Theatre
Buried Child, Trafalgar StudiosSaturday, 03 December 2016
What stroke of prescience brought two Sam Shepard plays to London in the very month America voted for Trump? The kind of people we’re learning to call the disenfranchised have been Shepard’s focus for the last 40 years, and now they’re global news.... Read more... |
This House, Garrick TheatreSaturday, 03 December 2016
This House arrives in the West End with magic timing - a comedy about the farcical horrors of being a government with a wafer-thin majority, frantically wheeling out dying, suicidal and breastfeeding MPs to vote, horsetrading with "odds and sods" to... Read more... |
The Little Matchgirl, Sam Wanamaker PlayhouseFriday, 02 December 2016
For anyone disposed to treat the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse as hallowed ground – and such issues have gained much currency at the Globe recently following the announced early departure of artistic director Emma Rice – The Little Matchgirl may seem like... Read more... |
'Hamlet’s actors are kings of infinite space'Thursday, 01 December 2016
“I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, Were it not that I have bad dreams…” 2016, with all its protectionist voting, has been the year I’ve taken my production of Hamlet – with just six actors, a sofa and a drum... Read more... |
10 Questions for Playwright James GrahamTuesday, 29 November 2016
Coalitions make for drama, and for comedy. We know that from, respectively, Borgen and the final series of The Thick of It. It is little wonder therefore that soon after the 2010 election delivered a hung Parliament, the National Theatre... Read more... |
Nice Fish, Harold Pinter TheatreSaturday, 26 November 2016
Mark Rylance was once renowned for skipping thank yous to agents, friends and everyone he’s ever met in award speeches and instead giving us a blast of Minnesotan prose poet Louis Jenkins. Now the two men have co-created an oddball meditation,... Read more... |
The Children, Royal Court TheatreFriday, 25 November 2016
Over the past decade, one new theme in particular has emerged in contemporary British new writing: generational conflict. In several bright new offerings – such as James Graham’s The Whisky Taster (2010) and Mike Bartlett’s Love, Love, Love (2012... Read more... |
Shakespeare Trilogy, Donmar at King's CrossThursday, 24 November 2016
If you are new to the Donmar Warehouse all-female stagings of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Henry IV – 2012 and 2014 respectively – the biggest surprise is not so much that these highly masculine dramas are performed entirely by women. It is their... Read more... |
King Lear, RSC, BarbicanFriday, 18 November 2016
At the conclusion of a year in which Britishness has come so resoundingly to the fore of the national debate – and with a play that at the time of its writing, 1605-6, was engaging with that concept no less urgently – the first impression made by... Read more... |
Half A Sixpence, Noel Coward TheatreFriday, 18 November 2016
That old saw about a star being born really is on view at the Noel Coward Theatre, where newcomer Charlie Stemp justifies and then some, the fuss being made about him in this "revisal" of the onetime Tommy Steele vehicle Half A Sixpence. Whether you... Read more... |
An Inspector Calls, Playhouse TheatreThursday, 17 November 2016
So, the Inspector has come calling yet again. Twenty-four years have passed since Stephen Daldry’s graphic revision of JB Priestley’s moral tub-thumper opened at the National, followed by a tour of duty in the West End that seemed to go on forever.... Read more... |
The Sewing Group, Royal Court TheatreThursday, 17 November 2016
The beauty of the past is that it’s a foreign country, and you don’t need a visa to visit it. With the free movement of the imagination you can conjure up life as it might have once been experienced. You can even join a re-enactment society. In the... Read more... |
