England
Miranda Heggie
If you’d started senior school when this production premiered, you’d be finished by now and out in the world of work or at university, your first year days a distant memory. A lot’s changed since the curtain first came up on this version in 2011, and nearly a decade on, and in the wake of #metoo, Robert Carsen’s high school-set production feels more than a little out of date. Sure, it’s fun, but do we really need more stories told through the eyes of a dissatisfied juvenile male?Carsen’s taken the plot of Handel’s 1711 opera - his first for the London stage - and transposed it into a 20th Read more ...
Tom Baily
Cindy Sherman predicted the selfie, so goes the claim. From our current standpoint, it is all too easy to analyse her many hundreds of photographic self-portraits made since the late 1970s as cultural forebears of the digital medium. What this BBC Arena film opens up, alongside that bold claim, is a question about the mystery of Sherman as a person: who is she and why has she done what she’s done? Always reclusive, refusing public appearances, and elusive about her work, Sherman seems to have designed the enigmatic tone with which she is publicly discussed. Here, a small but rewarding effort Read more ...
Richard Bratby
It’s the saddest music in the world: the quiet heartbeat and falling melody with which Tchaikovsky opens his opera Eugene Onegin. Imagine a whole society, a whole lifetime of solitude, longing and disillusion, evoked in a single bass note and a few bars of tearstained violin. And then imagine it sustained over three acts. Is there another 19th century opera score that matches music to drama so simply, and yet so unerringly? – repeatedly finding the precise turn of melody or twist of harmony required to distil the poignancy out of a situation, and then letting it trickle straight back into Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“I want to discover how our government could fall apart and the country become bitterly divided in just a few weeks,” historian Lisa Hilton announced at the start of her BBC Four account of the traumatic demise of Charles I. In a mere 50 days in 1641-2, it seemed that the foundations of the state were sawn away as England tumbled towards a calamitous civil war.Well, in outline it was fairly simple. Take one absolute monarch convinced that he enjoyed the divine right of kings and sublimely indifferent to the opinions of his subjects, and pitch him against the leader of the House of Commons Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Time hasn't necessarily been kind to this slow-aborning West End transfer of a show first seen (and lauded) in its 2015 debut in Leicester and then again two years later for a summer run at the Menier Chocolate Factory. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 has now reached the West End, and the obvious question is who is this musical version of the ever-popular Sue Townsend books for? It's difficult to imagine overly many of the Adrian Moles of today (or even their parents) latching on to jokes about Dallas or Elizabeth Taylor, and the retrograde sexual politics – "shut your Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The famous ambiguity of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw is whether the ghosts that take possession of the two children are real or merely figments of the young Governess’s imagination. Britten’s opera resolves this unequivocally in favour of their reality: they appear alone together, and generally materialise so solidly that it never occurs to you to doubt their real existence. But now Louisa Muller, in her vivid new production for Garsington, casts a fresh and intriguing light on this question. She presents the Governess, the housekeeper Mrs Grose, and the ghostly Miss Jessel as three Read more ...
Tom Baily
Should the Ritz catch up with modernity? This question is posed and immediately answered with another question: Does it need to? Not really, say the staff, clients and celebrity guests that populate this bubbly, formulaic and unashamed celebration of what is, rightly, a gorgeous and historic venue. Sticking tight to tradition and celebrating it – with the help of some very famous talking heads – is what is on offer in ITV's latest show. But viewers in search of history, intrigue, scandal, or an insight that slides even an inch beneath surface description will not find it in this overtly Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An apocalyptic title proves somewhat of a red herring for a slight if intriguing play that returns the dream team behind Harry Potter and the Cursed Child to their erstwhile stomping ground at the Royal Court. Set across 20 years in the Newbury kitchen of a socialist family most of whom on this evidence cannot cook, Jack Thorne's play traces a familial and political bequest that takes us from the arrival of Tony Blair as PM through to the spring of 2017 and a lone reference in passing to "Brexit Britain". But quite what the author and his longtime director, John Tiffany, want us to make of a Read more ...
Damian Cruden
How we deliver culture in the modern day is complex. There are many misconceptions about where and who is capable of leading the nation’s cultural charge. The accepted conceit is that if culture doesn’t emanate from certain places, like London or Stratford, then it couldn’t possibly be of value. By way of response, Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre brings affordable, high-quality culture to audiences outside the M25. It promises an immersive experience, accessible to all and undeniably great fun. The artists creating the work have all had a wide range of experience gained in the major arts Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" can be heard pulsating through the Old Vic auditorium as the curtain rises on its wondrous revival of Present Laughter: a decisive feather in the cap of artistic director Matthew Warchus's regime. But all Garry Essendine, the vainglorious actor at the whirling centre of Noël Coward's 1942 play, really wants is to make it through the day (and night) intact. Possessing 18 dressing gowns but at odds with that ever-elusive entity known as happiness, Garry has men and women alike in thrall, and so – and how! – does its stratospherically gifted Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Under a turbulent sky racked with jagged clouds suggesting bolts of lightning, pale figures hurl themselves into a spitting expanse of water. Swathed in white towels, other figures mingle with the pink bodies, seeming to process along the pier as if towards a baptism. Swimmers’ vigorous arms overtop their submerged heads; on land, no individual face is distinguished. As if exuberance could tip at any time into anarchy, a sense of threat pervades the depiction of communal leisure. By the time the Second World War broke out, the invincible boys depicted in Claude Flight’s linocut, Boys Bathing Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Terence Rattigan completists, and count myself among them, will leap at the chance to see a rare production courtesy the Orange Tree Theatre of While the Sun Shines, a 1943 monster hit for this great English writer that has languished in semi-obscurity ever since. (Theatre Royal, Bath, did an acclaimed version in 2016 but London hasn't seen it in an age.) Returning to a playwright whose previous French Without Tears enjoyed two sellout runs at this address, the director Paul Miller confirms a gift for mining the canon afresh.If one's actual experience of the play amounts to a rather more Read more ...