Theatre
An Ideal Husband, Vaudeville Theatre review - unsettled evening leaves blood on Wilde's drawing-room furnitureFriday, 04 May 2018
Across London last night politicians waited anxiously to hear their fates, and things were no different at the Vaudeville Theatre, where the ongoing Oscar Wilde season took a topical turn with An Ideal Husband.Colliding drawing-room comedy and... Read more... |
Picks of Brighton Festival 2018 by writer-director Neil BartlettThursday, 03 May 2018
Director, playwright and novelist Neil Bartlett has been making theatre and causing trouble since the 1980s. He made his name with a series of controversial stark naked performances staged in clubs and warehouses, then went on to... Read more... |
Mood Music, Old Vic review - riveting critique of the music bizThursday, 03 May 2018
Playwright Joe Penhall and the music biz? Well, they have history. When he was writing the book for Sunny Afternoon, his 2014 hit musical about the Kinks, he had a few run-ins with Ray Davies, the band’s lead singer. A couple of years ago The Stage... Read more... |
Chess, London Coliseum review - powerfully sung but still problematicWednesday, 02 May 2018
Its origins as a concept album cling stubbornly to Chess, the Tim Rice collaboration with the male members of ABBA first seen on the West End in 1986 and extensively retooled since then in an ongoing quest to hit the elusive jackpot. Following hot... Read more... |
Nine Night, National Theatre review - Jamaican family drama full of spiritTuesday, 01 May 2018
The good news about so-called black drama on British stages is that it has broken out of its gangland violence ghetto and now talks about a whole variety of other subjects. Like loss. Like death. Like mourning. So London-born actress Natasha Gordon’... Read more... |
The Writer, Almeida Theatre review - deconstruction run rampantTuesday, 01 May 2018
Forget write what you know: writing what you feel would seem to be the impetus driving Ella Hickson's often-startling The Writer, a broadside from the trenches that takes no prisoners, least of all the audience. Demanding and sometimes irritating,... Read more... |
10 Questions for Sharon Smith of Arts Collective Gob SquadThursday, 26 April 2018
Gob Squad is a “seven-headed” Anglo-German arts collective who specialise in multimedia performance. Beginning in Nottingham in 1994 and now based in Berlin, their work ranges from site-specific to installation and film but, more recently, mainly... Read more... |
Absolute Hell, National Theatre review - high gloss show saves over-rated classicThursday, 26 April 2018
Rodney Ackland must be the most well-known forgotten man in postwar British theatre. His legend goes like this: Absolute Hell was originally titled The Pink Room, and first staged in 1952 at the Lyric Hammersmith, where it got a critical mauling.... Read more... |
The Prudes, Royal Court review - hilarious but frustrating sex showWednesday, 25 April 2018
Playwright Anthony Neilson has always been fascinated by sex. I mean, who isn’t? But he has made it a central part of his career. In his bad-boy in-yer-face phase, from the early 1990s to about the mid-2000s, he pioneered a type of theatre that... Read more... |
Strictly Ballroom: The Musical, Piccadilly Theatre review - largely naffWednesday, 25 April 2018
A much tinkered-with show needs to go back to the drawing board, if this latest iteration of Strictly Ballroom: The Musical is any gauge. Having travelled across Sydney, Leeds, and Toronto on its extensively revised way to the West End, director-... Read more... |
Kathleen Turner: Finding My Voice, The Other Palace review - a familiar name in freshly exciting formWednesday, 25 April 2018
A one-time Martha and Maggie the Cat in the theatre, and a screen siren of the sort they don't make any more, might not be the first person you expect to see swaggering on to a London stage in a dark pantsuit ready to offer up two hours of song and... Read more... |
Rasheeda Speaking, Trafalgar Studios review - unsettling comedy, thorny racismSaturday, 21 April 2018
Conflict and comedy can be unpredictable bedfellows, and Chicago playwright Joel Drake Johnson’s 2014 play occasionally risks overstretching itself in its attempts to reconcile the two – although its immediate context, the world of office politics,... Read more... |
