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Thursday 14 March 2024

Theatre review: King Lear (Almeida)

Given that it doesn't look like Yaël Farber’s going anywhere anytime soon, I feel like Rupert Goold's Almeida has really found the right match for the highly ritualistic South African director, by sticking to those Shakespeare plays where an apparent complete absence of a sense of humour isn't a major obstacle. So after her Macbeth we now get a nearly four-hour long King Lear that despite being a particularly nihilistic take on the play is easily the best work I've ever seen Farber do. Regular readers of this blog may both decide for themselves how much of a compliment that actually is - but I'd say it's also one of the better Lears I've seen in general. We begin at a live TV broadcast by the Royal Family where the succession is to be formally announced. Lear (Danny Sapani) asks his three daughters how much they love him, and the eldest two go along with the ritual, singing his praises.

Tuesday 12 March 2024

Theatre review: The Lonely Londoners

Roy Williams' The Lonely Londoners is the first stage adaptation of Sam Selvon's classic novel of the Windrush generation, and he makes a concise, intense evening out of its sweeping journey through the lives of six people who've arrived in London from Trinidad in the 1950s. At the centre of the group is Moses (Gamba Cole,) one of a trio of early arrivals who've developed a healthy cynicism after years of struggling to find and keep work, and experiencing casual and not-so-casual racism in a mother country they'd been told was desperately in need of their help. To his irritation, Moses has found himself in the position of fixer for the community, someone newcomers have heard about and go to for help. He tries to prepare wide-eyed newcomers for the reality of life as a black Londoner, and they don't come much more wide-eyed and optimistic than Galahad (Romario Simpson.)

Saturday 9 March 2024

Theatre review: Uncle Vanya

Mere months since Chekhov's Vanya last graced a London stage he's back, although this time he's brought the rest of the cast with him too. With Trevor Nunn both adapting and directing this version of Uncle Vanya it's not particularly surprising if it's a bit more traditional - Simon Daw's designs definitely take us to late 19th century rural Russia, and you bet there's a samovar in pride of place centre stage. But Nunn isn't just ticking another classic off his list or indulging in a bout of nostalgia, as the Orange Tree production has elements that give it its own personality. Not least of all in tone: One of Chekhov's bleaker plays, it wasn't even questionably billed as a comedy like many of them, but the blurb here calls it a tragicomedy, and that's something it pulls off. The setting is the country estate that once belonged to Vanya's sister, purchased as a dowry for when she married a St Petersburg academic.

Tuesday 5 March 2024

Theatre review: Nachtland

Despite an incredibly irritating social media publicity campaign (who were those messages raving about the show months before it opened even meant to be from, anyway?) I've been looking forward to the Young Vic's Nachtland: Marius von Mayenburg's dark satire (translated here by Maja Zade) has a viciously clever premise, and Patrick Marber's production has a great cast. The resulting evening is an entertaining one, but a frustrating one as well. The audience enter to Anna Fleischle’s set absolutely covered in dusty old props, which the cast clear away before the action starts: Siblings Nicola (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) and Philipp (John Heffernan) are clearing out the house of their recently-deceased father, bickering about who looked after him when he was alive and whose story it is to tell even as they narrate it to the audience.

Monday 4 March 2024

Theatre review: The Human Body

Plays can take a while to go through development and writing and get to production, often ending up with similar ideas making it to the stage at the same time. I wonder if it was the sound of people banging pots and pans every Thursday night four years ago that now gives us a batch of plays about the founding of the National Health Service? I didn't have any particular preconceptions about how Lucy Kirkwood would take on the subject, but it certainly wouldn’t have been something quite as camp as the Donald and Margot Warehouse's The Human Body turns out to be, filtering the birth of the NHS through Brief Encounter. It's 1948 and Dr Iris Elcock (Keeley Hawes) juggles being a GP with being a local Councillor, prospective MP in an upcoming by-election, and right hand woman to a Labour MP (Siobhán Redmond.) She's also a wife and mother, although despite her reassurances to the press that she's also the perfect housewife this is a role she's less of a natural in.

Friday 1 March 2024

Theatre review: Shifters

Benedict Lombe's Shifters is one of those two-handers that follows a couple who seem perfect for each other but may or may not figure it out by the end of the show. And while it doesn't actually take place across the multiverse, there's musing about the choices we make and the different paths they could have led to, which makes it yet another show to give me flashbacks to Constellations, surely one of the most influential shows on British theatre so far this century. (I'm not knocking it, it's better than when it looked a couple of years ago like every young theatremaker was going to fill the stage with solemn, slo-mo Yaël Farber processions.) Part of Lombe's twist on the formula is that instead of starting as a rom-com and building to tragedy, Shifters' leads have tragedy built into their stories early on. Dre(am) (Tosin Cole) first notices Des(tiny)* (Heather Agyepong) as the only other black kid in his new school in Crewe.

Thursday 29 February 2024

Theatre review: Out of Season

Back to Hampstead and this week I'm Downstairs for its latest commission, Neil D'Souza's Out of Season and a midlife crisis comedy that gently takes in some themes you don't often see on stage. Thirty years ago, a trio of university friends went on a memorable holiday to Ibiza. Now, to celebrate his 50th birthday, Chris (Peter Bramhill) has asked that they recreate the trip - right down to the same room in the same hotel. Regardless of how many times he and Dev (D'Souza) say it's been done up since they were last there, the grubby walls and fading paint of Janet Bird's set suggest both the fact that they might have unrealistically romanticised their original holiday, and that they, like the room, have seen better days. Once in a band that came within sight of success only to miss their chance, manchild Chris still plays gigs in pubs, while Dev has become an academic and music historian, grumpily putting himself through a week he didn't really fancy for his old friend's sake.

Tuesday 27 February 2024

Theatre review: Cable Street

The 1936 Battle of Cable Street in East London is known as the biggest anti-fascist protest on British soil. It's a piece of English history that can still be looked back on with pride at a time when most re-examinations of the past don't see it hold up too well, so it remains a popular subject. It also marks a significant moment of unity between the Jewish and Irish communities that until then might not have necessarily been on the same side, so there are bound to be many people in both those modern-day communities who have personal family stories about it. Which is all to say that when Southwark Playhouse put Tim Gilvin (music & lyrics) and Alex Kanefsky's (book) musical premiere Cable Street on sale it sold out the entire run before it had even opened, an impressive enough feat at the moment for an Off West End show with no star casting.

Monday 26 February 2024

Theatre review: Dear Octopus

An obscure rediscovery seems to have been a hit at the Lyttelton as Emily Burns directs Dodie Smith's Dear Octopus, a sprawling family drama set over the weekend of Dora (Lindsay Duncan) and Charles Randolph's (Malcolm Sinclair) golden anniversary. The sort of family who describe themselves as ordinary because they don't have a coat of arms, they assemble at the large country house built by Charles' grandfather. Over the weekend we see four generations of the family who've been raised in this house - three of them by the same nanny. Of the couple's six children four survive - the eldest son died in the First World War, while one daughter died of undisclosed causes. The others juggle various successes and neuroses: Margery (Amy Morgan) is trying to control her warring children, Hilda (Jo Herbert) manages to balance a successful job as an estate agent with her OCD, and Cynthia (Bethan Cullinane) works for a Paris fashion house, although rumour has it she's been in France for so long because she's concealing a scandal in her personal life.

Saturday 24 February 2024

Theatre review: Just For One Day

I've got to say I found the idea of Just For One Day a bit baffling, and having now seen John O'Farrell's jukebox musical setting the story behind the scenes of Live Aid to songs from the setlist, I still feel a bit vague about what exactly's going on at the Old Vic at the moment. I want to say the framing device is a young woman in the present day, Jemma (Naomi Katiyo) wanting to know more about the event for, I guess, a history project, but the use of multiple narrators muddles this. She gets help from Suzanne (Retired Lesbian Jackie Clune,) who was at Wembley for the concert, as well as Bob Geldof (Craige Els) himself, who for some reason is available to give the inside scoop. So in 1984 Bob sees a news report about a famine in Ethiopia and is horrified - by the suffering, the general indifference and lack of aid from wealthier nations, and from the fact that while he knows others will be upset by the story as well, it'll soon be forgotten by most people when the news cycle moves on.

Thursday 22 February 2024

Theatre review: Double Feature

John Logan has written two major West End plays (plus wrangled the general madness of Moulin Rouge,) so a third is to be approached with a mix of excitement and trepidation, as I loved one of his previous plays and hated the other. Fortunately while his latest premiere isn't the instant classic that Red was, it also never threatens anything like the tedium of Peter and Alice. Logan is best-known as a screenwriter, and it's in the movies where he's found his inspiration for Double Feature. Particularly in the spiky relationships between actors and directors, as he gives us two pairings behind the scenes of famous movies: Anthony Ward's set is a dimly-lit Suffolk cottage, an authentically old building in the countryside that a studio has given young director Michael Reeves (Rowan Polonski) to stay in while he shoots the grisly 1967 horror movie Witchfinder General.

Wednesday 21 February 2024

Theatre review: An Enemy of the People

Trigger Warning: This review contains references to an actor who doesn't really seem to understand what trigger warnings are for.

Paul Hilton has catapulted himself across the river and straight from one Ibsen play into another, as the corrupt mayor in Thomas Ostermeier, Florian Borchmeyer and Duncan Macmillan's adaptation of the overtly political An Enemy of the People. Matt Smith is the star turn in Ostermeier's production, playing Thomas Stockmann, the (medical) doctor who works at a spa known for its borderline miraculous water, and which is at the heart of a small town's economy. But an industrial complex that was built a few years earlier has been polluting the waters, and Thomas has just completed a study proving as much. He informs his brother Peter (Hilton,) the town's mayor, but doesn't get the enthusiastic spring into action he's rather naïvely expecting: Closing the springs to make repairs wouldn't make the shareholders too happy.

Monday 19 February 2024

Theatre review: The Frogs

I've seen two previous shows from Spymonkey, the veteran physical comedy troupe who tend to be a lot more hit than miss. Even if I wasn't seeing it on a quiet Monday night their latest show would come across as a little less full-on than the others though, as it comes with an added element of melancholy as the established quartet is now a duo: Petra Massey has left the company and Stephan Kreiss died suddenly in 2021, so there's an added significance to the remaining pair of Toby Park and Aitor Basauri tackling Aristophanes' The Frogs, itself written in reaction to the death of a beloved theatrical figure. That figure is Euripides, the Greek tragedian who'd died a year before Aristophanes premiered this parody of a heroic quest. With him gone Dionysus, Olympian god of drama (Park) thinks theatre is doomed, and decides to get him back.

Saturday 17 February 2024

Theatre review: A Midsummer Night's Dream
(RSC/RST)

When a theatre decides when to schedule A Midsummer Night's Dream they tend to do so with a fairly literal approach to the title; if it shows up out of season that usually means we're in for one of the "darker and edgier" takes that honestly believes it's the first production ever to notice the line "I wooed thee with my sword" and proceeds to apply it to every scene, Joe. So it's refreshing to see Eleanor Rhode's new RSC production - the last Shakespeare of Erica Whyman's interregnum period - open in a very different way: The lines about winning love with injury are still there, but their context feels a lot less personal. The Duke of Athens and Queen of the Amazons' wedding is definitely an arranged one made as part of a peace treaty, but both of them are pawns in this situation, and Bally Gill's sweetly awkward Theseus is clearly intimidated by Sirine Saba's businesslike Hippolyta.

Thursday 15 February 2024

Theatre review: Plaza Suite

Back at the theatre after another unscheduled, Covid-related break of a couple of weeks, and it's to one of the year's first London visits from big US names: Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick are the real-life couple playing three different pairs in Neil Simon's Plaza Suite. Wonder if they'll explore the country while they're here? Probably best to steer clear of Liverpool, that's Cattrall country. And hopefully he won't be driving. Anyway, John Benjamin Hickey directs Simon's portmanteau of stories taking place at the end of the 1960s in the same suite of New York's Plaza Hotel overlooking Central Park. For the first couple it's a significant location - if Parker's Karen has got the right room, that is: She and her husband Sam are staying there for the night while their house gets redecorated, but she's decided to surprise him for their anniversary by booking the same suite they stayed in on honeymoon.

Thursday 1 February 2024

Theatre review: Othello (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

Interesting times to be visiting the Globe, the venue that can do everything except draft a press release that doesn't dig them into a deeper hole. Ola Ince is looking like one of those directors who can reinvent a Shakespeare play to fit a very specific modern-day issue, and actually follow through with the idea. After her 2021 Romeo & Juliet was filtered through the way Tory cuts would have caused every beat of the story, her Othello in the Swanamaker becomes about racism in the Metropolitan Police, and some of the language is modified to match this setting: Othello is no longer referred to as the General but the Guvnor, Desdemona is usually called Desi, one of the story's inciting incidents now involves Othello choosing an Eton old boy as his new Inspector rather than a more experienced cop, and instead of a military action from Venice to Cyprus, the characters from Scotland Yard are going on an undercover cartel bust in Docklands.

Tuesday 30 January 2024

Theatre review: Cruel Intentions: The '90s Musical

My third show in a row to make liberal use of bisexual lighting, Roger Kumble, Lindsey Rosin and Jordan Ross' Cruel Intentions: The '90s Musical is based on Kumble's 1999 film, which is based on Stephen Frears' 1988 film Dangerous Liaisons, which is based on Christopher Hampton's 1985 play Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which is based on Pierre Choderlos de Laclos' 1782 novel. But yeah, as the subtitle says, we're very much sticking with the 90s teens here, and the version that famously starred Sarah Michelle Gellar, Reese Witherspoon, and Ryan Phillippe's arse. Set in a New York private high school for the rich, bored and terminally horny, Sebastian Valmont (Daniel Bravo, whose parents Johnny and Juliet must be very proud,) is the resident fuckboi whose bad reputation precedes him. His step-sister Kathryn Merteuil (Rhianne-Louise McCaulsky) is the class president and golden girl.

Monday 29 January 2024

Theatre review: Cowbois

Considering that attempting a trip to Stratford-upon-Avon amid rolling rail strikes is a bit of a coin-toss, I decided not to book for the RSC's Cowbois last year, fairly confident that we'd get a chance to see it transfer to London. Given the creative team I would have guessed the Globe, but instead the Royal Court gets Charlie Josephine's queer fantasy Western. Co-directed by Josephine and Sean Holmes, whose signature style of letting the actors use their own accents even in plays where you'd expect a very specific one means the Wild West is populated with voices from every corner of the UK and Ireland, the action takes place in a little town built on principles of acceptance and equality. Whether that's how it actually plays out when the men are around is a different story, but right now they're not: Most of the men left over a year ago to go prospecting for gold, and with no word from them and news of a cave-in, they're presumed dead.

Saturday 27 January 2024

Theatre review: Northanger Abbey

It's no great insight to say people in this country, and probably most of the world, love Jane Austen's stories in the original novels and the many stage and screen adaptations, but maybe we love metatextual Austen just as much: We've had Lost In Austen, The Watsons, and now Zoe Cooper's queered-up interpretation of the beloved author's swipe at the lurid gothic novels that were all the rage in her day: Northanger Abbey isn't the most famous of the books - it was one I never got round to reading, and I don't think I've even seen an adaptation before, given how unfamiliar the story was to me. Then again I'm sure some of the places Cooper takes her heroine would have been unfamiliar to the 18th century author herself, if not outright sent her straight to her fainting couch. Stripped down to a three-person show, Cooper puts Catherine Morland, aka Cath (Rebecca Banatvala) in charge of telling us her own story.