Theatre
james.woodall
Theatre director Peter Brook is back in London. Brightly, eloquently, he's promoting his new show, in English (most of his work since the 1970s has been in French), currently running at the Barbican: entitled Eleven and Twelve, it's a dense chamber piece exploring a religious dispute in early 20th-century Mali. Quiet, sensitively investigative of an unknown strand of north African faith, it will enlighten some and bore others. Classic Brook?Well, certainly not redolent of the firebrand deconstructor of the 1960s, who imported an alarming thing called Theatre of Cruelty into mainstream British Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You may know the actor, drag artist and gay activist Bette Bourne from his portrayal of Quentin Crisp in the theatre, or perhaps his Lady Bracknell for English Touring Theatre (a role he was surely born to play) but outside the gay/theatrical London loop, he is less well known. That’s a shame because this charming and rather unorthodox piece of theatre shows that his life story - from an East End childhood, through early gay liberation, the scourge of Aids and the advent of queer theatre to present-day stately homo status - deserves a broader audience.A Life in Three Acts started with Read more ...
hilary.whitney
A new play by David Greig opens at the Hampstead Theatre for the Royal Shakespeare Company next week. A theatre director as well as playwright, Greig (b. 1969) is one of the most prolific and artistically ambitious playwrights of his generation and a key figure in the current burgeoning of Scottish theatre. In addition to an extraordinarily diverse range of plays such as Europe (Traverse Theatre, 1994), The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union (Tron Theatre, 1999) and Damascus (Edinburgh International Festival, 2009), his work includes Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Okay, now that you’re a citizen of Dystopia, and you’ve reached the regulation old age, it’s time to check into an approved care home. Please enter the Ark, and take your allotted bed. A government official will be with you in due course. Yes, that’s right, just take those pills and you will be fine. Will you be expecting visitors? Okay. Any problems, just ask Nurse. In Tamsin Oglesby’s satirical new drama, which opened last night at the National's Cottesloe space, the biblically named Ark is not a means of salvation but an instrument of euthanasia.We start with a family which, in its Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Jerusalem was bound for Broadway from virtually the moment the raves poured in for Jez Butterworth's career-best play and leading man Mark Rylance's career-defining star performance. So why isn't Ian Rickson's glorious production headed to New York the minute the curtain comes down on its 12-week West End run, which opens Wednesday at the Apollo?It turns out that Rylance is intending an interim London and New York booking in the form of a hoped-for revival of American writer David Hirson's verse play, La Bête, which was a Broadway flop the first time round, in 1991. (Its Read more ...
tom.paulin
I came to Medea because 26 years back, the Field Day Theatre Company in Derry - started by Brian Friel and Stephen Rea - asked me to a version of Antigone. Entitled The Riot Act, it was staged in the Guildhall in Derry in September 1984 and toured Ireland after that. It has been produced several times since then, most recently at the Gate Theatre in London.The following year the Open University Arts and Civilisation course asked me to do a version of Prometheus Bound – it was broadcast that year and published by Faber as Seize the Fire. I didn’t do any version of a Greek play Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The wait is over. Less than six months after dramatic literature's defining tramps departed the West End, here are Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo) back again, with some new faces to flesh out Beckett's eternal verities about that grievous but also grimly funny thing we call life. Roger Rees has joined Ian McKellen to make up a double-act whose vaudevillian tendencies intensify the more these two abject fellas face down the void. The truly startling news, though, is the added jolt afforded the evening by the arrival of Matthew Kelly as a seriously searing Pozzo: a capacious performance Read more ...
sheila.johnston
"Plays about cinema tend to be written by people who have done some movies, come back and filled their fountain pens from their spleen," the Oscar-nominated screenwriter Larry Gelbart once told me. David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow is probably the best-known example, followed by such works as Christopher Hampton's Tales From Hollywood, Martin Crimp's The Treatment and, most recently, last week's The Little Dog Barked. Oliver Cotton's diverting comedy (they are invariably comedies) sits very snugly in that long dyspeptic tradition, bringing few fresh insights to the party but lifted by some sharp Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Synaesthesia is a tricky beast. It’s basically a neurological condition which condemns those afflicted with it to a life in which words evoke colours, and emotions can be experienced as colour. Sometimes it is almost playful, with the mere names of the days of the week evoking tonal sensations; at other times it is intensely painful, with the mere glimpse of a buzzy pattern causing dizziness or strong feelings conjuring up great blasts of colour, an unbearable onslaught of confusion and derangement.In James Graham’s empathetic and engaging new play, which opened last night, twentysomething Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Catching an impression of contemporary Russian drama may have become easier for British theatre goers over the last decade, but the work that has come through nevertheless looks like only parts of a wider picture. Four staged readings by the British-based Sputnik Theatre Company at the Soho Theatre at the beginning of February are the latest chance to take the sometimes chilly temperature of what’s been written there recently.Credit for beginning the dialogue goes squarely to the Royal Court’s international department, which back in 2001 pioneered a programme that brought four plays to London Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Tamsin Greig takes her mighty stage chops to a new level in The Little Dog Laughed, a minor Broadway comedy that gets a major star performance from Greig in her first West End role since God of Carnage. Tearing into a role that deservedly won its New York originator, Julie White, a 2007 Tony Award, Greig gives a cyclonic performance in a play that suffers palpable subsidence every time she leaves the stage. Beane's brittle if, at times, fairly banal satire isn't greatly enhanced by opening back-to-back with Six Degrees of Separation, an earlier, far more expansive American play that (for Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Sexual politics has always been fertile (oops) ground for comedy, and Doug Lucie’s vigorous satire — whose 1984 premiere starred Lindsay Duncan, David Bamber and Kevin Elyot — is here given a revival on the London fringe. We are in Kilburn during the Thatcher era, and the local trendy lefties have turned inward. As thirtysomething Will and his wife Ronee decide to experiment with radical sexual politics, the men’s group that he hosts explores, often hilariously, the subject of sexism and what it might mean to be a New Man.At the same time, Ronee takes things even further, and finds it more Read more ...