Old Vic
Tom Birchenough
There’s cruel comedy and human drama aplenty in Fortune’s Fool, so much so that it’s hard sometimes to know whether we’re watching farce or tragedy. But it’s a mixture that works well in Lucy Bailey’s production of Ivan Turgenev’s early play in this version by Mike Poulton, making its London debut at the Old Vic.Fortune’s Fool has a rather special history behind it. Poulton’s adaptation of Turgenev’s 1848 work was first seen in Chichester in 1996, to mixed critical reception. Thanks to Alan Bates, who had played the central role of the tragic Russian country estate hanger-on, Vasily Kuzovkin Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“What, my dear Lady Disdain! Are you yet living?” Surely never before has Benedick’s opening quip cut so close to the literal, nor drawn such a laugh from its audience. With a combined age of 158, the romantic leads in Mark Rylance’s Much Ado About Nothing take the current trend for an older pair of lovers to the extreme. James Earl Jones and Vanessa Redgrave turn Shakespeare’s text on its head. Here nieces are older than their uncles, elderly men challenge duels and declare youthful passions. It’s a reading that goes against the grain, but one that brings a certain friction to a comedy of Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
A town called St Cloud, a girl named Heavenly and a faded star who feels she’s living on the Moon: the imagery of Tennessee Williams’s drama is celestial, yet he puts his characters through hell. Amid the clamour of church bells and self-righteous moral hypocrisy, this torrid play invokes castration, venereal disease and prostitution, with love and sexual passion colliding violently with repressive social strictures. It’s about as juicy and lurid a slice of Southern Gothic as anyone could have an appetite for – and this superlative production by Marianne Elliott savours every pungent mouthful Read more ...
Laura Silverman
Terence Rattigan's beautifully spoken characters are a passionate lot in this gripping story of a father's fight to prove his son's innocence. Lindsay Posner's production of the 1946 play succors and seduces its audience with an unstoppable determination to prove that right will be done. Its methods may not be subtle, but its effects are no less stirring.How often the audience is reminded that a boy stealing a five-shilling postal order is such “a little case”: no matter for the Government, nor the media nor a family to fret over. And yet, how evident it becomes that the principles at stake Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Here’s an elegant thing to do before eight o'clock dinner - stroll out for an hour’s recital of a rollicking story-poem done by a leading actress in a hip underground venue with judiciously hip application of modern dance, then go off and diss it over your sushi. Very London life.And if the pleasure potential offered by Fiona Shaw and Phyllida Lloyd in recounting Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s splendid 1798 horror yarn The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is any yardstick, there ought to be a future for a periodic series restoring dramatic poetry to the public at the cocktail hour.Shaw herself ushers Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Cole Porter’s musical spin on Shakespeare demands the fluidity, fizz and acidity of champagne. In Trevor Nunn’s revival, which transfers to London after a successful run in Chichester, it’s more like gelato. It has sweetness, and a rich abundance of detail, but it’s also thick, cloying, and somewhat bland. There’s plenty of stagey pizzazz on display, but it too often feels strained and soulless. The production lingers when it should zing, and despite some fine song and dance, it never conjures either the sexual heat or the showbiz buzz that should set it sparkling.The show takes place on and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Hedda Gabler – the doomy tragedy, the one with the pistol, the “female Hamlet”. We all know the score when it comes to Ibsen. All, that is, except apparently for Sheridan Smith, who recently admitted in an interview that she hadn’t heard of the play before she was asked to take on the lead. It may be a world away from the buxom bar-maids and big-hearted bimbos that have become Smith’s trademark, but the double Olivier Award-winner makes light work of a role that carries the weight of theatre’s greatest actresses.Smaller than almost everyone else on stage, and disappearing into sofas, melting Read more ...
sheila.johnston
You might not think that a drama about German parliamentary politics in the 1970s would be of great urgency today. But when Democracy, Michael Frayn's play about Willy Brandt and the Günter Guillaume spy scandal, first opened in 2003, Brits swiftly discerned links with another charismatic politician, the first left-wing leader in decades, while across the Atlantic the womanising German Chancellor looked very much like Bill Clinton. Today a new spin appears and Democracy is described as "exploring the Machiavellian nature of coalition government."Brandt ended his first speech after being Read more ...
ash.smyth
A director who is “passionate about biology”; a humorist who “hardly ever mocks”; an artist who speaks fluently about the origin of species; a non-musician who has directed some of the best-received opera productions of the modern era; a doctor with his own profile on IMDB. In short, a man who puts the “poly” into “polymath” – and like as not does it in Greek. Don’t you just hate Jonathan Miller?No, of course not. As last night’s Arena portrait could simply not fail to convince you, all laud and honour be to Jonathan Miller: there ought to be one of him in every home.And in the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This is the Jacobean tragedy that probably gave Quentin Tarantino his best ideas - by the end of the night the body count is almost in double figures through stabbings and strangulations. But even as the fake blood flows and the gurglings mount, Jamie Lloyd's sturdy but sometimes sluggish production of John Webster's masterpiece (c 1614) isn't exactly gripping.Lloyd, who recently directed a romping version of She Stoops to Conquer down the road at the National to great acclaim, has fewer directorial flourishes up his sleeve here. Oh, he tries to sex it up – we first see the duplicitous Read more ...
judith.flanders
Site-specific work has been flavour of the month for many many months now, and when the site is as spectacular as the Old Vic Tunnels, one understands why. Nearly 3,000 square metres of tunnelling under Waterloo Station (the trains rumble steadily overhead), the site has in its year as a venue been the location of the first showing of Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop, a participant in last year’s LIFT festival, and Alan Moore, the V for Vendetta graphic comic genius, even read there.Interestingly, as that list suggests, none of the works have been literally “site-specific”, that is, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The play-within-a-play device has honourable antecedents - playwrights from Thomas Kyd and Anton Chekhov through to Bertolt Brecht and Tennessee Williams have flirted with it, while Shakespeare loved it so much that he used it in several of his plays, most famously in Hamlet. Michael Frayn had the idea for Noises Off, which he wrote in 1982, when he was standing in the wings at a performance of Chinamen (a one-act farce performed as part of The Two of Us), which he had written for the late Lynn Redgrave, and thought that the backstage goings-on were even funnier than the onstage action.In Read more ...