Almeida Theatre
Little Eyolf, Almeida TheatreFriday, 27 November 2015
Greek family smashups at the Almeida now yield to northern agony sagas, less bloody but potentially just as harrowing. In Little Eyolf the 66-year-old Ibsen dissected a failed marriage as ruthlessly as Euripides, Strindberg or Bergman, who... Read more... |
Medea, Almeida TheatreFriday, 02 October 2015
With her strong, often fierce features and her convincing simulations of rage, Kate Fleetwood might have been born to play Medea. Unfortunately this isn’t Euripides’ Medea but Rachel Cusk’s free variations on the myth rather than the play. Many... Read more... |
The Iliad, British Museum /Almeida TheatreSaturday, 15 August 2015
You don’t know Homer’s Iliad until you’ve heard it read aloud, all 24 books – not quite every line, but almost – and 16 hours of it. Yesterday's marathon was surely something like the events in which the Athenians kept the oral tradition... Read more... |
Bakkhai, Almeida TheatreFriday, 31 July 2015
This is the real Greek, bloody-fantastical thing. After the fascinating but flawed attempt to bring Aeschylus’s Oresteia into the 21st century, the Almeida has turned to a more tradition-conscious kind of experiment with Euripides’ last and greatest... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Director Michael LonghurstMonday, 06 July 2015
Is there more than one Michael Longhurst? As sometimes happens in theatre, a rising young director seems to be everywhere at once. His calling card is the modestly universal Constellations. Directed with clarity and simplicity, Nick Payne’s romantic... Read more... |
Oresteia, Almeida TheatreSaturday, 06 June 2015
There are two fundamental ways to fillet the untranslatable poetry and ritual of Aeschylus, most remote of the three ancient Greek tragedians, for a contemporary audience. One is to find a poet of comparable word-magic and a composer to reflect the... Read more... |
Game, Almeida TheatreThursday, 05 March 2015
This venue is one of the coolest in London — and its regular audience is both trendy and well-heeled. In the foyer, you get jostled by a better class of person. For this immersive show, written by the prolific and ever-inventive Mike Bartlett, the... Read more... |
The Merchant of Venice, Almeida TheatreTuesday, 16 December 2014
All that glisters is not gold in the casino and television game-show world of Rupert Goold’s American Shakespeare, first staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2011. Not all the accents are gold either, though working on them only seems to have... Read more... |
Our Town, Almeida TheatreSaturday, 18 October 2014
A template of the American theatre gets dusted off to quietly devastating effect in Our Town, the 1938 Thornton Wilder play that has never been especially beloved in Britain even as it gets performed in every high school across the States. With luck... Read more... |
Little Revolution, Almeida TheatreThursday, 04 September 2014
Dramatic national events such as riots tend to attract verbatim theatre practitioners like smashed shop windows attract looters. In this new play, Alecky Blythe – who specialises in recording ordinary people and editing their words into a... Read more... |
Mr Burns, Almeida TheatreFriday, 13 June 2014
In creating Mr Burns, Anne Washburn was trying to answer a question overlooked by most purveyors of dystopian fictions: what would happen to pop culture after an apocalypse? The physical and emotional challenges of life after civilisation have been... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Director Jonathan KentSunday, 01 June 2014
Jonathan Kent was an actor before he was a director. Indeed, he had not directed a single play when in his mid-40s he assumed control of the Almeida Theatre in 1990. By the time he and his co-artistic director Ian McDiarmid has left more than a... Read more... |
