Theatre Reviews
Splendour, Donmar WarehouseWednesday, 05 August 2015
On contemporary stages, absence is a constant presence. This is very odd if you consider how corporeal and concrete theatre is. Unlike film, which is just light shining on a screen, or books, which are just letters on the page, theatre is live performance that is irreducibly there in the same space as you are, breathing the same air. Yet many playwrights – led of course by Samuel Beckett, Caryl Churchill and Martin Crimp – have explored the notion of absence on stage. Read more... |
Dear Lupin, Apollo TheatreTuesday, 04 August 2015
A sterling case is made for the lost art of letter-writing in Michael Simkins’ dramatisation of Roger Mortimer’s missives to his wayward son. Mortimer’s inimitable turn of phrase, preserved in epistolary form, is the highlight of a genial show notable more for its casting of a real father and son than provision of gripping drama. It’s cosy as a pair of bedroom slippers, best enjoyed with a glass of Mortimer-approved sherry, but hasn’t entirely transitioned from one medium to another. Read more... |
Bakkhai, Almeida TheatreFriday, 31 July 2015
This is the real Greek, bloody-fantastical thing. After the fascinating but flawed attempt to bring Aeschylus’s Oresteia into the 21st century, the Almeida has turned to a more tradition-conscious kind of experiment with Euripides’ last and greatest masterpiece. Read more... |
Of Thee I Sing, RFHFriday, 31 July 2015
Satire may famously be what on Broadway closes Saturday night, but last night's concert performance of the Gershwin brothers' Of Thee I Sing found many patrons fleeing the Festival Hall at the interval. The culprit lay in sound issues that took the aural equivalent of a pneumatic drill to a featherweight piece that needs tender treatment if it is to flourish as the original did against the odds. Read more... |
Three Days in the Country, National TheatreWednesday, 29 July 2015
The trouble with the classics is that they are long, complex and difficult. But today’s sensibility favours the quick, simple and easy. So it is no surprise that the National Theatre have opened its doors to Patrick Marber, who has taken Ivan Turgenev’s 1850s play, A Month in the Country, and given it a makeover. After all, in its uncut original version it runs for four hours. Read more... |
Prom 11: Fiddler on the Roof, Grange Park OperaSunday, 26 July 2015
Stop miking Bryn Terfel. Stop over-miking musicals; the show voices in a hybrid cast don’t need much. Too much ruined English National Opera’s recent Sweeney Todd, and in this Proms adaptation of Grange Park Opera’s summer crowd-pleaser it sent the voices ricocheting around the Albert Hall, making mush of the words and stridency of the few belt-it-out moments. Read more... |
Richard II, Shakespeare's GlobeFriday, 24 July 2015
The earthy contact with groundlings that Shakespeare’s Globe offers in its stagings makes a comical but telling context for Richard II, a play largely about political point-scoring between kings. The people whose interests lie so remote, in reality, from the moral tussle between King Richard and his cousin who will wrest the crown from him and become Henry IV, are, in reality, everywhere underfoot. Read more... |
The Gathered Leaves, Park TheatreSaturday, 18 July 2015
Families. Whether it's the House of Atreus, the court at Elsinore or the Archers, they tend to be of compelling interest. For most of us, loyalties, guilty secrets, truths that will out, petty jealousies and sentimentality tend to be the order of the day more often than towering passion and murder. And that is what Andrew Keatley focuses on in this gentle, poignant, often funny play about a family reunion in the run-up to the "things can only get better" election in 1997. Read more... |
What's It All About?, Menier Chocolate FactoryFriday, 17 July 2015
Burt Bacharach, existentialist? That's among the surprising thoughts prompted by the searchingly titled What's It All About?, the altogether delightful but also touching musical revue that trawls Bacharach's back catalogue – and that on opening night found the 87-year-old tunesmith tinkling the ivories for a moment or two during the curtain call. Read more... |
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Garsington OperaFriday, 17 July 2015
We’re so used these days to theatre music as aural torture – blasts of pop music on the tannoy, assorted electronics or, if you’re (moderately) lucky, a snatch of too-loud Chopin or Grieg before the lights come up on the Ibsen drawing-room – that it’s easy to forget a time when plays were introduced, interrupted and even accompanied by a pit orchestra playing music specially composed by the greatest composers of the day. 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*
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