Theatre
Shakespeare: The Top 10 DeathsSaturday, 23 April 2016
Today marks 400 years since the death of William Shakespeare. To celebrate this and, indeed, put the two together, the Brighton Festival 2016 commissioned The Complete Deaths, a show based around the 74 deaths that take place onstage in the work of... Read more... |
Funny Girl, Savoy TheatreThursday, 21 April 2016
Vaudeville is having quite the West End moment, with Funny Girl inheriting the Savoy from Gypsy and Mrs Henderson Presents over at the Noël Coward. Gypsy is the pick of the bunch dramatically, delivering theatre history with real psychological heft... Read more... |
The Flick, National TheatreWednesday, 20 April 2016
A Pulitzer Prize and numerous walkouts: The Flick, infamously, courts extreme reactions. Yet this latest American import is dedicated to minutiae. In Annie Baker’s slow-burning (three hours-plus), microscopic epic, her lens is trained on ordinary... Read more... |
My Mother Said I Never Should, St James TheatreTuesday, 19 April 2016
Charlotte Keatley’s 1987 feminist classic is one of the most often performed plays by a woman writer. It is typical of its time in that this story of four generations of women in one family not only explores the theme of mothers and daughters, but... Read more... |
All's Well That Ends Well, Tobacco Factory, BristolMonday, 18 April 2016
Andrew Hilton’s new production of All’s Well That Ends Well makes the most of the complexities of a "problem play", neither comedy nor tragedy, and navigates this startling mix of emotional depth and light farce with great deftness. This is... Read more... |
The Sugar-Coated Bullets of the Bourgeoisie, Arcola TheatreSunday, 17 April 2016
The playwright Anders Lustgarten has spent a considerable chunk of his life reading and writing and thinking about China, and clearly wants to set a few points straight. Tired of the persistent Western view of that country and its people as... Read more... |
Another World: Losing Our Children to Islamic State, National TheatreSaturday, 16 April 2016
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... Read more... |
Guys and Dolls, Phoenix TheatreFriday, 15 April 2016
It’s all change once more for Gordon Greenberg’s slick, protean revival, which began life at Chichester back in 2014, as three new leads join the show’s transfer from the Savoy to the Phoenix. If not a revelatory version of this 1950 masterwork, it’... Read more... |
In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, Charing Cross TheatreThursday, 14 April 2016
Was Tennessee Williams breaking rules, or breaking apart when he wrote this 1969 play? A bit of both, probably, and the two main characters of the rarely performed In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel face the same choices.It emerged from what the writer... Read more... |
Boy, Almeida TheatreWednesday, 13 April 2016
Contemporary London life in all its forbidding, faceless swirl makes for a visually busy evening at Boy, the Leo Butler play that finally isn't as fully arresting as one keeps wanting it to be. An admirably kaleidoscopic view of the capital as... Read more... |
Arnold Wesker: His Life and Career in 10 ScenesWednesday, 13 April 2016
Of all the dramas with the name Arnold Wesker attached to them, the most absorbing ran as long as The Mousetrap, but offstage rather than on. It was in the style of a remorselessly black farce, in which the little man as hero suffers an endless... Read more... |
The Brink, Orange Tree TheatreTuesday, 12 April 2016
Generation Y are worriers. There’s certainly plenty to fuel that angst, from mounting debts, employment uncertainty and the ever-worsening housing crisis to international conflict and terrorism – as explored by a slew of recent articles (and the... Read more... |
