Theatre Reviews
Master Class, Vaudeville TheatreWednesday, 08 February 2012
A fired-up Maria Callas (Tyne Daly) is hectoring a student. “I don’t want it done like me, I want it done like Verdi!” “With music?” enquires the nervy pianist. “Yes,” she snaps, “With music: this isn’t a play.” Quite. What exactly is Terrence McNally’s Master Class? A classy version of “Tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be Maria Callas”? Yes, but no. There’s impersonation, but not of her singing. Read more... |
The Devil and Mr Punch, Improbable, The PitWednesday, 08 February 2012
Dickens has been getting all the press in his 200th year, but there is another performer, even older, who celebrates: in 2012, Mr Punch, of Punch and Judy fame, is 350 years old, and Improbable, in revitalising the old showman’s tradition, has given him the best birthday present that can be imagined. Read more... |
Sex with a Stranger, Trafalgar StudiosWednesday, 08 February 2012
Twentysomething emotional confusion is fertile ground for drama. In this new play, Stefan Golaszewski - writer of the BBC Three sitcom Him & Her and star of BBC Four’s Cowards - explores the situation of a young man who doesn’t really know what he wants. Well, except for lots of sex of course. With lots of different women. Or so it might seem. But does he really? Read more... |
DNA, Rose Theatre, KingstonTuesday, 07 February 2012
I have to confess it was about five minutes in to Dennis Kelly’s DNA last night before I concluded, definitively, that I had seen it before. Four years ago, it was part of the Connections programme at the National Theatre – a scheme for generating short, double-billable, "youth"-friendly plays that, practically speaking, don’t require the operating budget and elephant-handlers of a Veronese Aïda. Read more... |
Bloody Poetry, Jermyn Street TheatreMonday, 06 February 2012
In opening words cited in the programme for Primavera’s new production of Howard Brenton’s Bloody Poetry (1984) the playwright states he wanted to remind people of “England’s radical, republican tradition” as “Thatcher set about shredding it”. So he chose to dramatise sections of the lives of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley in self-exile, post-Waterloo, in Switzerland and Italy. It was an odd choice. Read more... |
The Changeling, Young VicFriday, 03 February 2012
The murder drama is a staple of television schedules. And for every Miss Marple or Rosemary and Thyme there are many more trickling from the Lynda La Plante vein, whose currency of gore, horror and perversion seem to suffer permanently from inflation. Yet there’s little even in the grim likes of Messiah to equal the Jacobean capacity for horror, for incestuous, libidinous, blood-lusting violence and moral decay – T.S. Eliot’s “skull beneath the skin”. Read more... |
The Pitchfork Disney, Arcola TheatreThursday, 02 February 2012
Critics can also be historians. In my opinion, the great new wave of 1990s British theatre starts not with Sarah Kane’s Blasted in 1995, nor with Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking a year later, but with polymath Philip Ridley’s amazing debut, The Pitchfork Disney, in 1991. Now, with this long overdue revival which opened last night, we get another chance to sample a powerful and imaginative drama in all its glittering and eerie strangeness. Read more... |
She Stoops to Conquer, National TheatreWednesday, 01 February 2012
With its mistaken identities, a meddling mother, a chest of precious jewels, gulling of fops and two pairs of thwarted lovers, it's easy to see Shakespearean overtones in Oliver Goldsmith's 1773 masterpiece. And because She Stoops to Conquer's witty and intelligent heroine, Kate, outsmarts her would-be suitor Marlow, it's even more tempting to see it as having shades of The Taming of the Shrew, only without the difficult bits for modern audiences. Read more... |
The House of Bernarda Alba, Almeida TheatreSaturday, 28 January 2012
No one can exactly accuse Federico Garcia Lorca's 1936 play of falling into neglect. From Howard Davies's National Theatre revival to this latest reclamation by the Almeida, The House of Bernarda Alba has received six separate airings in (or near) London within almost seven years. The various treatments include an American stage musical, an adaptation relocated to Pakistan, and a puppet play performed to a pre-recorded Farsi soundtrack. Read more... |
Shallow Slumber, Soho TheatreSaturday, 28 January 2012
Write what you know, the cliché goes, and in his new drama the playwright Chris Lee draws on his day job as a social worker to create a tense two-hander about a middle-class social worker and her client, a working-class single mother who kills her baby. Inspired by the notorious case of Baby P, the piece adopts an intriguing form in order to examine the realities behind the tabloid headlines about evil mums and monstrous sinners. 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*
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