National Theatre
Rachel Halliburton
If Harold Pinter’s work represents, as he slyly joked, the weasel under the cocktail cabinet, then Oscar Wilde’s represents the stiletto in the Victorian sponge – at a time when the stiletto was a slim dagger used for assassination. Beneath the fopperies and fripperies of his fin-de-siècle classic, every line draws blood as he skewers the false gods and hypocrisies of his age.On paper there’s plenty to tempt audiences to the National Theatre’s latest production of Wilde's searing attack on social convention. Maybe you’re seduced by the thought of a cast that includes current Dr Who, Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Contemporary reworkings of Greek tragedy run a very particular risk, that out of context the heightened actions of the original plays – the woefully poor judgement, the copious bloodletting, the rush to disproportionate vengeance and suicide – can seem like hapless histrionics and just a bit daft. Not so The Other Place. "Inspired" by Sophocles’ Antigone, Alexander Zeldin’s triumphant new play, which he directs, transmutes the seething passions and misdemeanours of myth into a contemporary English family home, with discomforting ease. It is strange, twisted yet terribly Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Queenie is in trouble. Bad trouble. For about a year now, this 68-year-old Indian woman has been forgetful. Losing her car keys; burning rice in the pan; mixing up memories; just plain blank episodes. At various times, she relives distant moments in her life with her husband Ameet, who died more than 20 years ago. Very soon she is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.As played by national treasure Meera Syal, who barely leaves the stage during this full-length tragi-comedy by Tanika Gupta, making a very welcome return to the National Theatre, she grows in emotional stature while her incurable condition Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The National’s new production of Coriolanus has to be one of the most handsome to appear on the Olivier stage. But it has arrived minus a key item: a hero whose end is tragic.Maybe director Lyndsey Turner wasn’t aiming for that. Her protagonist, pugnaciously played by David Oyelowo, is more a fully functioning part of Shakespeare’s steel-trap of a play than a hero to understand and pity. In this fast-paced piece, Coriolanus rises, then falls, but there are no pit stops, no subplots, along the way. He has a family, but there’s virtually no family time to reveal a gentler side to this super- Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Two boys in east London, one Black, one white, grow up together, play pranks at school, then decades later have a tempestuous falling out. That’s the main narrative arc of these twin plays, but it accounts for none of their extraordinary richness and the superlative acting they entail. These are monologues, a genre where dramatic excellence is primed to go right off the scale: think the powerful solos of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, the haunted storytellers of Conor McPherson’s plays, Simon Stephens’s Sea Wall. Recast after their runs at the Dorfman, the trio of plays is directed by Clint Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It’s a brave company that embarks on a staging of John Steinbeck’s award-winning 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. A grim study of human goodness in an unrelentingly cruel universe, it’s a long slog for both cast and audience.Steinbeck based his novel on his experiences in 1936 of reporting for a San Francisco newspaper on the US migrant camps known as Hoovervilles, after the President who set them up. But relief for their residents — escapees from the US’s economic collapse in the early 1930s and the Dust Bowl that then destroyed over-farmed land in Texas and Oklahoma — would have to wait Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s an exuberant comedy from the start in Katori Hall’s The Hot Wing King, which comes to London after an initial Covid-truncated Off Broadway run which brought her a Pulitzer prize in 2021. Roy Alexander Weise’s production puts in all the energy it can find and then more, doing its best to balance that comedy with the more serious themes, such as family responsibility, and a man’s role in the world, with which it is interspersed.It’s a balance that the production does not finally quite achieve, however, with an extended first half dominated by the kitchen banter of four Memphis friends, Read more ...
Heather Neill
Prolific playwright James Graham was born in 1982, the year Alan Bleasdale's unforgettable series was televised. From Nottingham rather than Liverpool, Graham recognised in his own surroundings the predicaments of the main characters, the bonds between them and the importance to them of place and of shared stories. An admirer of Bleasdale's work, he had already acknowledged the older writer's influence on Sherwood, his television crime drama pulsating with continuing divisions caused by the miners' strike.Billed as "Alan Bleasdale's Boys from the Blackstuff by James Graham", and arriving on Read more ...
aleks.sierz
“He do the police in different voices.” If ever one phrase summed up a work of fiction, and the art of its writer, then surely it is this description, by Charles Dickens in his 1865 novel, Our Mutual Friend, of his character Sloppy’s ability to read aloud from a newspaper. Ironically enough the book itself is one of Dickens’s least exuberant performances, written in his maturity, and with enormous and unnecessary detail (800 pages worth).Its complex plot has now been adapted for the National Theatre by Ben Power, with music by PJ Harvey. But is this the best way to tell this story? Dickens’s Read more ...
Jane Edwardes
Can there be anyone from Sheffield who has not seen Standing at the Sky’s Edge, possibly several times? This is the once local show, opening at the Sheffield Crucible in 2019, playing at the National Theatre's Olivier in 2023, and now bringing a touch of Sheffield warmth and straight-talking into the West End, where it will no doubt worm its way into the hearts of a multitude of spectators wherever they are from; it also won a Best Musical Olivier Award along the way.Who would have predicted such success for a musical about the great brutalist block, inspired by Le Corbusier, which sits on Read more ...
Mert Dilek
Doom and gloom, we are told, may have abounded in the classical underworld, but Hadestown suggests otherwise. Returning to London five years after its run at the National Theatre, this time with a slew of Tony Awards, this bracing musical proves its mettle as a heart-warming and atmospheric feast of deeply soulful tunes.With music, lyrics, and book by American singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell, Hadestown reimagines familiar tales from mythology through exquisite songs and eloquent stagecraft. The story centres on the tragic romance between the bard Orpheus and Eurydice, as king Hades and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Sisters are doing it for themselves, just as families as a whole are, too, on the London stage these days. Dear Octopus follows Till the Stars Come Down and The Hills of California as the third domestic drama I've seen in the last 10 days and in some ways the most surprising. Rarely encountered since its 1938 premiere which starred a young John Gielgud, Dodie Smith's leisurely play emerges as a real pleasure, not least for returning the wonderful Lindsay Duncan to a preferred address for a performer whom I first saw on this same stage - the National Theatre's Lyttelton - in Cat on a Hot Read more ...