playwrights
aleks.sierz
Platonic love should be simple – basically you’re best mates. And without the complications of sex, what could go wrong? Waleed Akhtar, whose big hit The P Word was also performed here at the Bush, takes this idea and complicates it – by making it about a gay boy and a straight girl.The playwright then adds further complications: family, ethnicity, religion, life chances and career choices. The result, which stars It’s a Sin’s Nathaniel Curtis as well as Mariam Haque, is a fascinating account of mixed emotions and a sad story about the gradual decay of youthful idealism. As such, it Read more ...
aleks.sierz
I live in Brixton, south London; in my street, for many years, a pair of trainers were up in the sky, hanging over the telephone wires. They were there for years, getting more and more soggy, more and more decayed. Urban myth called them a tribute to a dead gangster.There are similar urban legends aplenty in Tife Kusoro’s 75-minute new play, G, which won the George Devine Award last year, and now gets its premiere in the upstairs studio at the Royal Court. Its bare traverse staging features a pair of luminous white trainers hanging above the action. But, unlike the ones in my street, these Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Before a word is spoken, a pause held, we hear the seagulls squawking outside, see the (let’s say brown) walls that remind you of the H-Block protests of the 1980s, witness the pitifully small portions for breakfast. If you were in any doubt that we were anywhere other than submerged beneath the fag end of the post-war years of austerity, the clothes confirm it. And a thought surfaces and will jab throughout the two hours runtime: “How different are things today in, say, Clacton?”But Ultz’s design work has grounded Harold Pinter’s second play firmly in pre-Beatles England, where even Elvis Read more ...
aleks.sierz
For the past ten years, Black-British playwrights have been in the vanguard of innovation in the form and content of new writing. I’m thinking not only of writers with longer careers such as Roy Williams and debbie tucker green, but also of Inua Ellams, Arinzé Kene, Nathaniel Martello-White, Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini and Tyrell Williams.And every year they are joined by other talents. One such is Benedict Lombe, who won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2022 for her debut monologue, Lava, and now returns to the Bush Theatre with her latest, a 100-minute two-hander which is exquisitely written Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It’s awards season in the film world, which means that we’re currently swamped by hyperbolic shows of love and respect – actors and their directors gushing about how each could simply never have reached their creative heights without the other. Of course, it’s not always like that; there is plenty of hell unleased on a movie set. John Logan’s new play investigates the messier, uglier side of the director-actor dynamic, by considering two real-life, notorious, if very different confrontations. One is between Alfred Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren, during the shooting of Marnie, in 1964 in Read more ...
Lia Rockey
Richard Schoch, in the subtitle of his new book on Shakespeare’s House, promises something big: “a window onto his life and legacy.” To the disgruntled reader – pushed to the brink by one too many new books on Shakespeare, each nervously proclaiming truly never-before-seen revelations – I suggest patience. Schoch is aware of the balance that writing this kind of book demands. He also has the sort of well-oiled experience that reassures us of a pair of safe hands. There’s a sweet spot that must be struck when writing a Shakespeare book, one between nicheness and accessibility, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
British Theatre abounds in forgotten writers. And in ones whose early work is too rarely revived. One such is Michael Hastings, best known for Tom & Viv, his 1984 biographical drama about TS Eliot and his wife Vivienne, so in theory it’s great to see this playwright’s 1956 debut, Don’t Destroy Me, being revived at the Arcola by director Tricia Thorns’ Two’s Company, whose remit is the discovery and resuscitation of long-ignored work.First staged in the same year as John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, the play is an anguished Jewish family story, but is it any good?Set in a Brixton flat in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
They called Noël Coward “The Master”, and Barnaby Thompson's 90-minute documentary marking 50 years since his death reminded us why. Though there was nothing here in the way of hitherto unknown revelations, the tale of how a boy who left school at nine and had no musical training yet became one of the world’s most prolific playwrights and composers undoubtedly has something fantastical about it.With a commentary by Alan Cumming, quotations from Coward’s own writings voiced by Rupert Everett and bags of time-travelling period footage, the film pieced together the story of this son of an out-of Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We’re in Moscow (we hear that quite a lot) where an ageing woman on a rare trip out of her apartment block catches sight of an advert in a bank’s window. She is soon inside and subjected to a sales pitch by a keen young bank "manager", torn between his understanding of her dementia and the career-boost the loan will bring. Five months later, she’s in her little flat with a debt collector, a man even more ruthless in pursuit of his objectives – and events take an unexpected turn.Theatre503 continues to find highly promising playwrights through its International Playwriting Award scheme, 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 ...
Gary Naylor
In Annus Mirabilis, Philip Larkin wrote,"So life was never better than In nineteen sixty-three (Though just too late for me) – Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban And the Beatles' first LP."That might be the only point on which he and Joan Littlewood, a fellow poet, might agree, because she caught the zeitgeist and was doing iconoclastic work of her own in Stratford (emphatically not "upon Avon") with her revolutionary musical Oh What A Lovely War. Though it feels now to be something of an artefact in theatre’s archaeology, it has not lost its sting nor its Read more ...