Theatre Reviews
This May Hurt a Bit, St James TheatreTuesday, 20 May 2014
When I first heard that the new play from Out of Joint was about the NHS I thought this might be a delayed result of the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympics: all those prancing nurses surely deserve a play of their own. In fact, the emotional fuel behind Stella Feehily’s new play comes from nearer home. In 2006, Max Stafford-Clark, her husband and the play’s director, suffered a stroke, which means that much of this drama’s depth of feeling comes from first-hand experience. Read more... |
Wolf Hall/ Bring Up the Bodies, Aldwych TheatreSunday, 18 May 2014
Hilary Mantel’s two Thomas Cromwell novels have captured an enormous new readership for history with their crackling sense of place and immediacy of tension - the plays created on them, now brought to London by the Royal Shakespeare Company, are relishable creations of different virtues. Mantel’s exquisitely detailed, emotionally penetrating descriptions of weather, place or internal worries aren’t to be found. Read more... |
Debris, Southwark PlayhouseFriday, 16 May 2014
"Debris - literally!" Or so spoke a fellow reviewer as she sat down next to me, having navigated her way through the rubble scattered across the floor of Southwark Playhouse's aptly-named Little auditorium. It's here that Openworks Theatre in association with the Look Left Look Right company is reviving Dennis Kelly's 2003 one-act, Debris, which centres on a brother and sister in their late teens as they relive the darkest, most disturbing episodes of their lives. Read more... |
The Last Days of Troy, Royal Exchange, ManchesterWednesday, 14 May 2014
By picking his way through Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Virgil’s Aeneid - written 600 years later - Simon Armitage has it all, including the horse and Helen, each of whom in their way enable the hordes to breach Troy’s gates. What with that and the mingling of mortals and gods, not to mention the 100,000 troops that Agamemnon leads across the Aegean to rescue Helen, there’s a lot to attempt to pack into this theatre’s intimate space in three hours. Read more... |
The Pajama Game, Shaftesbury TheatreWednesday, 14 May 2014
On the Richter scale of catchiness Richard Adler and Jerry Ross’s songs for The Pajama Game are right up there. Quite who did what in their brief but shining songwriting partnership was never entirely clear, though Adler claimed supremacy in the music department. But one thing is clear: the man who brought them on and pushed them forward - the great Frank Loesser - is all over their work like a rash. Read more... |
Catch-22, Theatre Royal, BrightonTuesday, 13 May 2014
There are echoes of Lost in the crashed B-25 bomber that fills this often brilliant production with its rusting corpse. And they’re probably intended. Read more... |
Waiting For Godot, Arcola TheatreTuesday, 13 May 2014
Waiting For Godot is one of those plays which even those who have never seen know something about. “A tragicomedy in two acts,” as Beckett's subtitle described it, in which two tramps in bowler hats blether on about boots and a bloke who never appears, and where, in Irish critic Vivian Mercer's immortal words, “nothing happens twice”. And if they know nothing else about it, they surely can quote the play's most famous line: "We give birth astride of a grave." Read more... |
Yellow Face, National TheatreFriday, 09 May 2014
Yellow Face comes into the Shed a year after it was first greeted enthusiastically at the newly-opened Park Theatre. Its category was generally agreed to be "mockumentary". Fair enough as the author David Henry Hwang appears as a character in his own play, a mixture of autobiography and fiction. Read more... |
The Testament of Mary, BarbicanThursday, 08 May 2014
If you’re tempted to see Fiona Shaw’s impressive solo performance as Mary the mother of a son she can’t bring herself to name – and see it you probably should – then bear two things in mind. Read more... |
Bonanza, Sallis Benney Theatre, BrightonWednesday, 07 May 2014
When absorbing any artistic experience we can be confounded by our own expectations. Such was the case for me with Bonanza. Rather confusingly, Berlin are a Belgian outfit majoring in cinematic, multimedia theatre so, perhaps, I was expecting an element of performance to the evening, of direct human delivery. 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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