Theatre
Peter Pan Goes Wrong, Apollo TheatreMonday, 14 December 2015
The pleasures to be found in the pitfalls that are part of live performance rear their accident-prone head yet again in Peter Pan Goes Wrong, the latest exercise in controlled (or is it?) chaos from Mischief Theatre, the young and clearly very... Read more... |
Tracks of the Winter Bear, Traverse Theatre, EdinburghSaturday, 12 December 2015
The first surprise in the Traverse Theatre’s seasonal production comes on entering the theatre – being led backstage, then onto what’s normally the performing area, and finally to two ranks of audience seating either side of a gently undulating... Read more... |
wonder.land, National TheatreFriday, 11 December 2015
Widely hyped as “an Alice for the online generation”, and “a coming-of-age adventure that explores the blurred boundaries between our online and offline lives”, this version of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland stories is advertised with a poster that... Read more... |
Hapgood, Hampstead TheatreThursday, 10 December 2015
A supposed Stoppardian footnote gets a first-class reclamation in Howard Davies's sizzling revival of Hapgood, the espionage-themed drama from 1988 that resonates intellectually and emotionally to a degree it didn't begin to achieve at a West... Read more... |
A Christmas Carol, Noël Coward TheatreThursday, 10 December 2015
Is Jim Broadbent Britain’s best-loved actor? The slate of screen roles he’s accumulated over the years – this Christmas Carol is his return to theatre after a decade away – has surely given him a very special quality in the nation's consciousness, a... Read more... |
You for Me for You, Royal Court TheatreWednesday, 09 December 2015
North Korea is the kind of place that haunts the imagination of the West – and not in a good way. One of the last hardline Communist dictatorships, it is also a country of immense sadness, a landscape of food shortages and human-rights abuses. Yet... Read more... |
Cymbeline, Sam Wanamaker PlayhouseWednesday, 09 December 2015
There’s a happy, cyclical logic to this first production of Cymbeline – Shakespeare’s late tragicomedy of love and jealousy – at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. The first play Shakespeare wrote for the candle-lit, indoor Blackfriars Playhouse,... Read more... |
Hangmen, Wyndham's TheatreTuesday, 08 December 2015
Just what constitutes reasonable behaviour in an enlightened society? Not long ago, the death penalty fell under that umbrella in Britain, and state-sanctioned killing as punishment for the crime of, well, killing is just the kind of twisted irony... Read more... |
Macbeth, Young VicFriday, 04 December 2015
Events have overtaken this Macbeth, dramatically heightening its queasy topicality. Not just brutal beheadings and torture, but the cost and collateral damage of conflict without end, and the scourge of a tyrant slaughtering his own people, strike... Read more... |
Around the World in 80 Days, St James TheatreFriday, 04 December 2015
One of the joys about this stage adaptation of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days is the contrast between its phlegmatic hero Phileas Fogg, who deals with everything in terms of precision and logic, and the picaresque confusion of his journey... Read more... |
Funny Girl, Menier Chocolate FactoryThursday, 03 December 2015
It's hard not to invoke the B word - Barbra, that is, not Brice - and I speak as one who bunked off school to catch her at a midweek matinee when Funny Girl first played London almost 50 years ago. It was standing room only at the Prince of Wales... Read more... |
Howard Barker Double Bill, Arcola TheatreWednesday, 02 December 2015
Two plays for the price of one. What’s not to like? Particularly when they resonate so strongly with each other on a hard, uncompromising theme. Broadly, that theme is love and war, sex and death, but more specifically, both plays home in on the... Read more... |
