West End
Matt Wolf
The past haunts the present and looks likely to torpedo the future in Rosmersholm, the lesser-known Ibsen play now receiving a major West End revival in welcome defiance of the commercial odds. The protean Sonia Friedman, this venture's producer, was wise to grant the directing reins to Ian Rickson, who has made many a Pinter play land in a similar environment (and directed the National's glorious Translations last year). Blessed with the design team of one's dreams and an ace trio of leads, Ibsen's sometimes-murky psychology here rivets throughout, even Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
In an age where political, social, and gender norms seem to be in perpetual meltdown, it should be pretty much impossible for a musical that begins with a song celebrating ‘Tradition’ to strike a chord. Yet from the moment that the cast of Trevor Nunn’s foot-stompingly fist-wavingly triumphant Fiddler on the Roof launches into the opening number, it’s clear that they have the energy and chutzpah to whip up an emotional storm.The musical – the latest West End transfer from production powerhouse, the Menier Chocolate Factory - is famously based on Sholem Aleichem’s stories about a Jewish Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The grand finale of Jamie Lloyd’s remarkable Pinter at the Pinter season is this starry production of one of the writer’s greatest – and certainly most personal – works, inspired by his extramarital affair with Joan Bakewell. The 1978 play is famous for its reverse-chronological structure, however Lloyd’s stylish, expressionistic take emphasises the daring not just of the formal trickery, but of the unsparing scrutiny of humanity.Soutra Gilmour’s stark set resembles a gallery, with the tangled trio as its shades-of-grey exhibits; it’s a reminder, too, that these yarn-spinning schemers Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
As China and the US arm-wrestle for world domination in everything from trade to military power, we find ourselves in the throes of a space race again. After China became the first nation to land on the dark side of the moon this January, it seems particularly apt to revisit The Twilight Zone in all its retro glory to examine what aliens can – among other things – reveal to us about our humanity.The continual osmotic reaction between what happens on a stage and the news headlines outside the theatre means that this return of a production first seen at the Almeida in 2017, now transferred to Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's a lovely, quietly subversive musical lurking somewhere in Waitress, and for extended passages in the second act that show is allowed to shine through. The flip side means putting up with an often coarse first act that seems to have taken its cue from its sister show in female emancipation, the Dolly Parton-scored 9 to 5, playing down the street. The advantage for Waitress is Grammy ceremony semi-regular Sara Bareilles's eclectic and catchy score, and a clutch of winning performances capable of taking even the hoariest material (you've seen almost all these characters before) and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was TV gold-dust. The original seven series of Only Fools and Horses were broadcast on BBC One from 1981-1991, and a string of Christmas specials kept the show running until 2003. It was showered with awards and critical acclaim, and in 1996 the episode "Time on Our Hands" drew a record-breaking 24.3 million viewers.This musical version at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, authored by Paul Whitehouse and Jim Sullivan (son of the show’s creator John Sullivan, who died in 2011), whisks us back to 1989, and deftly recreates the dodgy Peckham milieu of the Trotter family. This consists largely of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Against the grimmest of backdrops, generosity and even grace can be possible. That's the eternally uplifting message of Come From Away, the surprise Broadway musical hit about the community that was taking place north of the US/Canada border even as a New York felled by 9/11 continued to burn. Cynics may scoff (and have) at the feelgood factor to a show that some have been tempted to dismiss as merely a weightier Mamma Mia! But that's to miss the point entirely of the musical's canny portrait of a ready and unselfconscious empathy, which transcends the specific trauma from which the piece Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A musicals-intensive season gets off to a wan start with 9 to 5, a retooled West End version of a 2009 Broadway flop based on the beloved 1980 film that proffered a sisterhood for the ages in the combo of Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, and Lily Tomlin. Parton gets bigtime producing billing on a stage venture for which she has provided a so-so (albeit Tony-nominated) score, and her shining face graces the onstage screens to clue us into the none-too-difficult plot and provide a fairly hoary Donald Trump joke. But it's clear pretty much from the start that Jeff Calhoun's production is aiming low and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Women spend a lot of time gazing at themselves in the mirror in the Belgian auteur director Ivo van Hove's latest stage-to-screen deconstruction, All About Eve, which is based on one of the most-beloved of all films about the theatre: the 1950 Oscar-winner of the same name. And well these varying generations of stage talents might want to anatomise every pore. Advancing age kills figuratively, if not literally, in the landscape of a play that may bear the same title as Joseph L Mankiewicz's iconic backstage story but conveys its own entirely (and deliberately) different import and impact. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a rather sublime equilibrium to Arthur Miller’s 1968 play between the overwhelmingly heavy weight of history and a sheer life force that somehow functions, against all odds, as its counterbalance. But in purely dramatic terms the scales of The Price are tipped from the moment that Gregory Solomon, octogenarian second-hand furniture dealer extraordinaire, wheezes his way into the action. David Suchet’s peerless performance, flavoured with a masterful spiel that puts his character squarely (and knowingly) in the traditions of Jewish comedy, has such bravado insouciance that everything Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It was back to the very beginning for this final instalment of “Pinter at the Pinter”, with its pairing of A Slight Ache and The Dumb Waiter. Both were written at the end of the 1950s, which explained a certain rock’n’roll vibe in the auditorium, but brought home how much Pinter’s work stretches beyond period, resounding with new intonations to match new times.This highly revealing commemorative season of the playwright’s one-act plays has shown what (relative) rediscoveries there are to be made. A Slight Ache, originally written in 1959 as a radio play, remains much less known than The Dumb Read more ...
Tim Cornwell
The Fifties? They were terrible: bone-cold houses where people huddled round the fireplace for heat, empty Sundays that lasted a month, drawn-out rationing, bread you could build houses with. It was all making do and mending and "grey meat, grey people, everything grey," or so declares Susan Brown's Sylvia in a mother's get-real rant in Home, I'm Darling, the Laura Wade play now on the West End after a sellout run at the National Theatre/Dorfman last year and Theatre Clwyd before that. Women were frightened of a new invention called yoghurt, not to mention of husbands, who had all the rights Read more ...