Theatre
42nd Street, Theatre Royal Drury Lane, review - 'sheer synchronised splendour'Wednesday, 05 April 2017
Can London support two dance musicals, each one dazzling in a different way? We're about to find out, now that the mother of all toe-tappers, 42nd Street, has set up shop a jeté or two away from where An American in Paris is achieving... Read more... |
The Lottery of Love, Orange Tree Theatre review - the fragile charm of artificeTuesday, 04 April 2017
The social permutations of love are beguilingly explored in the 90-minute stage traffic of Marivaux’s The Lottery of Love, with Paul Miller’s production at the Orange Tree Theatre making the most of the venue’s unencumbered in-the-round space to... Read more... |
There's more to Karen Blixen than Meryl StreepMonday, 03 April 2017
Karen Blixen (1885-1962), the prolific Danish storyteller, is perhaps most immediately recognised for the portrayal of her and her works on the big screen, above all by Meryl Streep in Out of Africa. But her own story, and her place in the literary... Read more... |
Don Juan in Soho, Wyndhams Theatre review - 'David Tennant is Marber-Molière playboy'Thursday, 30 March 2017
Updating the classics is not without its pitfalls. How can a modern audience, which has a completely different set of religious beliefs, relate to a 17th century morality tale in which the lead character behaves really badly, but gets his... Read more... |
The Wipers Times, Arts Theatre review - 'dark comedy from the trenches'Wednesday, 29 March 2017
You may be having a moment of déjà vu, as Ian Hislop and Nick Newman’s new play (which lands in the West End after a UK tour) was previously a BBC film (shown in 2013), and a very fine one too, covering as it does a true story from the First World... Read more... |
Anna Maxwell Martin: 'I like playing baddies' - interviewTuesday, 28 March 2017
She was Lyra in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials at the National, she has shared the stage with Eileen Atkins (in Honour and The Female of the Species), played Isabella in Measure for Measure, Regan in King Lear and Sally Bowles in Cabaret. She... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Writer David Storey, pt 1Monday, 27 March 2017
David Storey, who has died at the age of 83, was the last of the Angry Young Men who, in fiction and drama, made a hero of the working-class Northerner. His father spent his life down a Yorkshire pit, and out of guilt that he belonged to an educated... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Writer David Storey, pt 2Monday, 27 March 2017
In Radcliffe, an early novel by David Storey, one character murders another with a telling blow from a hammer. The author was later advised that Kenneth Halliwell was reading Radcliffe on the night in 1967 before he killed his lover Joe Orton, also... Read more... |
The Kid Stays in the Picture, Royal Court, review – ‘sad, bad and sprawling’Friday, 24 March 2017
The beauty of fiction is that its stories have both compelling shape and deep meaning – they are dramas where things feel right and true and real. The trouble with real life is that it’s the opposite: it is messy, frequently shapeless and often... Read more... |
An American in Paris review - 'stagecraft couldn't be slicker'Wednesday, 22 March 2017
What’s in a yellow dress? Hope over experience? Reckless confidence? This is a legitimate question when the second big cross-Atlantic people-pleaser hoves into view featuring a girl in a frock of striking daffodil hue. It doesn’t take a degree in... Read more... |
Love in Idleness, Menier Chocolate FactoryTuesday, 21 March 2017
What's in a name? Terence Rattigan’s Love in Idleness is a reworking of his 1944 play Less Than Kind (never staged at the time, it was first produced just six years ago). It reached the London stage at the very end of the same year with the Lunts,... Read more... |
Roman Tragedies, Toneelgroep Amsterdam, BarbicanSaturday, 18 March 2017
It felt good to be encountering Shakespeare at his most political with a world event to smile about, for once (hailing, of course, from this brilliant Dutch company's homeland). It felt even better to emerge six hours later spellbound and deeply... Read more... |
