Theatre
edward.seckerson
Commissioned by Josef Weinberger Ltd on the occasion of Stephen Sondheim’s 80th birthday today, In Good Company is a unique three-part collage of intimate conversations I have had with some of Sondheim’s closest colleagues and collaborators. Michael Cerveris, Ted Chapin, Barbara Cook, Daniel Evans, Maria Friedman, Angela Lansbury, Patti LuPone, Cameron Mackintosh, Julia McKenzie, Hal Prince, Jonathan Tunick and John Weidman share their experiences, their recollections, and their often very personal insights into what makes this man such a colossus in the world of musical theatre.Since Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Furthering their reputation as the least predictable prize-giving organisation out there, the Laurence Olivier Awards last night gave their top prizes to a host of productions that have long departed London, starting with Best Play for Tennessee-born writer Katori Hall's The Mountaintop. You were thinking Enron or (my personal best) Jerusalem? You'd be wrong.And so it went throughout an evening that dangled an odd carrot in the direction of some of the West End's reigning hits, giving Enron yet another directing trophy for Rupert Goold and Jerusalem the prizes for set design (Ultz's epic Read more ...
william.ward
Why is it that Method-ist actors are pretty much expected to spend months manically researching the inner minutiae of their character, but a much-lauded playwright can get away without providing any serious insights into his main subject matter?To anyone with even the slightest inkling of how modern businesses work – that is, just about anyone older than Kevin the token teenager – it is insulting, not to mention boring, to have to sit through three-and-a-half hours of such poorly developed material as Dennis Kelly’s new play about a global business mogul going bonkers in the boardroom, and Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Jonathan Mills has announced the programme for Edinburgh International Festival 2010, on a theme of modern culture in the New Worlds of the Americas and Australasia. Ranging from California to Canberra, New York to New Zealand, from Santiago to Samoa, the festival opens on Friday 13 August with John Adams' oratorio El Niño and closes on Sunday 5 September with the traditional fireworks concert.World premieres include political writer Alistair Beaton’s exploration of Scotland’s futile attempt at establishing a colony in Panama, Caledonia, directed by Anthony Neilson and co-produced by the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
One of the most common genres of contemporary Brit drama is the "me and my mates" play – usually stories about flatsharing twentysomethings. Although, over the past decade, this type of drama has been somewhat overtaken by the return of the family play, you can still spot the genre in new writing venues all over the country. So Penelope Skinner’s new 90-minute piece, which opened last night at the Bush Theatre, is – despite its evocative name (which means the colour seen by the eye in perfect darkness) – at first sight as familiar as an old sofa.Set in two flats at opposite ends of London, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Theatre lovers and theatre-history devotees alike will be delighted by the news that the Hackney Empire in east London, which went dark last month, is to be saved. A property developer will pay the theatre an unspecified sum to create 25 flats in an adjacent building it owns; there will also be offices and a community space for the use of the venue, a Grade II*-listed 1901 Frank Matcham beauty. The Empire's acting chief executive, Claire Middleton, described it as "a stabilising deal" and it will allow the theatre to regroup during 2010 before its next scheduled theatrical production, its Read more ...
aleks.sierz
It's common to feel a real sense of doom when you approach the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre. But it’s not the dodgy hoodies that turn your legs to jelly, it’s the sheer ugliness of the architecture. Yes, aesthetically, this is urban hell. But it’s also the site of the Royal Court’s Local project, in which a rundown shop unit has been turned into a makeshift theatre. Random, a spirited revival of Debbie Tucker Green’s 2008 play, is the first of a season of edgy dramas to make the trek from Sloane Square to Southwark.Outside, a chilly wind; inside a quick frisk by a bouncer, and you’re Read more ...
Veronica Lee
For the life of me I cannot understand why London Assurance is not performed more often. It’s a rollicking comedy, written in 1841 but which has a Restoration heart, with a cast list that includes a wideboy named Dazzle, a valet Cool, a servant Pert, a lawyer Meddle and - hold your sides - a horsey broad brandishing a whip named Lady Gay Spanker. Calm down, now.Dion Boucicault’s comedy of manners (written when he was only 21) is a witty commentary on town versus country and many of its lines could have been written yesterday. Mostly, though, it’s a chance for some of our greatest thespians Read more ...
Matt Wolf
In movies and on TV we expect sequels and spin-offs and the perpetuation of a franchise whereby we follow Rocky, The Terminator, or whomever seemingly to the grave. But theatre has tended to take the high road: Chekhov never revealed whether the three sisters actually reached Moscow. (What do you think?) And the nearest Beckett got to Waiting For Godot 2 are Hamm and Clov in Endgame, who can be seen as Didi and Gogo filtered through an even bleaker end of the existential prism. So the first thing to be said about Love Never Dies, Andrew Lloyd Webber's sure-to-be-debated follow-on Read more ...
james.woodall
Arthur Schnitzler belonged to a culture of inquiry and experiment, in which dreams and desire were crying out to be articulated and delineated; sexual needs were the unexplored stuff of life - how well Vienna painters like Klimt and Schiele knew this - and, as Freud worked it all out for us, not necessarily dangerous. Where better to bring this to flesh-and-blood life than on stage?In London drama of the same era, from Wilde to Coward, men and women expected private confusion to be allayed by social solutions. Snobbery and repression, moreover, were good. In Schnitzler's Vienna, men and women Read more ...
william.ward
Regular punters at the King’s Head are familiar with cheerily naked gay romps, they are quite a speciality in this much favoured North London haunt, possibly enhanced by the intimate dimensions of the theatre itself. In Martin Lewton's Lord Arthur's Bed the stark lighting and very basic set – a double bed and a dining chair – further highlight the sensation of almost prurient proximity, something almost immediately addressed by Ruaraidh Murray’s very in-yer-face Jim, who tells the audience that “you are our webcam”.So far, so Pirandello: we are not so much watching a play about the contrasts Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
“There is no hell, there is no heaven. This, this is real, this is now, and here is where matters.” So Professor Philip Goodman, sceptical expert in parapsychology and debunker of superstition, assures us. Except that what we are watching isn’t real, it’s theatre. The Professor is actually Andy Nyman, creative partner of celebrated trickster and mentalist Derren Brown and co-author of Ghost Stories with Jeremy Dyson of comic grotesques The League of Gentlemen. And whether, within the dramatic construct, the character Goodman will live up to his name and prove himself to be, indeed, a good man Read more ...