Theatre Reviews
The Tempest, Sam Wanamaker PlayhouseSaturday, 27 February 2016
A prevailing sense of farewell ripples through this closing production in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse's hugely welcome season of Shakespeare's final quartet of plays. That valedictory feel is traditionally true of The Tempest, a text commonly regarded as Shakespeare's own leave-taking and one that here also marks the final staging after a decade at the helm of the venue's sure-to-be-missed artistic director Dominic Dromgoole, who now hands over the reins to Emma Rice. Read more... |
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Lyric HammersmithSaturday, 27 February 2016
Shakespeare’s plays have proved remarkably resilient to everything that’s been thrown at them down the years, including – in the case of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its flowery bowers and fairies – cloying Victorian whimsy. Peter Brook’s white box production in 1970 effectively Tippexed out that option for the late 20th century. In turn, this version by the touring company Filter has put down a marker for the 21st. Read more... |
The Patriotic Traitor, Park TheatreSaturday, 27 February 2016
Theatregoers suffering from First World War fatigue may want to pass on Jonathan Lynn’s merely competent historical drama about two mythic figures: Charles de Gaulle and Philippe Pétain. Read more... |
Hamlet, Tobacco Factory, BristolFriday, 26 February 2016
Alan Mahon’s Hamlet in Andrew Hilton’s production for Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory bristles with teen spirit and this is no bad thing. The Prince of Denmark, even before his father dies, is beset with the angst that goes with the territory of late adolescence. The production presents, on one level, a tragic coming of age drama, one in which the young heroes are consumed by madness and caught in the political and sexual machinations of their elders. Read more... |
Cleansed, National TheatreWednesday, 24 February 2016
Although everyone agrees that Sarah Kane was one of the most influential British playwrights of the 1990s, revivals of her work have been few and far between. Now, at last, some 17 years after her suicide at the age of 28 in 1999, our flagship National Theatre has finally decided to stage one of her best works (artistic director Rufus Norris, thank you). Read more... |
Cyrano de Bergerac, Southwark PlayhouseWednesday, 24 February 2016
Given that Edmond Rostand’s 1897 tragicomic verse play Cyrano de Bergerac gave the word "panache" to the English language, it’s an irony that panache is the quality most woefully lacking in Russell Bolam’s production of Glyn Maxwell’s adaptation. It ought not to be so. Read more... |
A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, Young VicFriday, 19 February 2016
Eimear McBride’s debut novel, the provocatively titled A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, won the first Goldsmiths Prize in 2013, as well as the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction a year later. This phenomenal book, which was written when McBride was 27 years old, but took nine years to find a publisher, has been adapted by Annie Ryan and is performed solo by Aoife Duffin with a compelling mix of bruised charm and sheer intensity. Read more... |
The Encounter, BarbicanWednesday, 17 February 2016
Actor and director Simon McBurney’s one-man Complicite show has arrived in London after gathering plaudits in Edinburgh and elsewhere last year – before setting off again on a nationwide and European tour. Read more... |
Mrs Henderson Presents, Noël Coward TheatreWednesday, 17 February 2016
War bad, theatre good. That’s about the level of insight available from this amiable show, transferring after a successful run in Bath. It’s one of the weaker entries in the ever-popular backstage genre, sharing Vaudevillian DNA with Gypsy and a Nazi backdrop with Cabaret, but lacking the profundity of either. Though our girls bare all to stick it to Hitler, the drama remains skin-deep. Read more... |
Hand to God, Vaudeville TheatreTuesday, 16 February 2016
There will be blood. And expletives. And puppet sex that makes Avenue Q look positively monastic. But perhaps most shocking of all is that beneath the eye-wateringly explicit surface of Robert Askins’ provocative farce, which began life Off-Off-Broadway in 2011, lies a sentiment that makes this one of the cuddlier shows on the West End. Albeit one that features a graphically detached ear lobe. 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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