The late Simon Gray, who died in 2008, lived a ragged, bruised and battering life. I usually think of him as the John Prescott of playwrights, except that he was miles more articulate, and eventually rewarded by a CBE rather than a peerage. Anyway, he was pugnacious and out of step with playwriting trends. In an age of lefty state-of-the-nation dramas, Gray explored the emotions of upper-middle-class characters and their difficulties with communication. Although he could be irascible, and his published diaries are scorchingly rude, the default position of his plays is an ironic melancholy, as evidenced by this welcome revival of The Late Middle Classes.
theatre reviews
Ismene Brown
A young Arthur Miller wrote this highly moralistic, redemption-seeking play soon after the Second World War, a parable about an older generation’s dubious pragmatic principles versus the bewildered idealism of their children who were Miller’s generation, the soldiers’ generation. The deathlessness of its message about faulty army equipment, young military casualties and the no-blame culture may be quite as much a reason for this new revival of Howard Davies's 2000 National Theatre production, now with David Suchet and Zoë Wanamaker.
Matt Wolf
There's bizarre, and then there's Paradise Found, a new musical that falls so short of the not always clearly defined mark that audiences may likely be mulling over what went wrong for years. What do the two acts have to do with one another? What in heaven's name is the point? How much weight in water is leading man Mandy Patinkin losing per performance? Those are just a few of the questions spectators will be left pondering during what for many will nonetheless be essential viewing, notwithstanding the show's self-evidently inchoate status.
aleks.sierz
Nick Grosso is a good example of the “now you see him, now you don’t” playwright. In the mid-1990s, he was feted as a lads’ writer for his funny plays about masculinity, such as Peaches, Sweetheart and Real Classy Affair. Then he dropped out of view. He resurfaced briefly in 2002 with the deliciously surrealistic Kosher Harry. Then nothing. Until now. As his new comedy, which opened last night in a production which stars Lesley Sharp, takes to the Royal Court studio stage, we have a chance to enjoy again Grosso’s knack for words.
Matt Wolf
After Wolf Hall and The Tudors, Shakespeare's Globe is arriving rather late at this particular historical party, especially given that the Bankside venue brings with it a closer connection to the period than most. Can this theatre animate a rarely performed Shakespeare play - well, make that Shakespeare and John Fletcher, in accordance with scholars' assessments - that is rarely performed, presumably, for a reason? (The last prominent London sighting was Gregory Doran's glittering but soulless staging for the RSC in 1996.) The short answer: and how. Indeed, Henry VIII is so unexpectedly lively an affair that it makes one wonder whether the Globe isn't often at its best the less well known the play at hand actually is.
aleks.sierz
One of the least lamented (by me at least) genres that has fallen foul of social changes in the past two decades is the 1980s gay drama. You know the kind of thing: right-on coming-out speeches, painful but ridiculous instances of homophobia, and the compulsory dying-of-AIDS scene. The irony is that Jonathan Harvey, whose 1993 classic Beautiful Thing did so much to pull the gay play out of its ghetto, has now returned to this 1980s genre. His latest play, which opened last night and marks his long-overdue return to the stage, revisits gay culture between the 1960s and today. Okay, it’s retro, but is it worth seeing?
David Nice
Just say "Gaza" and it's like throwing a bombshell marked "Darwin" in among the Creationists. Only in this case it's not always clear who the antagonists might be. Several seemingly liberal theatre venues in Israel, where this project originated as a clear statement of the UN Relief and Works Agency's humanitarian role, cancelled at the last minute; more recently, supposedly enlightened sponsors suddenly withdrew substantial support. None had seen or read the content. It seems that telling the plain tale of a warehouse destroyed is inflammatory stuff. Odd when the warehouse in question, the protagonist of this drama, goes out of its way to tell us that it takes no sides and holds no weapons.
aleks.sierz
Dystopia is a genre that works like a rhetorical device. Take a government policy — let’s say the war in Afghanistan — then list the bad effects that this has had on the British people, exaggerate by a factor of ten, or more, add some obscure but sinister language, extrapolate by throwing in some nightmarish horrors, and then wrap it all up for a small cast. If you’re lucky, as Beth Steel has been with her debut play which opened last night at the Old Vic Tunnels, you’ll get a really atmospheric venue, and, in her case, Kevin Spacey sitting in the first-night audience.
alexandra.coghlan
“All over the world children are safe – but not here, not on my ship.” Despite its wild pack of homeless children, a flesh-eating crocodile and some of the most gut-punching depictions of parental grief in all literature, J M Barrie’s Peter Pan has somehow been consigned to the theatrical remainders bin, its old-fashioned sentimentality acceptable really only at Christmas, or in pantomime form.
aleks.sierz
During the past week, as the first coalition government for 70 years has been formed in the UK, we were frequently warned that failure to find a solution might be the end of the world. It’s a solid, if usually over-used, metaphor. But what would happen if we really did face the end of life on Earth? You know, the real thing: a total catastrophe — the implosion of the universe — which we could predict, but not prevent? That is the premise of this unusual new play, a joint effort by playwrights David Eldridge, Robert Holman and Simon Stephens.