David Greig’s delightful Midsummer (a play with songs), opened at the Traverse in Edinburgh in 2008, was revived for last year’s Fringe and now provides a warming tonic for frozen winter nights in London. A knowing, modern romcom about two thirtysomething lost souls from opposite ends of Edinburgh who find each other over the midsummer weekend, it could just as easily serve as a love-letter from the playwright to the city of his birth.
theatre reviews
Matt Wolf
Audiences genuinely love Legally Blonde, and all but the most churlish of critics should crack plenty a smile, as well. A feel-good show that - unusually, in my experience - actually does leave you on a high, this stage adaptation of the 2001 Reese Witherspoon film benefits immeasurably from a rapturous star performance from Sheridan Smith as the unlikely heroine of Harvard Law School, Elle Woods.
Veronica Lee
If ever you wanted to understand the art of acting and how it gives life to words on the page, this is a good place to start. Actress Linda Marlowe, under the direction of Di Sherlock, has adapted Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s 1999 collection, The World's Wife - which gives a wry, subversive and feminist voice to characters (real or imagined) written out of history, mythology and the Bible - and gives the words form on stage. It is an exquisite treat.
Sam Marlowe
Endure this bafflingly pointless, sparsely staged and hopelessly dated musical, and you might find that the prospect of bloody death in the jaws of an enraged tiger somewhat loses its sting; you certainly won’t care whether that’s the fate in store for the show’s bland balladeer hero. A curious concoction of forgettable chirpy ditties, half-hearted satire and lots of twee larking about that is reminiscent of children’s television from 40 years ago, The Lady or the Tiger's downright weirdness doesn’t make it any less unrewarding.
Matt Wolf
How to encapsulate the theatre year just gone, one in which the critics - not always to the benefit of an increasingly imperilled profession - made headlines of their own, whether for being drunk (as if!) or fat? (Well, how many critics do you know who resemble Olympic rowers?) Amidst such a kerfuffle, one might have thought life offstage was more interesting than it was on - until one pitched up virtually any night across the year in either of the Royal Court's two auditoria or at a rejuvenated Almeida or at a National capable of Alan Bennett's deliciousThe Habit of Art or at a spate of West End revivals (Arcadia and Dancing at Lughnasa, especially) that were at least the equal of their original productions. Clutching to the last to the holiday spirit, I herewith offer five shows that made 2009 playgoing a genuine pleasure, followed by five to look out for in 2010. Both lists are presented in order of the productions' openings.
Veronica Lee
When I saw Gregory Doran’s production of Twelfth Night for the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in October, I thought it unsubtle and underpowered, but that it would settle in during its run. Apparently not, as, in its transfer to London’s West End, it has gathered neither pace nor depth. That’s a real shame as there are some terrific performances at its heart.
Matt Wolf
A banner year for the Almeida Theatre continues with Rope, director Roger Michell's taut, tense production of the 1929 Patrick Hamilton play better known from the subsequent Hitchcock film, starring a peculiarly cast James Stewart.
aleks.sierz
She’s the most famous young pout in Hollywood. And her first West End appearance has already sparked a media frenzy, making this contemporary version of Molière’s The Misanthrope the hottest ticket in town, with massive advance bookings already guaranteeing anyone associated with the show a credit-crunch-proof Christmas. Of course, I’m talking about Keira Knightley – I mean, who isn’t? But what about the play, which opened last night with a barrage of paparazzi flashbulbs?
Veronica Lee
It is telling that there were drama critics at the Apollo to review Camille O’Sullivan’s show, The Dark Angel. The half-French, half-Irish woman is ostensibly a singer, but so unique is her delivery that each song is a piece of theatre in its own right. My companion confessed to being just a little scared of O’Sullivan, who has a distinctive look - part vamp, part cabariste, but wholly diva. She described the singer, with her raven hair and a gash of bright-red lipstick, as “a cross between Tracey Emin and Judy Garland”, but soon warmed to her. But then O’Sullivan is a pussy cat, as evidenced by her slinky movement about the stage and exhortations of the audience to miaow (“my favourite sound”) at her.
james.woodall
He was the biggest hitter in an A-team of mid-20th-century American painters: Jackson Pollock, Barnet Newman, Willem de Kooning. Mark Rothko, born Marcus Rothkovitz in what has become Latvia, was Abstract Expressionism's shaman, its restless thinker and febrile poet, an artist who fashioned from an investigation into the power of pure colour a philosophy of art as potent as Crick and Watson's contemporaneous unravelling of the double helix.