Uncle Vanya comes into the Vaudeville at an artful slouch. Lindsay Posner’s take on Chekhov’s story of bickering Russian sophisticates has an unusual visual style. In Britain we’re used to seeing Chekhov set in some fading Palladian mansion just outside Haslemere or Bath. Designer Christopher Oram has rummaged through the archives and discovered some hideously
Martina Cole is a rarity among novelists. Her work is set in the ugly, male-dominated world of London’s criminal fraternity and yet nearly all her fans are women. Blonde women, in particular, as I found out when I took my seat in the Theatre Royal Stratford East to see Patrick Prior’s adaptation of her breakthrough
Hard on the heels of last year’s television adaptation starring David Suchet and Ray Winstone is a new version of Dickens’s Great Expectations, in cinemas later this month. The new version, starring Helena Bonham Carter and Ralph Fiennes, and which closed the 2012 London Film Festival, comes after adaptations which include David Lean’s 1946 classic,
Covent Garden, 1833. Edmund Kean, the greatest tragedian of his age, has collapsed while playing the title role in Othello at the Theatre Royal. His son, Charles, is all set to take over and has just prised the lid off a trusty tin of boot polish ready to smear dark grease all over his peachy
Wow. This is a turn-up. Politicians and actors rarely see eye-to-eye. Thesps regard Westminster as sordid, petty, corrupt and corrupting. Politicians, for their part, like to dismiss the theatre as pretentious, irrelevant and fake. So here’s a play that brings them together. This House, written by James Graham, and directed by Jeremy Herrin, is a
High ambitions at the Donmar. Artistic supremo Josie Rourke has chosen to direct one of Racine’s more impenetrable dramas, Berenice. The play introduces us to the emperor Titus, a besotted weakling, and his lover, Queen Berenice, an ageing sexpot from Palestine. Berenice wants to become Titus’s official squeeze but the xenophobic Romans don’t care for
I’ve just come back from India. At least that’s how it feels after a double attack of subcontinental drama. Tara Arts, in Wandsworth, has relocated Molière’s The Miser to modern India and commissioned a script from the Glaswegian standup, Hardeep Singh Kohli. He brings the two cultures together with the insouciant aplomb of an experimental
The Charing Cross Theatre has followed the trends of performance art for more than a century. It used to be a music hall. Then it put in a stint as a cinema. Now it’s a small theatre and it specialises in experimental comedies. The Man on her Mind fits the bill nicely. It opens with
The tone is the thing. Ibsen is among the heaviest of the heavy-going playwrights and his masterpiece, Hedda Gabler, is an unbearably tense psychological thriller that ends with one of the biggest shocks in the theatrical repertoire. The play takes us into a doomed marriage between Hedda, a brilliant and eccentric depressive, and George Tesman,
Without You is a show that requires a bit of prior explanation. However, if you’re a gay jobless thesp living in New York in 1994, and your Mom’s dying of cancer back home in Illinois, and you’ve landed a role in Rent, a new musical about Aids, then you’re already up to speed. You have
If you’re thinking of putting on a West End show, here’s what you need. Half a million quid. That should cover it. Unless it’s a musical, in which case you’ll need five or ten times as much, depending on how munificent/crazy you happen to be. Investors tend to be fretful, superstitious types who rarely make
Written soon after Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida is by a long chalk Shakespeare’s most unpleasant play. With a pox-ridden Pandarus and the filthy-minded nihilist Thersites as our guides to one of the least savoury episodes in the Trojan war, Shakespeare probes the cesspit of human nature. It’s an exploration of a farthest frontier from which
I saw a few car crashes at Edinburgh but I’ll mention only one. Hells Bells (Pleasance, Courtyard) by the excellent Lynne Truss is a peculiar experiment. Truss sets her play in a TV studio and she spends the first 40 minutes explaining the storyline. The show lasts 45 minutes. So when we finally learn what
A good title works wonders at the Edinburgh Fringe. Oliver Reed: Wild Thing (Gilded Balloon) has a simple and succinct name that promises excitement, drama and celebrity gossip. And it delivers. Mike Davis and Bob Crouch’s exhilarating monologue races through the chief highlights of Oliver Reed’s career. Showmanship ran in his veins. On his father’s
Richard III is seriously bad for your health. Any actor will tell you that the part of the ‘bunch-backed toad’ is so physically punishing that the chap in the title role usually ends up being injected with painkillers by the local quack before each show. Or he finds himself in hospital when he should be
George Bernard Shaw argued passionately that Britain should create a public health service. And he lived long enough (1856–1950) to become one of its earliest victims. This play from 1906 shows the very best and the very worst of his creative abilities. He had a plan: to strip bare the iniquities of private medicine and
A timely show at the Finborough takes us into the heart of Bashar al-Assad’s terror state. Zoe Lafferty’s verbatim piece gathers evidence from activists and torture victims and flings it straight at us. The result is utterly gruesome and utterly compelling. A fractured, blood-stained snapshot of an ancient monstrosity blundering towards its own funeral. Syria,
OK, I was wrong. I’ve said it a million times but I now realise it’s perfectly feasible. Antique dramas can make sense in a modern location. Nicholas Hytner sets Timon of Athens slap bang in the middle of present-day London. The action begins in a mock-up of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury wing, complete with that
Michael Frayn is a schizophrenic. His creative personality bestrides the English Channel. When he’s at home he writes traditional West End farces with amusing titles and plenty of jokes. When he sits at his European desk he comes up with dour, static, talk-heavy historical dramas with boring titles and no jokes at all. Democracy, written
Fear is a new drama by Dominic Savage and it’s one of the nastiest plays I’ve ever seen. It’s also one of the most scrappily written. Yet the subject matter and the clunky script make it weirdly captivating. We meet a pair of teenage muggers who hang around posh bits of London scoping out victims
