Theatre
Haïm: In the Light of a Violin, The Print RoomWednesday, 15 June 2016
On the face of it, there is nothing in this tightly focused little piece that says anything new about the Holocaust. The plight of a poor Jewish boy unfortunate enough to be growing up in 1930s Poland is dismally familiar. The story of life-... Read more... |
Handle with Care, Urban LockerSunday, 12 June 2016
Storage space units are not a nice place to hang out. Chilly and quiet, vaguely depressing and horribly lit, they bring on a desire to leave almost immediately. The same impulse is palpable in Dante or Die’s site-specific show, Handle With Care,... Read more... |
Phaedra(s), Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe, BarbicanSaturday, 11 June 2016
Britten fathomed Phaedra's passion for her stepson in a shattering quarter of an hour's dramatic cantata. Euripides' Hippolytus takes about 90 minutes in the playing. Director Kryzsztof Warlikowski's fantasia on the Phaedra myth is more... Read more... |
The Quiet House, Park TheatreSaturday, 11 June 2016
Infertility affects one in six couples, but it’s still something of a taboo subject. Gareth Farr’s new play throws welcome light on the challenges of conception, and is accompanied by a Fertility Fest that brings together artists and medical experts... Read more... |
Ross, Chichester Festival TheatreFriday, 10 June 2016
Thought Terence Rattigan was a playwright of the drawing room? Think again. A day after his defining work The Deep Blue Sea opened in an acclaimed revival at the National, Chichester Festival Theatre takes a lavish risk on this epic later work,... Read more... |
The Deep Blue Sea, National TheatreThursday, 09 June 2016
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.... Read more... |
Into the Woods, Opera North, West Yorkshire PlayhouseThursday, 09 June 2016
Opera North’s ongoing Ring isn’t taking up much of the chorus’s time, which presumably is one of the reasons that many of its members have decamped half a mile east to collaborate with the West Yorkshire Playhouse in an eye-popping new staging of... Read more... |
The Go-Between, Apollo TheatreWednesday, 08 June 2016
It has taken six years – and Michael Crawford – to bring Richard Taylor and David Wood’s poetic musicalisation of LP Hartley’s The Go-Between to the West End stage. And before the tired old debate begins as to what it is – opera? musical? play with... Read more... |
First Light: the story of the Tommies shot at dawnWednesday, 08 June 2016
Nothing quite prepares you for your first sight of Thiepval, the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. I had read about the events it commemorated and, before that, been told about them as a young boy. I’d studied the war poets at school and as a... Read more... |
The 306: Dawn, Dalcrue Farm, PerthMonday, 06 June 2016
The journey begins amid the glassy modernity of Perth’s gleaming Concert Hall. From there, you’re bussed a few miles out into the Perthshire countryside to a blasted, burnt-out farmhouse. And its neighbouring barn, transformed into a forest of... Read more... |
Dream On: Surprises in the Athenian WoodSunday, 05 June 2016
Doctor Peter Raby (Emeritus Fellow at Cambridge University) was quick to pull me up on my first stab at A Midsummer Night's Dream – an indulgence-of-a-production played out in a university park to the sound of cucumber flirting with Pimm's. His... Read more... |
The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare's GlobeSaturday, 04 June 2016
There’s a problem with The Taming of the Shrew, and it isn’t the one of Shakespeare’s making. So legendary are the work’s difficulties, so notorious its potential misogyny, that each new production can feel like a proffered solution, a defence of an... Read more... |
