playwrights
aleks.sierz
Few theatres have done as much to promote new young talent as the Royal Court; few theatres have done as much to stage plays about the pains and pleasures of the digital world; few venues have tackled the themes of race and gender in contemporary society more effectively. Now, once again, it's time for a young writer to make their debut in the upstairs studio space. Step forward Jasmine Lee-Jones, whose new play, Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner, has an arresting title, and has been advertised as an exploration of "cultural appropriation, queerness, friendship between womxn and the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The best kind of two-hander is the play about couples. And the most dramatic way of saying something about relationships is to show a couple who are in trouble, bad trouble. Crisis. Especially if they start off well together. Kenny Emson's smart, sharply written new play, which arrives at the Bush on its way to the High Tide and Edinburgh fesrtivals, does just that. Its main theme is honesty in personal relationships and if you think that its title, Rust, suggests a corrosive decay of hope you wouldn't be far wrong.The couple are Nadia and Daniel. Both in their late-30s, she is a middle-class Read more ...
aleks.sierz
In the middle of the current decade, there was a mild vogue for reviving a handful of the great plays of the 1990s, such as Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking and Patrick Marber's Closer. Now the Donmar Warehouse's new artistic director, the energetic Michael Longhurst, has chosen David Greig's Europe, first staged at the Traverse in Edinburgh in 1994, as his inaugural production. Because it's a kind of state-of-the-continent tone poem, this feels like a really excellent choice. After all, competing views about Europe loom large in the news every day, and in Longhurst's majestic production Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Irish playwright Dylan Coburn Gray's new play won the Verity Bargate Award in 2017, and his reward is a fine production of this beautifully written account of one Dublin family over several decades. It is a light-touch epic which is partly a humorous account of ordinary people's daily lives, partly a meditation on time and partly a social history of changing attitudes to family, and to sex, over the years in Ireland. Coming to the Soho Theatre after opening at the Abbey in Dublin last month, it is a short poetic tribute to the nitty-gritty of quotidian living.Opening with a taxi driver, and a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a joke early on in Sweat, Lynn Nottage's superlative drama about American working lives, in which a lively bar-room conversation turns to the seemingly unlikely subject of NAFTA. It’s 2000, the Bush presidency just around the corner, and the impact of the acronymic North American Free Trade Agreement is about to hit the country's industrial heartlands. It sounds like a laxative, one character jokes – a throwaway remark that proves to have a bitter truth behind it. By the end of her 2015 Pulitzer prize-wining drama, now transferred from the Donmar to the West End, Nottage will Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Edward Hall bids farewell to this venue, where he has been artistic director since 2010, with this production of a new play by Howard Brenton. The playwright has been a regular at the Hampstead Theatre, and he has enjoyed stagings of his history plays here, including 55 Days (2012), Drawing the Line (2013) and Lawrence after Arabia (2016). His latest is more contemporary and loosely inspired by Thomas Hardy's 1895 tragic novel, Jude the Obscure, which famously ends with infanticide and death by hanging, so it is with a faint heart that I sit down to watch this modern version, which changes Read more ...
Heather Neill
It is 30 years since Shadowlands, William Nicholson's much-loved play about CS Lewis's unexpected love affair with Joy Gresham, an American poet, was first seen on stage. The famous academic and author of the Narnia books, apparently content in his male world of Oxford high tables and intellectual cut-and-thrust, was transformed by his meeting with Joy, a clever, outspoken fan of his theological writing. Their idyll was short-lived; within a few years she succumbed to cancer and Lewis was overwhelmed with grief. Originally written for television and subsequently filmed (with Anthony Hopkins Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Superstar Sally Field has come to town. With two academy awards and countless other accolades, the actor who played Forrest Gump's mother and dozens of other roles, from Frog to Mrs Lincoln, in Hollywood blockbusters and on television now returns to the stage to play a delusional and deceitful matriarch in Arthur Miller's All My Sons, part of the Old Vic's continuing tribute to the American playwright. She is joined on stage by Bill Pullman (Torchwood) and Jenna Coleman (Victoria) in a co-production with Headlong theatre company, directed by Jeremy Herrin.First staged in 1947, All My Sons is Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Caryl Churchill is a phenomenal artist. Not only has she written a huge body of work, but each play differs in both form and content from the previous one, and she has continued to write with enormous creative zest and flair well into her maturity. Now in her 80th year, she can look over her shoulder at a back-catalogue which is stuffed full of contemporary classics, and a handful of masterpieces. Her 1982 play, Top Girls, finally getting a revival at this national flagship, is her masterpiece of masterpieces. Yes, it's that good. It proves, if proof were needed, that she is clearly the best Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Well, you have to give it to French playwright Florian Zeller — he's certainly cracked the problem of coming up with a name for each of his plays. Basically, choose a common noun and put the definite article in front of it. His latest, The Son, is the last in a trilogy which includes The Father and The Mother. His other recent work is titled The Truth and The Lie — see what I mean? Peasy. Then there's The Height of the Storm, a slight variation. Anyway, the previous parts of the Moliere-Award-winning writer's trilogy have won an Olivier (The Father) and critical acclaim (The Mother) so what Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
"It's gonna be the best golf course in the world," a man in an Aertex shirt and a bright red baseball cap is assuring us. "The best. I guarantee it." You can tell he's the kind of person who thinks talking quickly and loudly is the same thing as being right.If this sounds vaguely familiar, that's because Hannah Patterson's new play Eden, staged at the Hampstead Theatre Downstairs by Matthew Xia, is based on a true story, that of Donald Trump's luxury golf course in Aberdeenshire and the backlash it faced from local residents. Patterson transports the action to the fictional village of Eden, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
There is no doubt that Peter Shaffer's Equus is a modern classic. But does that justify reviving this 1973 hit play in our current social circumstances? And what can it say to us today? The good news is that up-and-coming director Ned Bennett is at the helm of this version, and that he brings not only his individual vision to the piece, but also plenty of guts and balls and feeling: this is much more than a simple retread of John Dexter's legendary original, with its platform-hooved man-horses and starry casts here and in New York (Alec McCowen, Anthony Hopkins and Tom Hulce). Nor is there Read more ...