. The play's Peter (Reece Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Do you remember how the 1001 Nights ends? You know how it starts: Scheherazade has been married to a king who kills his brides the day after he marries them. She tells him a story so good that he simply has to know what happens next, and she survives the next day. This goes on for 1001 nights, until… what?The inherently cyclical nature of the source material of the new play Hakawatis: Women of the Arabian Nights is a problem that writer Hannah Khalil never quite solves. But Pooja Ghai’s production at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, a collaboration with theatre company Tamasha, is Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Pain is, at one and the same time, something to avoid, and also something you can use. Kahlil Gibran, the Lebanese-American mystical author of the 1923 best-seller The Prophet, concludes that, despite suffering, “all is well”, but how true is that? In his award-winning play, which premiered in Boston in 2011, American playwright Stephen Karam examines the issues in a thoroughly original, brilliantly constructed and thematically compelling way.Now getting its belated European premiere at the Hampstead Theatre, Sons of the Prophet is an enthralling experience, both intellectually and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Opposition (and history) are the apparent mainstays of the ceaselessly busy James Graham, and he conjoins the two to riveting effect in Best of Enemies.Telling of the televised 1968 debates between William F Buckley and Gore Vidal during that year's presidential race, Graham's hurtling drama is now in the West End after its Young Vic debut nearly a year ago; Broadway, presumably, is the next destination, not least given his play's American setting. We've been down this road before in varying ways, via Frost/Nixon on the one hand and Graham's own Ink, which posited two male Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The set at the Arcola for Frank McGuinness’s Dinner with Groucho naturally features a table with two place settings and a backdrop of clouds in a blue sky. Overhead are pendant globe lights that will transform into stars. But the floor is a key feature too, covered in sawdust.For those who can’t see it from their seats, the playwright has usefully included a line about this being a “sawdust restaurant”. If you happen to notice that there are oyster shells scattered over it too, and nod in recognition, you will probably feel less adrift given that the oyster shells and sawdust reference comes Read more ...