National Theatre
10 Questions for Actress Phoebe FoxMonday, 06 February 2017
In London and New York, Phoebe Fox (b. 1987) is known to theatregoers as Catherine, the niece over whom Mark Strong's Eddie Carbone went pazzo. Their physical intimacy, in Ivo van Hove’s sizzling Young Vic production of A View from the Bridge, made... Read more... |
Us/Them, National TheatreTuesday, 24 January 2017
Unimaginable tragedy is given poignant, piquant form in Us/Them. The hour-long performance piece from Belgian theatre company BRONKS has arrived at the National after a much-acclaimed Edinburgh Festival premiere last year. In its intricate weave of... Read more... |
Love, National TheatreWednesday, 14 December 2016
For a play that ends with 15 minutes of breath-stopping, jaw-dropping theatre that is surely as powerful as anything the departing year has brought us, Alexander Zeldin’s Love has a challenging relationship to the concept of drama itself. For the... Read more... |
Hedda Gabler, National TheatreTuesday, 13 December 2016
Theatre conventions are a funny thing. Today, it’s actually quite difficult to see a modern classic dressed in the clothes and performed on the set of its specific historical period. It has to be in contemporary dress. And in a contemporary setting... Read more... |
Peter Pan, National TheatreMonday, 05 December 2016
The cry "Let's pretend" must have been heard often when J M Barrie played with the Llewelyn Davies boys in Kensington Gardens or at Black Lake Cottage in Surrey. The five sons of Arthur and Sylvia, orphaned as children and adopted by Barrie, almost... Read more... |
This House, Garrick TheatreSaturday, 03 December 2016
This House arrives in the West End with magic timing - a comedy about the farcical horrors of being a government with a wafer-thin majority, frantically wheeling out dying, suicidal and breastfeeding MPs to vote, horsetrading with "odds and sods" to... Read more... |
10 Questions for Playwright James GrahamTuesday, 29 November 2016
Coalitions make for drama, and for comedy. We know that from, respectively, Borgen and the final series of The Thick of It. It is little wonder therefore that soon after the 2010 election delivered a hung Parliament, the National Theatre... Read more... |
Amadeus, National TheatreFriday, 28 October 2016
Populist playwright Peter Shaffer, who died in June, gets a rapid honour from this flagship venue, which – aptly enough – is putting on his most popular play. So popular in fact that it has already sold out and is therefore critic-proof. Directed by... Read more... |
A Pacifist's Guide to the War on Cancer, National TheatreFriday, 21 October 2016
Some have responded to the very notion of a musical about cancer as if the idea itself were breaking some unwritten code of what is permissible to put on stage – which seems a bit rich given that the same genre has accommodated pieces about AIDS (... Read more... |
The Red Barn, National TheatreTuesday, 18 October 2016
At first, I was a bit confused by the play’s title. After all, David Hare gave his 1998 adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde the moniker of The Blue Room, which coincidentally is the same title as Mathieu Amalric’s very recent adaptation of a... Read more... |
Young Chekhov, National TheatreThursday, 04 August 2016
"Yes, from life," Nikolai Ivanov (Geoffrey Streatfeild) says in passing of a painting midway through the early Chekhov play that bears his name. But the phrase could serve as the abiding achievement of the largely thrilling triptych of plays that... Read more... |
The Deep Blue Sea, National TheatreThursday, 09 June 2016
From being the Aunt Sally of contemporary British theatre, attacked by the angry young men in the 1950s and the new wave of social and political realists for three decades after that, playwright Terence Rattigan is now well and truly rehabilitated.... Read more... |
