Review: ‘Art’
Tim Key, Paul Ritter and Rufus Sewell dazzle in this Old Vic revival of ‘Art’ directed by Matthew Warchus. Reza joked of her Olivier Comedy award: ‘I’m surprised, I thought I’d written a tragedy’ and this visceral but almost (dare one say, given the subject) cubist probing of the hairline crack between the two both affirms and denies Reza’s claim she’s not a cerebral writer. She asks dangerous questions of just what the ‘art’ of friendship consists of, and why.
Review: Not Dead Enough
Richie’s layered and occasionally skewed avuncularity brings a troubled warmth to Grace, a baffled tenderness. Nothing is as it seems and though McKenna has telescoped and altered the ending as such, the plot as presented falls apart in impossibilities. James is praised for exceptional plotting and vital elements – perhaps mere moments - are missing. It makes for a thrilling if improbably ending.
Review: The White Devil
The gender-slashing part of Vittoria demands venom and defiance as well as passion in verse. Joseph Timms and Kate Stanley-Brennan as Vittoria shine delivering Webster’s verse, pointing up with defiant splendor or self-delighting braggadocio tinged with Trainspotting. Ryan’s pacey revival is timely, thrusting us to Webster’s sadly timeless themes. But misogyny’s purged of its merely temporal strut with the force of such verse inhabited, which lays its living sinew bare.
Review: Gaslight
A first-rate revival of perhaps the classic stage thriller. Young and Blackledge bring fine characterful energy to their roles, as does Anderson, but the evening belongs to the range Tointon brings to her psycho-Cindarella role, and the gravelly improbable Prince Charming ‘old enough to be your grandfather’ Keith Allen. Banks’ pace never slackens: everyone’s given enough rope at the end to manage anything.
Review: Escaped Alone
Escaped Alone frames four women chatting in deckchairs in this everyday talk of tea and catastrophe - just as one of them steps into the void to prophesy a smorgasbord of Armageddons. The protean Churchill touches yet another dimension too. Do we have to wait to her eightieth in 2018 to proclaim her our greatest living playwright?
Review: The Playboy of the Western World
It was the third and last act mingling high farce and near-tragedy as it does, that pitches this part of the already superb performance to outstanding by any standard. The legendary production by Druid Theatre Galway in 2009 came to mind. This part of the night is on a par with it. There can be no higher praise.
Review: Winter Solstice
Winter Solstice, Schimmelpfennig’s apparently naturalistic fable is more than timely. As a dead-of-winter warning, it urges us to recalibrate, rewind our imaginations to the point where we might stop the tide of reasonable boundaries tightening into a noose.
Review: The Homecoming
Mid-period Pinter’s almost superseding the early ground-breaking works in popularity, and for good reason. Along with the later Old Times and No Man’s Land, The Homecoming’s recently been revived and re-appraised. Culann Smyth’s interaction with John Tolputt fascinates; and Smyth’s terrors jump out with reality. O’Shea has paced this with a tread that we follow down to the last triangle of light. A superb revival.
Review: Wish List
Erin Doherty gives a quite brilliant portrayal of someone rendered nearly voiceless who on occasion has to find a desperate authority and at other moments, aspire. Rarely have the terrible antimonies of work and benefits system been so precisely notated, and never the combined effect calibrated to crush out young lives so mapped. It’s an essential play that charts the betrayal of a generation.
Review: The Lower Depths
Gorky’s 1902 The Lower Depths is a vividly long evening, and holds the attention, but a huge challenge to pull into the shaggy shabby masterpiece it is. We emerge drier-eyed from this production, but it’s a bracing winter play, and all too grimly calls us out to act. It’s a seminal drama too, rarely seen, making this an essential pilgramage.
Review: Mary Stuart
Supremely realized by Stevenson and Williams, Icke’s triumphant production dispenses with trappings save to point up the reverse symbolism at the end which like all opposites fuses into one lost head in two, as both queens’ final gaze burns like scenes from an execution.
Review: Hedda Gabler
Occasionally opaque, van Hove frames his eloquent prison with enough space for Greek tragedy and his uniformly fine cast to project it, however skew. Wilson’s supreme power, refracted through the cataract of this fitfully illuminating production, is to convey the sense that whatever role she might have chosen, Hedda’s grown up dead.
Review: Sunny Afternoon
What makes this outstanding is Penhall’s wit and deft charactering of core band and satellites who interact with the complexity of a play, the way the songs move the narrative forward and are given believable geneses. This outstanding musical deserves the awards its original incarnation garnered – and it brings back The Kinks forever sharing the peak of British pop with The Who, The Stones and pre-eminently The Beatles.
Review: The Wizard of Oz
It beggars belief that on one tiny stage we can be subjected to so many scene stages so expertly handled, so many backdrops and scenery shifts, not to mention a cast of twenty-two who can all sing. This production is good enough for a larger professional stage. If you get a chance, ask for a ticket or return.
Review: Cymbeline
A Cymbeline that redefines the title role. This is perhaps the best mostly-uncut Cymbeline we can hope for till our nerves settle, but then again Cymbeline’s a state-of-the-nation vehicle, and has come again into its own.
Review: The Tempest
Walter’s is a reading riven with pained clarity – a conflicted anguish visibly traced on her face – sealing the broken majesty of this performance. It’s the pinnacle of the rough magic of a production fresh, streetwise with animated verse deliveries, vocal range and above all the new-minted, brave new world.
Review: The White Devil
The towering gender-slashing part of Vittoria demands venom and defiance as well as passion in verse. Peak delivers these with the kind of nuance in extremis that makes one wonder what more she could do with the part. As her brother Flamineo, the flame-voiced Bennett has great potential as a verse speaker, based on the rationale and clarity he brings here. The great lines at the end comprise the finest number of exits in drama.
Review: One Night in Miami…
This work’s even more urgent now human rights in the US and elsewhere are temporarily at the least regrouping. Kwei-Armah’s pace and dance made this beautiful to hear and behold, but even more to absorb. An all-black cast has been a long time coming.
Review: The Children
This devil’s bargain of a drama is how one generation takes responsibility for the ecological box of spiders it’s let out. One strength lies in avoiding the obvious. For one thing the children are absent. Kirkwood’s masterly play resonates with macrocosmic power, towering over the minutiae of living.
Review: The Tempest
It’s clear something miraculous and patient is born from this simple but endlessly detailed production, releasing The Tempest into its fullest consciousness for a long time. However many Tempests you might have attended, see this one.
Review: Blood Brothers
The show - nearly three hours - never for a moment seemed it, gripping the audience so tightly the whole audience rose spontaneously to its feet – something I’ve not seen in this theatre. The blend of definitive and new cast members in a recent classic has overwhelming impact.
Review: The Comedy About a Bank Robbery
The Comedy About a Bank Robbery redefines the category, by edging beyond even recent work and revealing a classic structure entering a hall of mirrors and going mad. The musical as well as general ensemble is the most remarkably timed I’ve ever seen in a theatre, and the set designs and shifts the most frantically split into milliseconds. This is an outstanding and redefining farce in every way.
Review: The Libertine
Dominic Cooper’s Rochester is up for it, as he tells the audience. Jeffreys has assured us of the finest, shrewdest, darkly poetic play of these times the centuries between have ever known.
Review: The Nest
This translation is more than a vivid spin on a foreign play. McPherson has spotted kindred and made it a blood brother of his imagination.
Review: The Shakespeare Revue
A consummate delight in this now rarest of forms; a tight song-and-dance of words. New material sizzles, inserted towards the end, the whole box of Bards from Bernard Levin’s Quoting Shakespeare to McKee’s arrangement of Shakespeare lines for a musical lights-out dances on the edge of hilarity before falling headlong into it.
Review: Lady Chatterley’s Lover
In adaptor Phillip Breen’s hands there’s not just one set of lovers here, however partly incapacitated: indeed there’s deep feeling released in this couple’s performance. The decision taken to highlight this is treasurable. One wonders if Clifford – tortured, typing, refusing to be typecast as war-emasculated cripple and even hoping to revive - is the hero. Breen makes a fine case for it.
Review: The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck
This Wannamaker Read Not Dead performance of The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck seals the proof that T. S. Eliot was right: it’s the finest non-Shakespearean history play of the whole Elizabethan-to-Caroline canon.
Review: The Coxcomb
Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Coxcomb is one of their finest, a sparkling yoke of two love-plots involving feminism and sexual freedom unparalleled in the period’s comedy.
Review: The Clean House
Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House is paced by director Sam Chittenden with clean elegance, counterpointing the messiness of existence with the neatness of fable, and the human need to straddle, even celebrate both. In a play about the perfect one-liner, we get the joke and far from killing us it offers us a small lesson in loving.
Review: The Boys in the Band
Mark Gatiss might be the best-known of the ensemble in The Boys in the Band but delights in being just one of this nine-hander which never falters, never droops and dances words to actions in a small masterpiece that seems poised to remain contemporary forever.
Review: Amadeus
In the most spectacular production imaginable, the antagonisms between the black-suited and marzipan fight it out in this extraordinary sumptuous and consummately musical production. Far from seeming out of place, Adam Gillen’s Young Ones-style shrilling brat with his technicolour frock-coats seems almost more attuned than Salieri to his milieu. It’s naturally the corresponding gravity this production looks to though: Lucian Msmati’s supremely crafted lead sets off the quicksilver of his rival to an unprecedented extent.
Review: Oil
This is a fabulous tale. Duff’s portrayal, tightrope-walking tenderness over an abyss of fear and atavistic decisions, forms the long burning-down wick of the play. Necessary theatre, and Hickson’s decision to focus on the mother-daughter axis underscores a neat parable of what we say we love, and how it might really love us back.
Review: A Tale of Two Cities
An outstanding production, with the central character given an outstanding performance by Joseph Timms. He’s supported by a near-faultless cast, and no weak links with a whiplash direction against the best of backdrops, even for the worst of times.
Review: The Entertainer
Gawn Granger carries the memory of greatness and it’s this elusive elixir Archie, consummately but seedily played by Branagh, which stands in for those lost ideals Osborne’s first great character Jimmy Porter grasped at. It’s the toppling of Archie Rice’s own inner idol, or failure to do so, that sends this absorbing production out whistling into the dark.
Review: Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Character-acting keeps this near-impossible-to-dramatize story a play. Since the film’s different, this charmingly-attempted soufflé of an adaptation might do the best service of all: send people in search of a ninety-page novella, and that’s in large print.
Review: Love’s Labour’s Lost/Much Ado About Nothing
This Love’s Labour's Lost is one of the great show-changing interpretations in Shakespeare and confirms this production as the most outstanding of this play for years. It has heart, plangency and not a little devastation. This production of Much Ado About Nothing finally grounds the play in a post-war setting it has long begged. Both the plays’ malefaction and mischievous confusion, and hectic high spirits, are given the most truthful reading of recent years. We feel we’ve permanently understood some characters in a way never before revealed.
Review: The Merchant of Venice
This outstandingly layered production seethes with Antonio’s and Shylock’s polar hatred. At the end of Judgement they’re both broken. Jonathan Pryce’s Shylock details as much hatred as Antonio (Dominic Mafham exhaling melancholy) and Venetian anti-Semites direct in spittle.
Review: No’s Knife
We’re enormously privileged to be living in such a rich age of Beckett performance, and here, a soaring creative response Beckett encouraged has claimed these texts as dramatic. Somehow Dwon avoids dissolution with her tensile strength and staggered, staggering vocal range, brushed with a tang of mortality.
Review: Imogen: Cymbeline Renamed and Reclaimed
This production sucked in a whole audience and breathed it out with laughter. Its power’s a popular, indeed populist one. And in Maddy Hill’s furious dove we’ve identified an Imogen many can reclaim, or claim for the first time.
Review: A Room With a View
This is about as good as you could reasonably hope for. The latter half is a delight, and should send people back to the theatre for different fare, and to the book.
Review: Torn
Adelle Leonce anchors protagonist Angel’s volatile unpredictability in a superb register of loss, calibrating her response to various family members at zig-zag stages of her life. Martello-White’s clever touching-in of few specifics allows this ninety-minute piece to amplify a wincing universality.
Review: How the Other Half Loves
Ayckbourn’s genius shows how literally times are changing in this early masterpiece portraying a sexual liberation more pervasive than the noisier one raging all around 1969: it shows how far the revolutions has as it were penetrated. Strachan’s brilliance is so complete, so identified with this particular play, you forget how superbly founded it is.
Review: Love Story
Refreshing treatment of this enormously affecting musical lies in its British bite working so well with Jenny’s feisty character, and youth generally. BLT and the Craig/Nock team have scored another bull’s-eye which by the end is pretty watery.
Review: They Drink it in the Congo
Brace’s hugely ambitious piece is whipped along with rapid dissolves and shifts by Longhurst so its stranded complexity never becomes turgid or bewildering. Central character Stef is played with brightness turned up exactly right by Fiona Button.
Review: Doctor Faustus
The RSC delights in dopplegangers: alternating the main roles of Faustus and Mephistopheles with Sandy Grierson and Oliver Ryan. Grierson’s commanding Mephistopheles does more than ringingly square off against Ryan’s smoky-voiced humanity. Aberg has though allowed the drama space to believe in itself, a darkness to believe in.
Review: The Alchemist
Ken Nwosu’s the stand-out, and if the RSC keep up with their Jonson, productions like these go 95% of the way to creating a relish for him.
Review: Glasgow Girls
Even on fictive terms this would garner praise for its raw power, its beating passion for justice and humanity. Difficult as it might be not to come away warmed this ensemble – and original musical – make it so very easy. This needs to be everywhere and should be shown if not live, then screened.
Review: The Dresser
The best revival we’re likely to see in a very long time, with outstanding performances from Stott and Shearsmith, with performances as strong in their way from Cadell and Thorpe, and not a weak link. It’s a masterly play from the inside, and this consummate portrayal of near-disaster ending in a successful one, is as good as it gets.
Review: Burning Bridges
Asperger-conditioned Sarah’s reels off her interests: ‘TV, One Direction, Bears, Ghandi, Oral Sex not necessarily in that order.’ This remarkable, necessary play explores the crisis provoked by Sarah’s single atypical act, and how it shows she’s improving - leaving domestic devastation. Shindler beautifully judges the pathos and development in each of her three main protagonists.
Review: A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur
A first-rate revival, the best we’re likely to see though hopefully not the last of late Williams. Oakley’s hinted there’s more to revive. Meanwhile, don’t miss this legacy-changing production.
Review: Strife
An outstanding and revelatory production of an outstanding play, whose relevance moves beyond even the tortured steel industry of today’s Wales or Britain to other professions undergoing exploitation, conflict of interest and barbaric intervention.
Review: Relatively Speaking
Not a creak in this sparkling production: Liza Goddard possesses an innate sense of how this should go: straight, elegant sang-froid touched with just the right amount of welcome; Powell inhabits the higher bluster; Antony Eden pitches it just right; Lindsey Campbell exudes recently thrown-off gawkiness. Herford knows what he’s about: pace, panache, and more than a dose of Ayckbourn’s generosity of spirit, which glows here as telling the world how it was going to be.
Review: The Truth
This is as good a machine for portraying infidelity as we’re likely to see. Hanson delivers frantic timing and hard-paced farce, O’Connor provides an elegant foil mixing guilt with anxiety, desire and cool pragmatism; Franks’ Laurence is always ready to spring shut on the luckless protagonist. Her counterpart in Portal conveys a flicker of reined-in menace, bluff urbanity waiting to pounce. Zeller quotes Voltaire’s scepticism about truth-telling: permanently unfashionable, perennially worth reviving
Review: Faith Healer
A supremely orchestrated production, the best we’re likely to see of Friel’s masterpiece for the play’s time-span, about twenty years. As Frank’s faith-healer character must have experienced, this production rapidly sold out, not through high-tech advertising blitzes, but word of mouth.
Review: Yerma
Piper’s excelled before but nothing has prepared for this devastating performance in Stone’s almost completely re-written play: a break-out wildness, a grieving as incandescent as anything in Greek Tragedy, connecting with Lorca beyond Stone.
Review: Present Laughter
Expertly-tailored, classy and for the most part surely-pitched fare: Stephen Unwin is sure-footed too and coaxes the best from his ensemble: jewel-like precision, light-footed blocking and quotable gestures makes this a production ravishingly conscious of its superiority.
Review: The Seagull
Olivia Vinall provides a tremulous foil for Joshua James’ vulnerable volatile Konstanin in a fresh emphasis on youth superbly undermined by Anna Chancellor and Geoffrey Streatfeild. World-class English-speaking Chekhov.
Review: Ivanov
Geoffrey Streatfeild inhabits this most problematic Chekhovian role like a stooping question-mark, a lanky laureate of the Russian superfluous man. James McArdle’s angular self-deluding hatred and smoothed-down hair and cheeks compresses into a Caledonian hiss worthy of John Knox. Nina Sosanya’s ardent but dignified pleading and Oivia Vinall’s headlong ardour all combine an explosive mix. Outstanding.
Review: Platonov
James McArdle’s vibrant, sexy quixotically self-aware Platonov is just the star of this family of actors assembled for the three Chekhov plays at the National, with perfectly judged reactions from each other like a small repertory company. In David Hare’s vivid yet faithful version - compressed by half - it’s no small feat to have finally delivered a definitive sixth masterpiece of Chekhov’s.
Review: The Plough and the Stars
The plot’s shocking volte-faces, so perfectly realized here streaked with blood and comedy, make this O’Casey’s masterpiece. Stephen Kennedy’s dipsily detailed drunk is the great turn here in a cast where Judith Roddy, Justine Mitchell, Josie Walker, and Grainne Keenan also excel in this flawless production.
Review: Pigs and Dogs
In a quarter-hour we’re struck with a rich and head-spinning narrative of how same-sex culture’s been oppressed first by the west and now through European language. You end up stopping in outraged disbelief at this virulent legacy of colonialism. If you can’t see it, read it.
Review: Unreachable
A profoundly quizzical play about directorial and film-mogul silliness, using one liners and silliness to address these questions.
Review: No Villain
Superb premiere of Miller’s 1936 play showing more than glimpse of the later Miller and more autobiographically-based than any other work would be again.
Review: Sunset at the Villa Thalia
Making noise quietly, Campbell’s new play perhaps pulls a few punches because it believes in quiet. Ben Miles dominates the stage in this uneasy parable, and Elizabeth McGovern’s uproariously funny and pathos-ridden.
Review: Rehearsal for Murder
Clever piece by the Murder She Wrote team, set in 1989, mostly ingenious, mostly satisfying Whoddunit.
Review: The Importance of Being Ernest
Beautifully designed and sumptuous production where the palm goes to the older cast, in this fresh and vigorous production. Look out for matching buttonholes, silks and ensemble.
Review: All My Sons
Superb, pitch-perfect production from an amateur theatre renowned for the professionalism of everything from sets to acting.
Review: After Miss Julie
Provocative but absorbing take on Strindberg’s 1888 masterpiece. Fine cast led by Helen George make much of demob denouements.
Review: Blue/Orange
Thrilling revival of this absorbing still relevant 2000 play about abusing the already-abused in the name of psychiatry.
Review: The Deep Blue Sea
Helen McCrory plumbs the erotic despair of Hester Collyer’s abandoned woman in this absorbing revival of Rattigan’s masterpiece.
Review: Richard III
Whilst Ralph Fiennes reins in his Richard, making his violent misogyny all the more chilling, his demonic fun evaporates. But an exemplary cast, with Vanessa Redgrave light up Goold’s direction in a production that never drags.
Review: Ross
Joseph Fiennes dazzles sotto-voce in his finest theatre performance to date, in this consummate revival of the troubling life of Lawrence of Arabia.
Review: Doctor Faustus
Kit-off Harington stars in this rewritten Marlowe piece, long on sex and violence but short on Marlowe. Intermittently brilliant.
Review: The Flick
Mesmerising exploration of three characters maintaining a failing cinema, heartbreakingly funny, mimetically riveting. One of the Nationals’ very finest new plays under the new regime.
Review: Kenny Morgan
Superb take on Rattigan’s lover’s suicide attempts, that inspired Rattigan’s masterpiece The Deep Blue Sea.
Review: Human Animals
A thrillingly compressed dystopia crossing The Birds, and Caryl Churchill with draconian government opportunism.
Review: A View From Islington North
Intermittently thrilling plays from the urgent left, two premieres and a couple of small gems roughened by the tumble of Westminster and the Corporates that really must be seen - unless you’re Gideon.
Review: Elegy
Starring Barbara Flynn and Zoe Wannamaker, Nick Payne’s new play – a thrilling and devastating probe at our identity - picks up the threads of science, self and mortality from Constellations and The Art of Dying, marking his most ambitious play since the former.
Review: Cuttin’ It
Superb distillation of the costs of FGM to victims and victim-perpetrators, James reaches out to all in this searing two-hander.
Review: Brideshead Revisited
Bryony Lavery’s adaptation of Brideshead, the first for the stage dazzles with stagecraft and storyline but something’s lost tail-chasing the detail.
Review: Here All Night
Sam’s all night shiner, Beckett’s Wake and Cabaret. Haunting, funny, unmissable.
Review: The Threepenny Opera
A coming-of-age for Rufus Norris, a wholly credible, cheekily interventionist Threepenny Opera with a few devastating critiques
Review: First Love
Conor Lovett lightens his pitch Becket’s exploration of lust, sexual disgust and the intolerable consequences of generation.
Review: The End
Conor Lovett rivets with a naturalistic pitch in this cut-down stand-up Beckett diminuendo of an ex-inmate’s prospects. More tour de force in a tour de farce of Beckett’s genius.
Review: The Bald Prima Donna
Spirited pacey revival of Ionesco’s first play, with one stand-out performance and superbly idiomatic one. A perfect introduction to the playwright.
Review: Boy
A superbly bleached-out vision of a seventeen-year-old’s prospects on a stunning conveyer-belt set. Not a comfortable but necessary seventy minutes.
Review: An Enemy of the People
Howard Davies directs a fine cast led by Hugh Bonneville in Chichester's generously human revival of the ultimate whistleblowing drama
Review: Broken Glass
Superb revival of Miller's late classic. Jerry Lyne's production is one of NVT's finest.
Review: Glengarry Glenn Ross
Riveting must-see revival of Mamet's breakthrough play at the Rialto directed by Roger Kay
Review: The Caretaker
Timothy Spall leads a strong cast in this magisterial, beautifully-orchestrated revival of Pinter's breakthrough play.
Review: King Lear
Michael Pennington triumphs in his tragedy in this superbly clear King Lear directed by Max Webster. Gavin Fowler’s Edgar rises with him.
Review: Cock
An exploration of sexuality within the 21st century confines of unconfined and ill defined relationships.
Review: A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride
" wonderful words, masterfully adapted, brilliantly brought to life"
Review: The Hampstead Murder Mystery!
Like 39 Steps, but with more actors. And more scenes. And more steps.
Review: The Andromeda Paradox
X marks the spot. Make space for Tom Neenan's latest journey into the unknown ..
Review: The Element In The Room: A Radioactive Musical Comedy About The Life And Death Of Marie Curie
The very height of (science) experimental theatre. Radium: rah-rah-radical ...
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