Hampstead Theatre
aleks.sierz
One island off the coast of Spain has more cultural oomph than all the rest put together. I’m talking about Ibiza, the sun-soaked, music-happy and drug-friendly paradise for anyone in their roaring luved-up twenties who wants a break that will fry their minds – and imprinting them with memories of sun, sex and ecstasy for years to come.Fair enough, but what happens when a group of guys decide to recreate this experience in their fifties? Well, that’s the subject of actor Neil D’Souza’s new comedy, Out of Season, which is currently playing in the Hampstead Theatre’s Downstairs studio.Set in Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It’s awards season in the film world, which means that we’re currently swamped by hyperbolic shows of love and respect – actors and their directors gushing about how each could simply never have reached their creative heights without the other. Of course, it’s not always like that; there is plenty of hell unleased on a movie set. John Logan’s new play investigates the messier, uglier side of the director-actor dynamic, by considering two real-life, notorious, if very different confrontations. One is between Alfred Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren, during the shooting of Marnie, in 1964 in Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
How do you make a play out of Stalin’s defecting daughter Svetlana, the psycho-economic theories of Daniel Kahneman and a fictionalised version of Derek Black, the son of a leading American white nationalist?Playwright Jonathan Spector, who reveals in a programme note that one of his favourite British dramatists is Tom Stoppard, has had a lot of fun playing in the same dramaturgical sandpit. HIs new play at the Hampstead, This Much I Know, is a sparely staged three-hander, but it cleverly expands to cover all the above ideas and references within the context of the faltering relationship of a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
There is a song by Syd Barrett, founder member of Pink Floyd, called “Golden Hair”. It’s on his album The Madcap Laughs, released in 1970, a couple of years after he left the band, and every time I hear it I feel like I’m falling in love again. It also features in Tom Stoppard’s 2006 epic, the aptly named Rock ’N’ Roll, now revived at the Hampstead Theatre by playwright and director Nina Raine.The figure of Barrett – an antic madcap whose use of LSD both inspired his psychedelic music and destroyed his mind – runs, skips and somersaults through the play, which spans European Cold War history Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A middle-aged man, expensively dressed and possessed of that very specific confidence that only comes from a certain kind of education, a certain kind of professional success, a certain kind of entitlement, talks to a younger woman. Despite the fact that she isn’t really trying, she’s attractive, bright and just assertive enough to weave a spell of fascination over men like him, with a tinge of non-dangerous exoticism evidenced by her East European accent to round things out. They are catnip to each other. And so it had been until almost two years ago. A torrid affair had been conducted, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
There’s only a couple of things you need to know about playwright Richard Bean: he started out as a stand-up comic, and he comes from Hull. Oh, and he wears Hawaiian shirts to press nights. So that’s three things. Oh, and that his masterpiece One Man, Two Guvnors (a populist farcical version of Carlo Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters) was a global megahit.That’s four things – now you’re in the zone. Here’s some more: his latest, To Have and To Hold, is an acerbic take on marriage and aging, which premiers at the Hampstead Theatre, starring Alun Armstrong and Marion Bailey, and it’s co-directed Read more ...
aleks.sierz
How many hearts does an octopus have? Answer: three. This pub quiz clincher is just one of the many fascinating facts that emerge from Octopolis, Marek Horn’s engrossing 100-minute two-hander which explores the relationship between humans and cephalopods, and is currently playing in the Hampstead Theatre Downstairs space, starring Jemma Redgrave.As well as diving into the depths of a philosophical enquiry into what kind of consciousness such a creature could have, the play also shows how scientific enquiry can be seriously compromised by the personal relationships of its practitioners.Set in Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
With more than 20 plays under her belt, San-Francisco based Lauren Gunderson is one of the most produced playwrights in the US. But she’s chosen London to premier her very topical new thriller. It’s a sign of a good writer that they can touch the zeitgeist just as the geist gets seriously gusty. anthropology was conceived before Chat GBT escalated the fears about the threat of artificial intelligence usurping mankind’s own sentient endeavour – and helped to herald the current actor and writer strikes in the US. While films have tackled the subject of AI getting ahead of Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Lucky Will Young: the production of the Simon Stephens monologue Song from Far Away that he is delivering at the Hampstead Theatre is directed by Kirk Jameson, not Ivo van Hove.The modish Dutch director of the initial UK staging, seen at the Young Vic in 2015, stripped his actor naked for much of the performance. Young, though, is allowed a loose white shirt and black trousers throughout. Van Hove’s literal laying bare of Willem was presumably a visual aid to what he thought the monologue was setting out to do. Willem is a hollow man: a determinedly private individual, a hedgie and Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Much of cricket comprises waiting – you wait on the boundary to hear news of the toss, you wait your turn to bat, you heed the call of your batting partner to wait to see if a run is on, you wait for the rain to stop. A friend once told me that he played cricket in order to make the rest of his life seem more interesting. There is something in that observation that would appeal to both principals in this play for sure.Two men bicker on the boundary as they wait their turn to bat. In at five and six, one is keeping score (and "working the telegraph", as cricket’s arcane argot has it), while Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Lip-syncing has become the hobby of many a young TikToker, but only an intrepid professional would contemplate using the technique to play Hamlet. Or rather, to “play” some of the knighted thespians and stars who have portrayed him. Dickie Beau is that brave soul. He has brought his 2020 show, Re-Member Me, back to the UK after its progress abroad was rudely interrupted by the pandemic, and it has bedded in nicely. An amalgam of film, multiple recorded famous voices, some witty stagecraft and Dickie’s gifted brand of physical comedy, it has a scope beyond co-ordinating face muscles to Read more ...
Joe White
Before I knew – or realised – I wanted to write about alcoholism in my play Blackout Songs (premiered last autumn at the Hampstead Downstairs and moving this weekend to the mainstage), I wanted to write about love and memory. I'd had three very close friends lose their dads to Alzheimer's in the space of about six years – all very young – and I'd seen how the deterioration of the mind and memory was in many ways as devastating as the physical.I saw how difficult it was for loved ones to process where they belonged in that person's mind – the joy Read more ...