Tricycle
Helen Hawkins
It’s only nine years since Moira Buffini’s Handbagged had its premiere at Kilburn’s Tricycle theatre (renamed the Kiln in 2018), but it triumphantly returns to the same venue as a copper-bottomed classic. Its timing is uncanny: Margaret Thatcher was dying the year it made its debut; now it resurfaces just as its other protagonist, HM the Queen, has passed away.Here they are again, handbags at the ready (black patent for the younger and older Thatchers, what looks like a black Launer for the two versions of the Queen), as they square up to slug it out in telling the story of their 11 Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
A lot’s changed since Kiln Theatre boss Indhu Rubasingham directed The Invisible Hand’s first UK outing in 2016, not least the theatre’s name (it was known as the Tricycle back then). But in Rubasingham’s capable hands, American Ayad Akhtar’s taut exploration of greed and blame still hits like a punch to the chest, ratcheting up the tension over two hours to an almost unbearable level.The premise is relatively simple. American banker Nick Bright (Daniel Lapaine, pictured below) has been kidnapped by accident – the unnamed organisation keeping him prisoner in rural Pakistan wanted his boss Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Holy shit! After being closed for two long years, the old and battered Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn has been refurbished and relaunched, with a name change and £5.5 million-worth of improvements. It’s now a much more welcoming place, full of light at the front and with an on-street café, as well as easy access to the new plush seats and excellent sightlines. Although some patrons have grumbled that the name change is a betrayal of past achievements, Indhu Rubasingham, the artistic director, has created a much more hipster-friendly, much more middle-class venue than the previous community hive. Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The last time but one that the Three Choirs Festival was in Gloucester the main offering was Elgar’s oratorio The Kingdom, and there’s a kind of inevitability about the same work turning up again, same place, same occasion, six years later. After all, the Three Choirs has not survived for almost 300 years by a fidgety policy of constant renewal. The festival may be a much more varied affair now than in its Barchester days, but the core image is still of a packed cathedral listening to Elgar or Vaughan Williams or Mendelssohn – and all these composers figure this time, with the bold, slightly Read more ...
Marianka Swain
In seeking to understand the historic, divisive and to some bewildering Brexit vote, I will turn to theatre. Through my regular exposure to it, I can number among my ever-widening acquaintance a young king, a whistleblower, a minimum-wage movie usher, a recovering alcoholic, a passionate teacher, a grieving parent, a struggling miner, an evangelical preacher, an underpaid social worker, a dementia sufferer, and a pair of star-crossed lovers.Theatre is empathy incarnate. It is one of the greatest tools we have for reaching another person, understanding their point of view, coming to realise Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
In the long tradition of fictional characters who embody their monikers, the naming of Nick Bright hardly counts as the most colourful, but it has a sardonic edge. Clearly the young American banker at the centre of Ayad Akhtar’s tight political thriller is too bright for his own good. A commodities trader for Citibank currently working in Lahore, he has been mistaken for his big-shot boss and kidnapped by Islamic militants who are holding him hostage in rural Pakistan while they wait for his employer, or the US government, to cough up $10 million to set him free.Fat chance, he reasons, and Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Anne longs for her 23-year-old son Nicholas to return home. One night, he appears. Or does he? Welcome back to the queasily elliptical world of Florian Zeller, where certainty fractures as familiar elements are repeated, dissected, made strange and menacing. Zeller used this immersive dislocation to powerfully communicate the experience of dementia in The Father, which last year travelled from Theatre Royal Bath to the Tricycle and on into the West End. This earlier 90-minute piece, on the same path, lacks The Father’s shattering focus and lyrical subtlety, but, thanks to Christopher Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Hollywood took 365 speaking parts, 50,000 extras and 2,500 horses to tell this epic tale in 1959; here at the Tricycle, it’s a cast of four and some enterprising puppet work. Playwright Patrick Barlow, following up global hit The 39 Steps, has chosen a comic contrast that could hardly be equalled: redux maximus.In fact, Ben Hur is closer in spirit to another Barlow phenomenon, the National Theatre of Brent. There’s more than a touch of pompous impresario Desmond Dingle in actor/manager Daniel Vale, of the Daniel Vale Theatre Company. Of course, the misplaced self-importance of Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Molière’s 1664 comedy Tartuffe transplanted to present-day Atlanta, Georgia: it sounds like an inspired idea. The hypocritical religious devotee becomes a charlatan preacher fleecing his flock, offering salvation in exchange for hard cash and a distinctly unpriestly grope. But Marcus Gardley’s attempt to put a contemporary spin on a once incendiary play comes with a trying side order of cartoonish caricatures and creaky sex farce.The tone is set by the opening sequence, in which randy Apostle Toof (Lucian Msamati) lays his healing hands upon a half-dressed ditzy blonde congregant (Michelle Read more ...