Theatre Reviews
Judgement Day, The Print RoomTuesday, 22 November 2011
There comes a point in a writer’s life when he – it’s usually a he – stops writing about life and starts writing about writing. With Ibsen this stage arrived in the self-reflexive rage and unquiet of When We Dead Awaken – the play the author seemed to realise would be his last. Brooding on genius, art and the clamour of the everyday, it’s an inhospitable work and not one we see often; London’s last professional revival was almost 20 years ago. Read more... |
How the World Began, Arcola TheatreSaturday, 19 November 2011
It’s the God factor. Although, until very recently, most British playwrights - being a secular bunch - have shied away from tackling questions of religious belief in their work, their American counterparts have had no such inhibitions. The market leader of this trend in the new generation is Catherine Trieschmann, whose 2006 play Crooked featured a “holiness lesbian”, and who now turns her sights on the clash between belief and science in rural Kansas. Read more... |
Reasons to be Pretty, Almeida TheatreFriday, 18 November 2011
This needs confessing. Neil LaBute and I have an uneasy relationship. David Mamet - in Oleanna or Boston Marriage mode – also gets under my skin. It’s a close-run thing: misogyny exposed, or the thing itself? After Fat Pig (2004) and The Shape of Things (2005), Reasons to be Pretty is the third in LaBute's trilogy of plays about female appearance, and his seventh collaboration with the Almeida. Read more... |
Juno and the Paycock, National TheatreThursday, 17 November 2011
“The whole world's in a terrible state of chassis,” says Captain Jack Boyle more than once during Sean O'Casey's great play, set in 1922 and the second of his Dublin trilogy, bookended by The Shadow of a Gunman (1923) and The Plough and the Stars (1926). Read more... |
The Lion in Winter, Theatre Royal, HaymarketWednesday, 16 November 2011
Don't be misled by the mini-history lesson with which Trevor Nunn's belated London stage premiere of The Lion in Winter begins, a sequence of dates, facts and maps that scroll up a decoratively appointed screen and threaten to turn the sumptuous Haymarket Theatre (Nunn's home now across four productions) into an upscale schoolroom. Read more... |
Beautiful Thing, Royal Exchange, ManchesterTuesday, 15 November 2011
Nearly 20 years have whizzed by since Jonathan Harvey, then a 24-year-old comprehensive school teacher, wrote a play in the school holidays – and caused a stir. That play was Beautiful Thing, dealing with the then (and now?) contentious issue of two 16-year-old schoolboys, next-flat neighbours in the high-rise south-east London council estate of Thamesmead, who fall in love – and overcome prejudices and obstacles, not least their own self-realisation. Read more... |
Salt, Root and Roe, Trafalgar StudiosTuesday, 15 November 2011
Many dramatists have taken their turn putting faces to Thoreau’s lives of “quiet desperation”. But the challenge in what Thoreau goes on to conclude – that it is therefore a mark of wisdom and the wise to avoid acts of desperation – has been taken up by far fewer. Salt, Root and Roe sees Tim Price transform an act of violence from one of apparently senseless desperation to one of humane intelligence and generosity. Read more... |
Next Time I’ll Sing to You, Orange Tree TheatreSaturday, 12 November 2011
Some plays are so weird they defy description. Well, almost. One of these must surely be the late James Saunders’s deeply absurdist play, whose first outing in 1963 launched the career of the young Michael Caine. Soon after, its author won a promising playwright award. The current revival, part of the Orange Tree’s 40th-birthday season, gives us a chance to look again at a writer whose innovative work has been consistently promoted by Sam Walters, artistic director at this address. Read more... |
Yerma, Gate TheatreSaturday, 12 November 2011
If you didn't know Frederico García Lorca's Yerma before this show, you probably wouldn't be any better informed after watching Natalie Abrahami's engaging but flawed production. In “a new version by Anthony Weigh”, as it says on the programme cover, a backstory of the childless couple Yerma and Juan is interpolated in the Spanish playwright's 1934 "Tragic Poem in Three Acts and Six Scenes” and its chorus has been excised in a much-reduced cast. Read more... |
Festen, Barbican Pit TheatreFriday, 11 November 2011
Family occasions can be fraught affairs, as playwrights from Harold Pinter to Alan Ayckbourn have convincingly proved, but the mother of all family meltdown dramas must be Thomas Vinterberg’s Danish Festen, a Dogme 95 film made in 1998. Soon after, this was turned into a stage play by Vinterberg and Mogens Rukov, which had an outstanding success in David Eldridge’s version here in 2004. Now a Romanian theatre company, Nottara, from Bucharest, bring their version to London. 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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