Young Vic
The Way Back Home, ENO, Young VicFriday, 12 December 2014![]() A Martian, a Spitfire and a flatulent penguin are the unlikely ingredients for The Way Back Home, English National Opera’s first foray into the colourful world of children’s opera. And if those don’t sound like enticement enough, be reassured, at... Read more... |
The Cherry Orchard, Young VicFriday, 17 October 2014![]() Ghosts are walking at the Young Vic. Katie Mitchell’s stark, startling production of Chekhov’s final lament is not just an evocation of a lost era, but a summoning of the spirits haunting Vicki Mortimer’s chilling sepulchral mansion. This is a... Read more... |
10 Questions for Playwright Simon StephensThursday, 16 October 2014![]() Fresh from global domination with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, currently garnering rapturous reviews on Broadway, inexhaustible playwright and adaptor Simon Stephens has swapped Mark Haddon for Anton Chekhov and a new... Read more... |
A Streetcar Named Desire, Young VicTuesday, 29 July 2014![]() The latest production of Tennessee Williams’s sultry, brutal yet poetic masterpiece is mainstream theatre that dares to go out on a limb. Directed by Benedict Andrews, it may occasionally miss a beat, but its risk-taking comes with an innate sense... Read more... |
The Valley of Astonishment, Young VicTuesday, 24 June 2014![]() “If we go to the theatre, it’s because we want to be surprised, even amazed.” Peter Brook’s programme note for The Valley of Astonishment stresses emotion and sensation above all things. How curious then that the play itself should be so cold, so... Read more... |
A View From the Bridge, Young VicFriday, 18 April 2014![]() What is it with the London theatre and this particular Arthur Miller play? In 1987, Michael Gambon reached a career-best peak playing the Italian-American longshoreman, Eddie Carbone, in a defining National Theatre revival of A View From the Bridge... Read more... |
Oh My Sweet Land, Young Vic TheatreThursday, 17 April 2014![]() Written and directed by the ever-varied Amir Nizar Zuabi, Oh My Sweet Land tells the story of a German-Syrian woman living in Paris and struggling with her connection to the raging civil war abroad. Zuabi, the Palestinian theatre-maker who gave us... Read more... |
Beauty and the Beast, Young VicTuesday, 10 December 2013![]() "My mum was given this new wonder-drug for morning sickness when she was pregnant with me," explains Mat Fraser at the start of Beauty and the Beast. "It was called Thalidomide. That's why I was born with arms like this."This is the simple,... Read more... |
The Scottsboro Boys, Young VicMonday, 28 October 2013![]() Forever breaking into song and dance, musicals are fun, fun, fun. They are primarily what folks go to for uplifting entertainment, are they not? Actually, many of the best aren't anything like that simplistic. Opening at the Young Vic last night,... Read more... |
American Lulu, Young VicThursday, 19 September 2013![]() We all know the drill: Wedekind’s Lulu is a page men have written on through the centuries, the canvas on which they have painted their desires, the feminine void they have filled. The patriarchy have appropriated her, and the perverts, and now it’s... Read more... |
A Season in the Congo, Young VicWednesday, 17 July 2013![]() No theatre in London, surely, has offered us more miracles of transformed space than the Young Vic. Small it may be, but its productions often feel big in every way, and none more so than Joe Wright’s total-theatre take on Aimé Césaire’s A Season in... Read more... |
Trash Cuisine, Young Vic TheatreThursday, 06 June 2013![]() There was a sense of nervous anticipation in the Maria, the Young Vic's studio space. Ninety minutes of torture was on the menu, and I'll admit to feeling some trepidation. But this show - and "show" is the right word - turns out to be a revelation... Read more... |
