Theatre
Laura de Lisle
The title is so long that the Royal Court’s neon red lettering only renders the first three words, followed by a telling ellipsis. But lyrical new play For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy lives up to its weighty name.Writer-director Ryan Calais Cameron shows us Black masculinity in all its nuances and contradictions, presented by six actors so naturally charming it’s impossible not to fall in love with them. This is an odyssey through Black masculinity, a complex navigation of a sea of troubles and expectations and joy and love. Line by line, each man’s soul Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
If Nero fiddled while Rome burned, then Boris Johnson has played the whole sodding orchestra. Between the parties, the lying, the enabling of Russian financial interests and the record European Covid death-toll he has not just traduced Pitt, he has tap-danced on Churchill’s grave in his narcissistic attempt to assert gravitas.It seems more than fitting, then, that Mike Bartlett has revived the most decadent form of theatre to chronicle London in the age of Johnson. After decades of Puritanism, the Restoration encouraged laissez-faire culture for the lazy and disaffected – here we see a city Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Zorro (what a name!) is back, swashing and buckling his way into the West End, 13 years after he left and now not the only one wearing a mask. He’s also an entertainer turned political leader, inspiring his people to resist an evil martinet. Well, that sort of thing is back in fashion too.Stephen Clark and Helen Edmundson’s story sets up two brothers in the Spanish outpost of Los Angeles (it’s 1805) with one, Diego – younger, the favourite – sent to Barcelona to learn the skills he’ll need to lead the pueblo when his father dies, and the other, Ramón – older, resentful – staying in California Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Ché Walker claims he wrote Wolf Cub, now in the Hampstead Downstairs studio space, in a two-day blitz prompted by Donald Trump’s election win in 2016. He was working in Atlanta at the time, the home city of Claire Latham, the solo performer for this piece. With Walker directing and the twice Olivier-winning actor Sheila Atim, no less, providing evocative incidental music, they have created a haunting 80-minute monologue that embraces epic events.The locus of the spasm the US was experiencing when Walker sat down to write Wolf Cub is traced back to Ronald Reagan’s two-term Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Jane Austen’s waspish vision revealed the vanities, delusions and cynical financial calculations that underpinned most of the relationships of her day. The element in which she thrived was repression; the heart constrained beneath the corset, the raging passion held firmly in place by that most important part of an Englishman’s anatomy, the stiff upper lip.This production – which opened to acclaim at the Manchester Exchange in 2017 – rips off the corsets and liberates the lips so that the vibrant, sometimes even violent subtext is revealed. In place of Austen’s assiduous filleting of Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Megalomania is inherently theatrical. So it feels like it was only a matter of time before Donald Trump took to the boards, blasting the assembled crowd with his tangerine paranoia and clownish nihilism. What was less predictable was the turbo-charged brilliance of his reincarnation by Bertie Carvel, whose pitch-perfect observation of every physical tic is underscored by the understanding of Trump’s primal need to reduce everything around him to its basest physical state. Whether it’s the alpha-male gorilla waggle of his buttocks while playing golf or his putrid inability to value any woman Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Danya Taymor’s production of “Daddy” A Melodrama has a huge exuberance: a tour de force in itself, it's also a scintillating introduction to the work of Jeremy O Harris. The young American dramatist earned considerable attention, and acclaim for the acuity of his investigation of race issues, for his 2018 Slave Play, but it's this earlier piece, written when Harris was in his mid-twenties, that reaches London first (after a two-year Covid delay).The music, lighting, movement and sheer dramatic craft – not least the stage-front swimming pool in which a fair part of the action takes place – has Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Musicals don't get madder than Anyone Can Whistle, the 1964 Broadway flop from onetime West Side Story and Gypsy collaborators Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents which makes history of sorts at Southwark Playhouse as the first Sondheim show to be revived since his death last year, age 91. What this trailblazing talent never short of an opinion might make of Georgie Rankcom's production is anyone's guess, though I suspect he would admire a sizeably non-binary set of artists gathered on a show about otherness and non-conformity.I for one began proceedings with a grin on my face, prompted Read more ...
Gary Naylor
When Rhum + Clay conceived this show, the idea of a comic becoming a political leader might have prompted thoughts of Boris Johnson's carefully cultivated buffoonery on "Have I Got News For You" and elsewhere. Since then, a certain Volodymyr Zelenskyy has given politician-comedians a rather better name. Comedy, as is so often the case, is in thrall to timing.Such thoughts may be inevitable as Matt Wells' attempts to create a show detailing his philosophy of political leadership are repeatedly subverted by his stage assistant, Julian Spooner, who wants politics to be "fun" (main picture Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Fever Syndrome has an ambition that places itself firmly in the tradition of the great American family drama (comparisons with Arthur Miller feel the most appropriate), a piece in which the reassessment of ties of blood is played out against a background of issues that touch on the wider society in which its protagonists exist.In Alexis Zegerman’s new play, receiving its world premiere at the Hampstead Theatre (where 15 years ago the British playwright was writer-in-residence), that latter element is compounded by a sense of scale, a conscious attempt to bring in big ideas, ranging across Read more ...
Chinonyerem Odimba
People often ask how long a play takes to make its way out of you. And it’s always a valid question because no matter how beautiful, soft, joyful, or short a play is, there is a wrestling match that takes place between the idea lodging itself somewhere in you, and it turning into words that actors can have fun getting to know. With Black Love, opening this week at the Kiln Theatre, that journey from the story embedding itself to a rehearsal script took almost seven years.When I was first commissioned in 2019 to write a play for Paines Plough, I had no idea what it was I wanted to write. Or Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park arrived at London’s Royal Court like a blazing comet in 2010, a bold kind of satire about race relations that was both sassy and savvy.Now it’s back for a run at the Park Theatre, N1. Twelve years on, we have learnt to don a tin hat and duck whenever somebody enters the minefield of other people’s sensitivities. But Norris’s play is a reminder that it’s possible to barrel straight into no-man’s land and lob grenades from there at targets on all sides, to hilarious and provocative effect.The piece is structured like a Rohrschach blot: two acts set a half-century Read more ...