Theatre Reviews
The Commitments, Palace TheatreWednesday, 09 October 2013
The setting is Dublin. We're talking modern-day and down-at-heel in this major new musical which has a deliberately scruffy look – with a launderette glowing in the dark and a concrete, four-storey housing block hulking upstage. The adaptation is by Roddy Doyle himself, based on his 1987 comic novel. Read more... |
Roots, Donmar WarehouseWednesday, 09 October 2013
British theatre is obsessed with the new, with novelty. And one of the obvious casualties of this is old plays that are not by Ibsen or Chekhov. Plays that feature in every history of British theatre, such as Arnold Wesker’s 1959 classic, Roots, about the political and sentimental education of Beatie Bryant, with its uplifting final scene of her self-awakening. At last, this revival gives us all the chance to watch a legendary piece of our cultural history. Read more... |
Blood + Chocolate, York Theatre RoyalSunday, 06 October 2013
Never before has “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players” been a more fitting opening gambit. This sprawling wartime spectacle knew few bounds as it marched across York’s cobbled streets for an evening that produced watery eyes, open mouths and, admittedly, tired legs. Read more... |
Great Expectations, Bristol Old VicSaturday, 05 October 2013
Neil Bartlett, as he has demonstrated in his earlier Dickens adaptations of Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol, knows how to make gripping theatre out of a complex work of fiction. His Great Expectations rattles through the twists and turns of Pip’s coming of age with a pace that rarely lets up, so much so at times, that there is perhaps not enough space for reflection and the emotional complexity of Dickens’s mature doesn't fully come through. Read more... |
Ghosts, Almeida TheatreFriday, 04 October 2013
In a moment of scalding intensity at the climax of Ghosts, terrified Oswald sees the sun. Throughout the rest of Ibsen’s celebrated drama about the sins of the past, light is fairly absent. Merely cataloguing the disasters that befall its heroine Mrs Alving would certainly indicate a play living up to Ibsen’s bad reputation as the leading dramatist of doom and gloom. Read more... |
Ghosts, English Touring TheatreFriday, 04 October 2013
A young man eaten up by fears of inherited disease, a mother who hid the facts of her awful marriage from her son to spare him, but is rewarded with even worse pain: the emotional plotlines of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts are huge. While the plot ticks off taboos - incest, rebellious women, euthanasia - deep at the heart of it is an atavistic fear in all of us that we will die in fully conscious agony, eaten up by a madness wished on us by someone’s selfishness or stupidity. Read more... |
Handbagged, Tricycle TheatreFriday, 04 October 2013
The life of Margaret Thatcher seems to draw sympathetic writers like wasps to a particularly sweet jam. In 2011, playwright and screenwriter Abi Morgan gave us a portrait of the first female prime minister in her film, The Iron Lady, and now Moira Buffini — whose film Tamara Drewe was a hit in 2010 — offers her take on the relationship between Britain’s top two women — Maggie and Elizabeth the Queen. Read more... |
All My Sons, Royal Exchange, ManchesterWednesday, 02 October 2013
The guilt of knowingly sending our sons to war with defective equipment and fatal results certainly resonates today. Who takes the blame? Do we get ministerial resignations or arms-dealers going to prison? Going back to post-World War II, this is the shocking dilemma that Arthur Miller deals with so harrowingly in All My Sons, bringing it home to each one of us by focusing on just one family. Read more... |
The Lyons, Menier Chocolate FactorySaturday, 28 September 2013
That slice of Broadway-upon-Southwark that is the Menier Chocolate Factory has a toxic treat in The Lyons, Nicky Silver's pitch-black and quintessentially New York comedy about a family so in love with truth-telling that they've all but forgotten how to live. Small wonder the cancer-ridden Lyons père (Nicholas Day, in blistering form) swears up a storm throughout the first act as he lies in hospital preparing to die. Read more... |
A Tale of Two Cities, King's Head TheatreSaturday, 28 September 2013
The opening of Charles Dickens's novel A Tale of Two Cities is among the most famous ever written: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…". If the publicity for this stage adaptation is to be believed, it is a scarcely less exalted addition to the mythology surrounding this novel. Read more... |
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★★★★★
‘A compulsive, involving, emotionally stirring evening – theatre’s answer to a page-turner.’
The Observer, Kate Kellaway
Direct from a sold-out season at Kiln Theatre the five star, hit play, The Son, is now playing at the Duke of York’s Theatre for a strictly limited season.
★★★★★
‘This final part of Florian Zeller’s trilogy is the most powerful of all.’
The Times, Ann Treneman
Written by the internationally acclaimed Florian Zeller (The Father, The Mother), lauded by The Guardian as ‘the most exciting playwright of our time’, The Son is directed by the award-winning Michael Longhurst.
Book by 30 September and get tickets from £15*
with no booking fee.
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