Old Vic
Matt Wolf
Might we be nearing light at the end of the lockdown tunnel? It definitely seems that way, with the news in recent days that social life beyond the home may be resuming soon, at least after a fashion. All the while, theatrical offerings continue to come thick and fast, all the while offering up a cheeringly broad away of online prospects. This week's quintet includes a piece of installation art that you are encouraged to experience lying flat on your back, alongside an acclaimed Shakespeare extravaganza from just last year that many at the time experienced on their feet. We've got something Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Reviewing theatre now means reviewing film. Knowing that Emma Rice’s Old Vic 2018 production of Wise Children, her typically rambunctious version of Angela Carter’s last novel, published in 1991, has been recorded by The Space immediately raises expectations of high quality. After all, this company specializes in digitally bringing good art to wider audiences. As you’d expect for a show that is now streaming on BBC iplayer, and will be broadcast on BBC Four in due course, the filming is well directed and edited. But what about the play?The plot tells the story of Brixton-born twins Dora and Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” Director Richard Jones has certainly taken Beckett’s words to heart in this vividly comic, star-cast Old Vic double bill, pairing Endgame with a lesser-known short play – which acts as a sort of stylistic and thematic amuse bouche. The result is a richly engaging evening, though one that skirts real profundity.We open with Beckett’s Rough for Theatre II, a half-hour vaudevillian sketch in which two dark-suited, bureaucratic colleagues (Alan Cumming and Daniel Radcliffe, pictured below) discuss whether or not a man will commit suicide; echoes here of both Read more ...
Heather Neill
"Dickensian" commonly means both sentimental Victorian, apple-cheeked family perfection (especially at Christmas) and abject poverty. The story of Scrooge encompasses both as the old curmudgeon learns to mend his miserly ways and open his heart to others in a tale of redemption.Matthew Warchus's enveloping production has already had two successful outings here (with Rhys Ifans in the "Bah Humbug" role in 2017 and Stephen Tompkinson last year) and another iteration of it has just opened on Broadway.This version, by Jack Thorne (a writer whose work is familiar to all-age audiences for Harry Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Playing our monarch and her husband in The Crown has made actors Claire Foy and Matt Smith into TV drama royalty, so reuniting the pair onstage guarantees a hot ticket. What’s less clear is why Lungs, Duncan Macmillan’s rather thin 2011 play, merits a major revival at the Old Vic. A two-hander charting the evolution of a couple’s relationship as they grapple with the prospect of parenthood and the future of the planet, it recycles well-worn themes, and its tone and viewpoint are as middle-class, conventional and, frankly, about as dramatically exciting as a weekly shop in Waitrose.There’s a Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
If Russia is, as Winston Churchill once so memorably said, “a riddle, wrapped inside a mystery, wrapped inside an enigma”, then this play is an outrage, wrapped inside a farce, framed by a bittersweet love story. Through the prism of the polonium poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, playwright Lucy Prebble reaches into the surreal, unknowable power-structure of what would eventually become Putin’s Russia, to create a bold, resonant piece of political theatre evoking the contradictions of our post-truth world.This is an evening that is as devastatingly moving as it is bitingly funny, anchored by Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" can be heard pulsating through the Old Vic auditorium as the curtain rises on its wondrous revival of Present Laughter: a decisive feather in the cap of artistic director Matthew Warchus's regime. But all Garry Essendine, the vainglorious actor at the whirling centre of Noël Coward's 1942 play, really wants is to make it through the day (and night) intact. Possessing 18 dressing gowns but at odds with that ever-elusive entity known as happiness, Garry has men and women alike in thrall, and so – and how! – does its stratospherically gifted Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Superstar Sally Field has come to town. With two academy awards and countless other accolades, the actor who played Forrest Gump's mother and dozens of other roles, from Frog to Mrs Lincoln, in Hollywood blockbusters and on television now returns to the stage to play a delusional and deceitful matriarch in Arthur Miller's All My Sons, part of the Old Vic's continuing tribute to the American playwright. She is joined on stage by Bill Pullman (Torchwood) and Jenna Coleman (Victoria) in a co-production with Headlong theatre company, directed by Jeremy Herrin.First staged in 1947, All My Sons is Read more ...
Marianka Swain
This year’s unofficial Arthur Miller season – following The Price and ahead of All My Sons at the Old Vic and Death of a Salesman at the Young Vic – now turns to his 1980 work, The American Clock, inspired in part by Miller’s own memories of the 1929 Wall Street Crash and subsequent Great Depression. It’s also based on Studs Terkel’s oral history Hard Times, and the combination is an uneasy one: a Miller-esque American family used as microcosm, but also constant diversions to other people and places in a sprawling three hours.Central to the play is the Baum clan: father Moe, initially a Read more ...
Tim Cornwell
The Old Vic's revival of its successful Christmas Carol first seen this time last year had me at the mince pies: they were served before curtain up by a Bob Cratchit figure while we admired the shoal of Victorian lanterns lighting the way over a cross-shaped stage that cuts the audience into quarters. Top-hatted gentlemen and gentleladies in swishing black great coats strolled about tossing oranges. One waved a sign that said, "Please do not use your mobile phones in the auditorium," which could have been more appropriately phrased but did at least keep the devices from being doused in the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"What could possibly go wrong?" The question ends the first act of Wise Children, the debut venture from the new company birthed by a director, Emma Rice, who must have asked herself precisely that query at many points in recent years. Unceremoniously dumped by Shakespeare's Globe, where her A Midsummer Night's Dream remains one of the most buoyant in my experience, Rice has picked herself up and moved gallantly on, partnering her fledgling company with no less tony an address than The Old Vic. Oh, and guess what: the company is called Wise Children, too.So it's somewhat disheartening to Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
A raw pagan vitality animates this extraordinary story about a teenage boy wrestling with tumultuous emotions in the face of his mother’s terminal illness. Director Sally Cookson has taken the potent blend of myth and realism in Patrick Ness’s book and transformed it into a wild, beautiful piece of theatre that visually beguiles at the same time as it bruises the heart.Grief – even when suppressed – is an isolating phenomenon, and the production emphasises this from the start by stranding the boy, Conor (Matthew Tennyson, pictured above right), at the centre of a stark, clinical white stage. Read more ...