Theatre Reviews
Life of Galileo, Young Vic review - shared-experience Brecht is powerful, timelyWednesday, 17 May 2017
Never mind breaking the fourth wall, Joe Wright and the Young Vic have smashed the other three as well. Read more... |
Manwatching, Royal Court review - the vagina manologuesTuesday, 16 May 2017
This monologue first saw the light of day at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2015. It's a frank – very frank – piece about female sexuality by an anonymous heterosexual female author, performed by a different male comic each night, who reads it sight unseen. Read more... |
Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour review - West End transfer hits all the right notesTuesday, 16 May 2017
Sacred and profane, trivial and profound blissfully combine in this irresistible, Olivier Award-winning tale of choirgirls gone wild. Lee Hall, of Billy Elliot fame, adapts Alan Warner’s 1998 novel with a similarly shrewd grasp of youthful hope amidst challenging circumstances, and with the arts once again proving a vital escape – albeit, in this case, temporarily. Read more... |
Casus Circus Driftwood, Brighton Festival review - eye-boggling gymnastic theatreTuesday, 16 May 2017
There is a sequence in theatrical circus troupe Casus’ new production, Driftwood, where three of the five members sit, each between the legs of another, in a row, facing the front of the stage. They look as if they’re about to do the rowing dance people in the Eighties used to do to the Gap Band’s “Oops Upside Your Head” at suburban discos. That is not what they do. Instead the front one rolls back... Read more... |
Three Sisters, Sovremennik review - over-conscious of its legendarinessSunday, 14 May 2017
Sovremennik is Russian for “contemporary”, and ever since its founding in the Soviet Union's 1950s Thaw, Moscow’s Sovremennik Theatre company has lived by the idea that it expresses new, fresh breath in Russian theatre. Unless you argue that the adjective “contemporary” by definition must reveal characteristics of its temporal surroundings, moribund is not one of the alternative meanings of the word. Read more... |
Medea, Bristol Old Vic - formulaic feminism lets Greek classic downFriday, 12 May 2017
Greek tragedy provides an unending source of material for the stage: in no other theatrical form have the labyrinths of human nature been so deeply explored: the rich tapestry of archetypal family conflicts, driven by instincts that force helpless characters into inescapable constellations of behavior that have resonated through several millennia. Read more... |
Salomé, National Theatre review - Yaël Farber’s version is verbose and overblownWednesday, 10 May 2017
Is God female? It says a lot about Yaël Farber’s pompous and overblown new version of this biblical tale at the National Theatre that, near the end of an almighty 110-minute extravaganza, all reason seemed to have vacated my brain, and its empty halls, battered by a frenzy of elevated music, heaven-sent lighting and wildly gesturing actors, were suddenly open to the oddest ideas. Read more... |
Occupational Hazards, Hampstead Theatre review - vivid outline in search of a fuller playWednesday, 10 May 2017
"This is the most fun province in Iraq" isn't the sort of sentence you hear every day on a London stage. On the basis of geographical breadth alone, one applauds Occupational Hazards, in which playwright Stephen Brown adapts global adventurer-turned-Tory MP Rory Stewart's 2006 account of his attempt to bring order to a newly-liberated Iraq. Read more... |
All Our Children review - shameful historical period horrifies anewSaturday, 06 May 2017
How do you tell a story as complex as the eugenics movement, which is pursued afresh in writer-director Stephen Unwin's new play All Our Children? Its idealistic origins lie in Britain with Francis Galton in 1883, before leading to forced sterilisation of the disabled in several countries, starting in America in the 1920s and continung in Sweden into the 1970s; its legacy is today’s screening for conditions such as Down Syndrome. Read more... |
Angels in America, National Theatre review - Andrew Garfield and company soar in seismic revivalFriday, 05 May 2017
"We live past hope," or so remarks the AIDS-afflicted drag queen-turned-prophet, Prior Walter (Andrew Garfield), late in Angels in America. Read more... |
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★★★★★
‘A compulsive, involving, emotionally stirring evening – theatre’s answer to a page-turner.’
The Observer, Kate Kellaway
Direct from a sold-out season at Kiln Theatre the five star, hit play, The Son, is now playing at the Duke of York’s Theatre for a strictly limited season.
★★★★★
‘This final part of Florian Zeller’s trilogy is the most powerful of all.’
The Times, Ann Treneman
Written by the internationally acclaimed Florian Zeller (The Father, The Mother), lauded by The Guardian as ‘the most exciting playwright of our time’, The Son is directed by the award-winning Michael Longhurst.
Book by 30 September and get tickets from £15*
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