Theatre
Katherine Waters
It's the 2nd May 1997, the morning after the night that swept New Labour into power. We’re in the staffroom of a school somewhere in Britain and the teachers are jubilant. They've been glued to their TV sets for the results and have shagged and drunk through the night to crawl in with hangovers and pouchy eyes to face the day with a particular brand of frazzled optimism. But they're also anxious, because — according to the relentless logic of musical theatre which permits only extremes — today is the worst day to be a teacher. Today, of course, is muck up day.Between the ordinary mayhem Read more ...
aleks.sierz
In one lifetime, the many loves that once dare not speak their names have become part of everyday chatter. But it would be shortsighted to believe that ancient prejudices are easy to overcome, or that change does not run the risk of creating familiar problems. In this new play, Wife, Samuel Adamson explores several decades of the trials and tribulations of forbidden love in a piece of epic theatre that is also exquisitely personal. At the same time, he has also penned a fan letter to the theatre, taking Ibsen's A Doll's House as a template against which to measure social progress.The story Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The huge achievement of the last two decades of August Wilson’s life, right up to his death in 2005, was his “American Century Cycle”, in which he charted the African American experience over that time frame decade by decade, its action set largely in the downtown Hill District of Pittsburgh where the playwright grew up.Premiered in 1999, King Hedley II represents the Eighties – the front curtain makes much of it being the beginning of the Reagan years – though Wilson’s concerns go far beyond standard documentary. History in this black neighbourhood extends back a long way, something that Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A small-scale Off Broadway venture late in 2009, The Starry Messenger has arrived in London to mark the belated British stage debut of Matthew Broderick, the movie name much-loved on the New York stage. Reuniting the two-time Tony-winner with his lifelong chum Kenneth Lonergan, who since this play's premiere has become an A-list Oscar-winner, Sam Yates's production is equal parts intriguing and irritating, and Broderick's singular theatrical deadpan may alienate as many people as it attracts. It may not help this play's cause that Lonergan has been represented in successive Broadway Read more ...
David Nice
Need Shakespeare 's Falstaff charm to be funny? Those warm, indulgent feelings won by Mrisho Mpoto in the amazing Globe to Globe's Swahili Merry Wives and by Christopher Benjamin in a period-pretty version are rarely encouraged by this season's Helen Schlesinger (in Henry IV Parts One and Two ) and now Pearce Quigley for Ellie While's 1930s romp. Both cut handsome figures with padding, not puddings, in their bellies; Quigly's not-so-fat knight is a tenorial Northerner to whom melancholy seems to come more readily than mirth - sometimes amusing in itself, as in the cued-then-cut laughter of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Githa Sowerby is the go-to playwright if you want a feminist slant on patriarchy in the industrial north in Edwardian times. Her 1912 classic, Rutherford and Son, has been regularly revived over the past 30 years, and now the National Theatreis staging it yet again, this time with the ever likeable Roger Allam in the title role. We know that he's a commanding actor and that this traditional three-act play has a lot to say about fathers and families, but can director Polly Findlay give this old tale of a domineering capitalist and rebellious children a contemporary twist? From the first, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Who is that slithering on the floor by your foot, or coming to rest by or upon your knee? Audiences lucky enough to find themselves at User Not Found, the latest from the ever-enterprising site-specific company Dante or Die, should be prepared to swivel this way and that as they take in the hairpin changes of tone achieved across 90 minutes by the play's invaluable solo performer, Terry O'Donovan, whom we find in mourning-induced freefall.Chris Goode's play casts Dante or Die co-founder O'Donovan as a character called – you guessed it – Terry, first glimpsed seated amongst Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This brilliantly conceived and executed show is about provenance in art. It’s also about our perceptions of the truth. However, it’s a show where it would be churlish to reveal too much of what goes on. This is, of course, perverse since some will be reading to find out exactly that, but the brain-frazzling thrill of True Copy, alongside the story it tells engagingly and with humour, is delivered by the stunning twists and turns it throws in, which would be ruined if even hinted at.Berlin are the most perversely named, unGoogleable company. They’re from Belgium and major in multimedia pieces Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Our Town was written shortly before World War Two about a small town in America in the years leading up to World War One, yet it makes its extraordinary impact by focusing its lens on details as apparently unexciting as pond-water. Just as a microscope reveals a universe within a drop of liquid, this happy-as-apple-pie portrait of a simple community shows how every life – no matter how seemingly ordinary – is conducted against the unforgiving backdrop of eternity.In the nature of the questions it raises about human existence the play anticipates It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), though its Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Mammon and Yahweh are the presiding deities over an epic enterprise that tells the story not just of three brothers who founded a bank but of modern America. Virgil asked his Muse to sing of ‘arms and the man’, yet here the theme becomes that of ‘markets and the man’: a tale of daring, determination and dollars that chronicles capitalist endeavour from the cottonfields of Alabama to the crash of 2008.The Italian playwright Stefano Massini first released what started as his five-hour long play on the world in 2013, consciously using the rhythmic verse and formulaic techniques of epic to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Tonight comes with a caveat, delivered before proceedings begin by the one-woman show’s writer and performer Nicôle Lecky, who’s sitting in a chair centre-stage. She damaged her foot during Sunday’s matinee at the Brighton Festival, dancing about, and has since had to do the whole thing seated. She assures us it was this type of read-through-style show that made the Royal Court Theatre originally commission the production in the first place. She hopes it will, therefore, not disappoint. It does not.Lecky plays Sasha, a 24-year-old mixed-race woman who starts Superhoe living at home with her Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Stasiland is a fascinating mental space. As a historical location, the former East Germany, or GDR, is the archetypal surveillance state, in which each citizen spies on each other citizen, even if they are intellectual dissidents. The Communist state acts like Big Brother, keeping tabs on everyone. This was memorably invoked by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck in his 2006 film debut, The Lives of Others. Now the National Theatre pays a similar visit to this unhappy place, with an intriguing play by Ella Hickson, which is given a thoroughly immersive production by Natalie Abrahami, using Read more ...