Theatre Reviews
wonder.land, National TheatreFriday, 11 December 2015
Widely hyped as “an Alice for the online generation”, and “a coming-of-age adventure that explores the blurred boundaries between our online and offline lives”, this version of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland stories is advertised with a poster that shows a Cheshire cat whose smile is more drug-addled rictus than quizzical grin. Read more... |
Hapgood, Hampstead TheatreThursday, 10 December 2015
A supposed Stoppardian footnote gets a first-class reclamation in Howard Davies's sizzling revival of Hapgood, the espionage-themed drama from 1988 that resonates intellectually and emotionally to a degree it didn't begin to achieve at a West End premiere that I recall almost three decades on. Read more... |
A Christmas Carol, Noël Coward TheatreThursday, 10 December 2015
Is Jim Broadbent Britain’s best-loved actor? The slate of screen roles he’s accumulated over the years – this Christmas Carol is his return to theatre after a decade away – has surely given him a very special quality in the nation's consciousness, a combination of general benignity with more than a hint of absent-mindedness, an almost madcap bafflement at the world. Read more... |
You for Me for You, Royal Court TheatreWednesday, 09 December 2015
North Korea is the kind of place that haunts the imagination of the West – and not in a good way. One of the last hardline Communist dictatorships, it is also a country of immense sadness, a landscape of food shortages and human-rights abuses. Yet its regime calls this dismal place the "Best Nation in the World". To us, it’s a secret world, a strange culture difficult to comprehend, easy to fear. Read more... |
Cymbeline, Sam Wanamaker PlayhouseWednesday, 09 December 2015
There’s a happy, cyclical logic to this first production of Cymbeline – Shakespeare’s late tragicomedy of love and jealousy – at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. The first play Shakespeare wrote for the candle-lit, indoor Blackfriars Playhouse, Cymbeline was quite literally made for this space. Read more... |
Hangmen, Wyndham's TheatreTuesday, 08 December 2015
Just what constitutes reasonable behaviour in an enlightened society? Not long ago, the death penalty fell under that umbrella in Britain, and state-sanctioned killing as punishment for the crime of, well, killing is just the kind of twisted irony that cries out for the Martin McDonagh treatment. Here it is, ending the playwright’s 10-year absence from the London stage, and his Royal Court hit fully earns its West End transfer. Read more... |
Macbeth, Young VicFriday, 04 December 2015
Events have overtaken this Macbeth, dramatically heightening its queasy topicality. Not just brutal beheadings and torture, but the cost and collateral damage of conflict without end, and the scourge of a tyrant slaughtering his own people, strike one anew in the wake of recent debate. Carrie Cracknell’s interpretative, modern-dress production traps us in a military underground bunker, drained of light and colour – a Hell as acutely psychological as it is physical. Read more... |
Around the World in 80 Days, St James TheatreFriday, 04 December 2015
One of the joys about this stage adaptation of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days is the contrast between its phlegmatic hero Phileas Fogg, who deals with everything in terms of precision and logic, and the picaresque confusion of his journey. Fogg (Robert Portal) has the habit of laying down portentous truths in an attempt to mediate the scampering mix-ups that he encounters at every stage. Read more... |
Funny Girl, Menier Chocolate FactoryThursday, 03 December 2015
It's hard not to invoke the B word - Barbra, that is, not Brice - and I speak as one who bunked off school to catch her at a midweek matinee when Funny Girl first played London almost 50 years ago. It was standing room only at the Prince of Wales Theatre but by then she was pretty much phoning in her performance, and only the thrill of that voice (smaller than one expected but laser-intense) carried her through. Read more... |
Howard Barker Double Bill, Arcola TheatreWednesday, 02 December 2015
Two plays for the price of one. What’s not to like? Particularly when they resonate so strongly with each other on a hard, uncompromising theme. Broadly, that theme is love and war, sex and death, but more specifically, both plays home in on the truth games played by a man and a woman at critical moments of intimacy. 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*
with no booking fee.
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