National Theatre
aleks.sierz
At first, I was a bit confused by the play’s title. After all, David Hare gave his 1998 adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde the moniker of The Blue Room, which coincidentally is the same title as Mathieu Amalric’s very recent adaptation of a thriller by Georges Simenon. Now Hare has taken another Simenon thriller, La Main, and called it The Red Barn, which immediately suggests the murder of Maria Marten in 1827.But Hare and Simenon’s barn is not in Suffolk; it’s in Connecticut and the year is 1969. Hope that’s clear. Even if not, a brilliant cast headed by Mark Strong and Elizabeth Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Yes, from life," Nikolai Ivanov (Geoffrey Streatfeild) says in passing of a painting midway through the early Chekhov play that bears his name. But the phrase could serve as the abiding achievement of the largely thrilling triptych of plays that has transferred from Chichester to the National under the banner title Young Chekhov.Here, as Ivanov's fleeting remark implies, is life in all its often despairing amplitude, and if the net result of Chekhov's worldview across eight hours is paradoxically exhilarating, that's because few writers see life so completely in the round. You emerge from Read more ...
aleks.sierz
From being the Aunt Sally of contemporary British theatre, attacked by the angry young men in the 1950s and the new wave of social and political realists for three decades after that, playwright Terence Rattigan is now well and truly rehabilitated. For the past quarter of a century, both his major and his minor works have been regularly revived. Since Benedict Cumberbatch starred in a revival of Rattigan’s After the Dance at the National Theatre in 2010 it was only a matter of time until this flagship institution staged his best play, The Deep Blue Sea. And this revival stars Helen McCrory, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Last seen at the National Theatre over 10 years ago, Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera is back in a new adaptation by Simon Stephens. But looking at Rufus Norris’s epic-theatre-lite production – all exposed stage-mechanics and makeshift sets – and listening to Stephens’s brutal but non-committal text, you’d swear it had never been away. There’s no aggressive update, no attempt to reinvent or make relevant, and the result is a clean, cold stab of a show, a theatrical assault every bit as cool and casual as Mack’s own murders.It starts badly. For all that this is a “play with music” Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Why do young British Muslims go to join the so-called Islamic State? Since the entire media has been grappling with this question for ages now, it is a bit puzzling to see our flagship National Theatre giving the subject an airing, especially as this is a verbatim drama, which uses the actual words of interviewees, and is thus not so very different from ordinary journalism. But if Gillian Slovo’s Another World: Losing Our Children to Islamic State aspires to be a stage piece, how does it work?The interviewees’ accounts are never questionedThe 95-minute show begins with examples of IS Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Lorraine Hansberry’s career as a playwright proved tragically short. A Raisin in the Sun is by some distance her best-known work, a key piece about the African American post-war experience. But she thought Les Blancs (The Whites) was potentially her most important play, although it remained unfinished at her death in 1965, aged only 34; it was assembled from drafts by her ex-husband and executor Robert Nemiroff, finally reaching Broadway in 1970. Les Blancs expands Hansberry’s dramatic range enormously, taking us from the direct American realism of Raisin to an unspecified African Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
With the 50th Brighton Festival taking place this year, Festival CEO Andrew Comben meets theartsdesk for a chat about the original 1967 event, and its relationship with this year’s Festival. Comben has been the Brighton Festival's overall manager since 2008, also overseeing the Brighton Dome venues all year round. He shares the festival’s curation this year with Guest Director Laurie Anderson.We meet in his office in the centre of Brighton. I start by mentioning that the great 20th century violinist Yehudi Menuhin played the 1967 Festival. Comben goes across the room and pulls a silver- Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Recovery depends on honesty, but Emma – not her real name – lies for a living. Duncan Macmillan’s searing play, getting a well-deserved West End transfer from the National, complicates the familiar story of addiction and rehab by making its protagonist an actress. The dissociation, self-delusion and pathological deceit that frequently accompany the disease are reframed by this sometimes dizzying metatheatricality, which, in Jeremy Herrin’s vivid Headlong staging, plunges us into the abyss.Rightly, much of the coverage of People, Places & Things has centred on Denise Gough’s revelatory Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Hurray, the two-part epic wizard-fest Harry Potter and the Cursed Child lands in the West End this summer, and its playwright is the ever-versatile Jack Thorne (who also successfully adapted the vampire romance Let the Right One In for the stage). But audiences who’d like to enjoy Thorne at his thorniest, rather than most Rowlingesque, might prefer to take a look at this, his 2015 two-hander about a couple and their loss of a child. It’s a Hogwarts-free zone and its main emotional fuel is horrific loss coupled with courageous honesty. Strictly for adults only.Like any romcom, the story of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Although everyone agrees that Sarah Kane was one of the most influential British playwrights of the 1990s, revivals of her work have been few and far between. Now, at last, some 17 years after her suicide at the age of 28 in 1999, our flagship National Theatre has finally decided to stage one of her best works (artistic director Rufus Norris, thank you). But although she became infamous for the media-fuelled scandal and atrocity-fest aspects of her work, subsequent reconsideration suggests that her main theme was nothing less than romantic love. Now revived by star director Katie Mitchell ( Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"One... Two... You know what to do": that coolly delivered rehearsal intro from a trombonist called Cutler (Clint Dyer) could serve as a synoptic appraisal of the simply overwhelming National Theatre revival of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. The play in 1984 launched the late August Wilson on to Broadway, where I first saw it, and here announces itself as a bellwether achievement in artistic director Rufus Norris's still-young National Theatre regime and as, very possibly, the finest Ma Rainey yet.For that, credit the surpassing empathy of a director in Dominic Cooke, who brings much the same easy Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Say what you will about London theatre during 2015, and by my reckoning it was a pretty fine year, there certainly was a lot of it. I can't recall a year that brought with it a comparable volume of openings, not least during September and December, this year's pre-Christmas slate of major press nights roughly double the same time period in 2014. And as proof that people were actually attending the stuff on offer, empirical evidence as ever was the best guide. One late-November Saturday on my way to an evening show, I counted six House Full signs while weaving through the West End, and for a Read more ...