Theatre Reviews
The Stripper, St James TheatreTuesday, 12 July 2016
Womanising detectives, shapely dames, gangsters and convoluted criminal conspiracies: Richard O’Brien and Richard Hartley’s 1982 musical take on Carter Brown’s California-set whodunit fiction is pulp noir to the max. However, unlike the pair’s previous collaboration, the indelible Rocky Horror Show, this is more homage than send-up – arch but fairly straightforward storytelling in place of riotous, risqué pastiche. Read more... |
Bugsy Malone, Lyric HammersmithThursday, 30 June 2016
For those in sore need of a theatrical pick-me-up, jazz square your way over to Bugsy Malone. Last year’s smash-hit opener of the redeveloped Lyric has been given a well-deserved encore, with Sean Holmes’s production once again nailing the beguiling blend of Alan Parker’s 1976 film: children performing musical mobster pastiche, smartly knowing in their deconstruction of adult absurdities, but sidestepping cloying precocity. Read more... |
Faith Healer, Donmar WarehouseWednesday, 29 June 2016
Oh dear. I could have sworn I had a book about Irish playwright Brian Friel somewhere. But I can’t find it. Or maybe I never bought it. Maybe I just thought I might have bought it. Maybe it’s a false memory. Better ask my wife. Now at least I’m in the zone, that place called ambiguity that is, aptly enough, one of the characteristics of Friel’s 1979 play, Faith Healer, which is being revived with a starry cast at this boutique venue. Read more... |
As You Like It, The Savill Garden, WindsorMonday, 27 June 2016
How often are you charmed by one of Shakespeare’s sylvan romances while literally under a greenwood tree? Even if this summer is proving rather generous with the rough weather, it is an unusual pleasure to wander around a fine woodland garden while Rosalind and Orlando pursue their light-hearted crossdressing courtship in the forest of Arden, and white sheets inked with bad love poems flutter from the trunks of many oak trees. Read more... |
Macbeth, Shakespeare's GlobeSaturday, 25 June 2016
It begins promisingly, a dark Gothic fairy tale – both Grimm and grim. The writhing witches (four, oddly) are summoned from a pile of dead bodies, Stefan Fichert’s eerie puppetry all chopped-up limbs and interchanging demonic heads, hands scuttling across the floor like a spider, and disembodied voices chanting and haunting. Then the spell is broken and “what seem’d corporal melted”. Read more... |
Henry V, Regent's Park Open Air TheatreThursday, 23 June 2016
As we finally go to the polls, casting votes based on our view of national identity and Britain’s place in the world, here comes Shakespeare’s ever-topical play. Robert Hastie’s thoughtful take is contemporary dress but stripped back, not so much holding up a mirror as inviting us to project modern concerns onto it. Read more... |
Maggie and Pierre, Finborough TheatreThursday, 23 June 2016
There's a one-man play inside every politician – and a one-woman play behind each male leader. Linda Griffiths's and Paul Thompson's solo show, Maggie and Pierre, explores Maggie Trudeau's struggle with bipolar disorder and her temptestuous relationship with Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (father of current PM Justin Trudeau). Written in 1979 but only now receiving its European premiere, this is an ambitious attempt to explore the personal fissures that politics creates. Read more... |
Vassa Zheleznova, Southwark PlayhouseWednesday, 22 June 2016
In the town of Nizhny Novgorod where Maxim Gorky was born, it was said that “the houses are made of stone, the people of iron”. Vassa Zheleznova, the titular matriarch of this rarely performed play, is one such person. She is a businesswoman of steely will and juggernaut energy whose tragedy is to see her family destroyed by the same bourgeois values that she has fought so fiercely to preserve. Read more... |
Wild, Hampstead TheatreTuesday, 21 June 2016
Who do you trust? The EU Referendum campaign has exposed a mounting suspicion of the establishment, from financial institutions to press and politicians, and our sense of nationhood has never been murkier. But if we cease to believe in anything, how does that affect our sense of self? Read more... |
Hobson's Choice, Vaudeville TheatreSunday, 19 June 2016
Harold Brighouse's time-honoured English comedy from a century ago survives, its virtues mostly intact especially once attention shifts away from the snarling patriarch of the title, Henry Horatio Hobson (a padded Martin Shaw), to the generation of women beneath him – his peppery, politically and socially progressive eldest daughter, Maggie (Naomi Frederick), chief among them. Read more... |
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★★★★★
‘A compulsive, involving, emotionally stirring evening – theatre’s answer to a page-turner.’
The Observer, Kate Kellaway
Direct from a sold-out season at Kiln Theatre the five star, hit play, The Son, is now playing at the Duke of York’s Theatre for a strictly limited season.
★★★★★
‘This final part of Florian Zeller’s trilogy is the most powerful of all.’
The Times, Ann Treneman
Written by the internationally acclaimed Florian Zeller (The Father, The Mother), lauded by The Guardian as ‘the most exciting playwright of our time’, The Son is directed by the award-winning Michael Longhurst.
Book by 30 September and get tickets from £15*
with no booking fee.
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