Theatre
Tim Cornwell
Confessions first: I fell asleep mid-way through Time Is Love/Tiempo es Amor, from too much time on trains and planes over the New Year. I was kindly allowed back for a second visit to the Finborough Theatre show, for a Sunday matinee, dosed with coffee and determined to concentrate fully. This was a good thing. The production's name attraction, Olivier Award-winner Sheila Atim, had previously seemed a minor part whereas her masterful performance (must one say mistressful these days?) as Rosa the stripper is a highlight of the piece. It was also a good thing because the plot of Time is Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“Love Changes Everything”, as immortalised by Michael Ball, is the most enduring feature of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Don Black and Charles Hart’s 1989 musical – a moderate West End success, and a Broadway flop. Jonathan O’Boyle’s production, seen last year at Manchester’s Hope Mill Theatre, follows the trend for stripping back big shows to get at the heart of them; a good tactic on the whole, though challenged by a work that’s ultimately more interested in dissecting love than sharing it.An adaptation of Bloomsbury Group member David Garnett’s 1955 novella, the convoluted story runs from 1947 to Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The scintillating, commercially bold season of Pinter one-acts at the theatre bearing his name plays a particular blinder with Pinter Five (★★★★★), from which I emerged keen to engage with its mystery and breadth of feeling all over again. Pinter Six (★★★) is worth seeing, as well, and may pay added dividends for those who didn't catch its author's world premiere of his brilliantly spiky play Celebration in 2000 – a production unlikely to be bettered anytime soon. But those keen to savour the esoteric will be richly rewarded by what director Patrick Marber's triptych in Pinter Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Will pride of place amongst theatre productions every year go in perpetuity to the work of Stephen Sondheim? One might be tempted to think so given the preeminence during 2017 of Dominic Cooke's breathtaking revival of Follies (due back in the National Theatre repertoire from February) and the equal strength of this year's musical theatre reclamation of choice, Company, the Sondheim title that immediately preceded Follies on Broadway. The chance before long to see these two stagings back-to-back is enough to make any theatre lover's heart skip a beat even as a glance back at 2018 finds Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A tremendous year for American theatre on the London stage is resoundingly capped by Sweat, the Lynn Nottage Pulitzer prize-winner that folds the personal and the political into a collective requiem for a riven country. But the wounding if sometimes overexplicit writing wouldn't amount to what is yet another feather in the Donmar's 2018 cap without an astonishing directing debut at that address of Lynette Linton, who is shortly to take the reins at the Bush. Between Lynton, designer Frankie Bradshaw, and the ensemble cast of one's dreams, Nottage's portrait of a land in divisive freefall Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Joe Hill-Gibbins’ uncompromising production of The Tragedy of Richard II hurtles through Shakespeare’s original text, stripping and flaying it so it is revealed in a new shuddering light. Narcissistic, petulant and indecisive, Simon Russell Beale’s Richard stumbles towards his downfall in a prison cell in which it is never clear what’s a figment of his paranoid imagination and what’s reality. Under Rupert Goold’s artistic directorship the Almeida has become renowned as a theatre where classical texts are given the equivalent of ECT, and Hill-Gibbins quickly sets out his intentions Read more ...
Veronica Lee
With the politics of hate alive and well both sides of the Atlantic, this seems a good time to revive Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori's 2003 musical, which is set in Civil Rights-era Louisiana. This production was first seen at Chichester Minerva Theatre last year and transfers to the West End via a run at Hampstead Theatre and has a stand-out central performance by Sharon D Clarke.Inspired in part by Kushner’s own Southern Jewish childhood, Caroline, or Change is almost entirely sung-through and Clarke (pictured below) is the titular black maid who is paid a pittance by the Gellman family to Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
If you’re looking for a Christmas with more pagan edge than saccharine cheer, where the wolves are howling and the mythological characters are steeped in the terror and mystery of winter’s long dark nights, then make haste to Wilton’s Music Hall. For the second year running, this adaptation of John Masefield’s chillingly beautiful 1935 novel – in which a child with a magical box is caught up in an elemental battle between good and evil – takes audiences on a darkly thrilling quest to save Christmas.From the moment you walk into the auditorium of Wilton’s Music Hall, where the gloaming is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The Tell-Tale Heart may be the title of an 1843 short story by Edgar Allen Poe, but rest assured that Anthony Neilson's adaptation of it for the National contains this theatre maverick's signature throughout. To be sure, the play charts a Poe-esque hallucinatory fall from sanity of an award-winning playwright called Celeste (or is it Camille, given the dualities in which the play revels). But the gathering grand guignol comes accompanied by multiple riffs on everything from the current hit revival of Company to the National itself, not to mention a first-act focus on excrement reminiscent of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Paul Merton has a lot of strings to his bow – stand-up, improv artist, historian of silent-movie-era comedy, quiz-show panellist, to name a few – and now he adds pantomime dame to his CV. He has appeared in television pantos before, but this is his first live outing, as Widow Twankey in Aladdin. What took him so long?After a hesitant start, Merton's command of the role grows and he throws in the odd line to keep the company on their toes (he is credited with supplying extra material for panto veteran Alan McHugh's script). His laidback Widow Twankey is less showy, in voice and costume, than Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Like a supermarket "Christmas Dinner" sandwich, cramming the delights of a full festive lunch into every bite, Epiphoni Consort’s The Christmas Truce was at once historical play, choral concert and carol service, and so wonderfully enjoyable I didn’t want it to end.It was also for me the discovery of another great London-based choir. Founded in 2014 by conductor Tim Reader, Epiphoni (pictured below by Kaupo Kikkas) is peopled predominantly by young singers with advanced vocal training who have followed careers outside music. They make a terrific sound: the upper voices are very good, the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Wow! First, the Black Panther team took cinema by storm; now, they have conquered theatre as well. Or, at least, two of them have. The Convert has been written by actor and playwright Danai Gurira (Okoye), and stars Letitia Wright (Shuri). Originally staged in the United States in 2012, and currently part of Kwame Kwei-Armah's first season at the Young Vic, this three-hour historical epic, which tells the harrowing story of an African Catholic believer's attempt to convert a young black woman in colonial South-East Africa, has a great cast which also includes Ivanno Jeremiah, Wright's Read more ...