The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Irish playwright Brian Friel has built a formidable reputation out of very slender materials. A couple of international hits and a handful of Chekhov translations have won him a mountain of trophies. He’s still best known for his 1990 turbo-weepy Dancing at Lughnasa, which featured five mad Irish birds stuck in the bog with no
Politics is everywhere in Edinburgh. It’s embedded in the architecture of the streets. The New Town, built in the latter half of the 18th century, is a granite endorsement of the Act of Union, a stone pledge of loyalty to Britain’s new Germanic monarchy in London. The layout forms an oblong grid. The horizontals of
High summer and it’s blockbuster time. The Donmar’s latest show is by the acclaimed Nick Payne, whose play about string theory, Constellations, wowed the West End last year. Constellations niftily incorporated its subject matter into its formal structure. What does that mean? It means the storylines multiplied like an exploding atom until an infinite number
Hats off for theatrical recklessness. The producer Danielle Tarento has taken a $10-million Broadway mega-musical and staged it in the 240-seat Southwark Playhouse. Titanic, by Peter Stone and Maury Yeston, opened in 1997 to howls of critical derision that it merrily ignored. The run lasted for two years. The writers take a comprehensive approach. All
This is brilliant. The new play by Oliver Cotton, a 69-year-old actor, is set in New York in 1986. An ageing couple, Joe and Ellie, are practising their ballroom dancing when Joe’s maverick brother Billy comes crashing through the front door. The cops are after him. He was holed up in a Florida hotel when
West End producers are itching to get their hands on the new show at the Bush. Mama Mia’s director, Phyllida Lloyd, takes charge of a script written by the Torchwood actress Cush Jumbo about the world’s first black female celebrity. Josephine Baker was born to wow the crowds. A child cabaret artiste from St Louis,
The Ladykillers is back. Sean Foley’s adaptation of the classic Ealing comedy introduces us to a crew of villains who stage a train heist while lodging in the house of a sweet old lady. She discovers their crime and when they try to bump her off she proves indestructible. The 1955 movie makes a huge
It’s always a problem with Macbeth: what accents to use? The Globe is applying the traditional remedy. Lord and Lady Macbeth come from Epsom. Everyone else comes from Glasgow. This is a highly entertaining production — one of the best at the Globe in recent years — but it’s not entirely perfect. Joseph Millson has
Dominic Cooke did it at the Royal Court. Now Ed Hall is having crack as well. Cooke’s crazy decision to place his theatre at the disposal of young scribblers prompted the emergence of several brilliant new female playwrights, some barely out of their teens. Ed Hall, following suit, has brought a play by newcomer Melanie
It’s hard to say anything about this uproarious show without falling into the appalling sexual wordplay which besmirches Sean Foley and Phil Porter’s version of A Mad World, My Masters, Thomas Middleton’s satiric comedy of 1605. Putting in its first ever appearance on a Stratford stage, Middleton’s play, as written, is itself as cornucopian a
Off to Wonka. With no preconceptions either. I’ve never seen this story on stage, page or screen and it strikes me as a dysfunctional hybrid of Oz and Twist. The show kicks off with a cartoon history of chocolate which — whoopsidaisy! — omits to mention sugar as an ingredient. We meet Charlie Bucket, an
Good and bad at the National. The Amen Corner by James Baldwin is a wryly observed comedy drama written for a studio theatre. It’s an excellent small play. The director Rufus Norris pumps it full of steroids and tries to turn it into a great American epic like Streetcar or The Crucible. His staging suggests
First the good news. Strange Interlude by Eugene O’Neill has been cut down from five hours to just under three and a half. The action, if you can call it that, begins at 7 p.m. but if you reach the Lyttelton theatre at the more civilised hour of 8 you’ll have missed very little. The
Mamet is back. His 2009 play Race is an offbeat courtroom drama set entirely in a lawyers’ office before the trial begins. Jack and Henry are two hotshot attorneys, one white, one black, who must decide whether to accept the case of a prosperous banker, Charles, accused of raping a black woman in a hotel.
Ah! Here comes the girl from the temping agency. That’s my first reaction when I meet Marianne Elliott, director of the global hit War Horse, and winner of this year’s Olivier for her work on The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. She’s a trim, attractive fortysomething with a neat blonde bob and
Here are your instructions. Relatively Speaking by Alan Ayckbourn is a comedy classic so you’d better enjoy it or else. The play dates from 1967 when Ayckbourn was working as a sketch writer for Ronnie Barker. It was his first hit. Notes in the programme testify to the play’s excellence. A telegram sent to Ayckbourn
A marvellous novelty at the Tower of London. The Banqueting Suite of the New Armouries has been converted into a pop-up theatre and the Tower authorities have welcomed a new play following the rise and fall (into two pieces) of Anne Boleyn. Joanna Carrick, who directs her own script, has chosen a tricky format. Two
How fashions change. Peter Nichols’s adultery drama, Passion Play, will seem tame and rather conventional to modern audiences. It was written in 1981 at a time when the rites and idioms of therapy hadn’t penetrated every level of our culture. Back then the candid scrutiny of one’s emotions, supervised by a ruminating analyst, was a
The Weir is the ultimate hit-from-nowhere. It was written in 1997 by the 26-year-old Conor McPherson. It opened at the Royal Court Upstairs and glided over to Broadway and then toured America. The script defies every rule of theatrical physics. It’s wordy and static, it’s entirely devoid of action or spectacle, and the atmosphere is
Grumbler: I suppose I have to begin by asking whether, if you’ll forgive the obvious question, you actually did like it? Optimist: Equally obviously, your question is too simple. Remember The Spectator rates its readers’ intelligence, abjuring the crudity of the ‘stars out of five’ system beloved of its competitors. G: You could at least
Amazing news at the National. Nicholas Hytner has invented a time machine that can bring Shakespeare to bumpkins who’ve never bothered to read him. His up-to-date Othello begins with Venice’s powerful élite dressed in two-piece suits, like Manchester Utd on tour, and striding around a war-room plotting military action against ‘the Turk’. In Act II,
They’re back. Howard Davies and his translator Andrew Upton had a well-deserved hit in 2007 with Gorky’s Philistines at the Lyttelton. Children of the Sun, which Gorky wrote in jail in 1905, is a prophetic allegory that foretells the destruction of Russia’s weak, idle and pretentious upper classes. We’re in a country mansion where a
Never a dull moment at the Jermyn Street Theatre. It’s a titchy venue, the size of a gents’ loo, nestling beneath a cavernous flight of stairs in the nameless hinterland between druggy Soho and tarty Mayfair. The current proprietors, aiming for an air of scholastic amateurism, are on the hunt for ‘unknown and forgotten classics’.
A lap of honour at the Royal Court. Bruce Norris has been one of the big discoveries of artistic director Dominic Cooke, who takes his bow by directing The Low Road. Norris’s greatest hit, Clybourne Park, was a savage and illuminating satire about racism. His next trick is to examine the burning issue of the
In his ‘Love Song’, T.S. Eliot’s ageing bank-clerk J. Alfred Prufrock protests he isn’t ‘Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be…’. David Farr’s new production sets out to put this to rights. The result is indeed a very strange affair. It is built around Jonathan Slinger, who last season starred memorably as Prospero in The
Inspired writer, John Logan. His 2009 play, Red, delved brilliantly into the gloom-ridden, suicidal mind of the misanthropic modernist painter Mark Rothko. The play’s unflinching and sordid honesty earned the author, and his director Michael Grandage, a bagful of gongs on either side of the Atlantic. The pair have reunited for Logan’s new play, Peter
Impossible, surely. The Book of Mormon could never live up to the accolades lavished on it by America’s critics. ‘Blissfully original, outspoken, irreverent and hilarious,’ was a typical review. The three authors are formidably gifted. Trey Parker and Matt Stone gave us South Park, while Robert Lopez is the co-writer of Avenue Q. As a
Declan Donnellan is riding high. His acclaimed production of the burlesque classic Ubu Roi has confirmed his membership of the elite group of British directors who enjoy renown across Continental Europe and beyond. The critics cheered his French-language production of Alfred Jarry’s anarchic satire when it reached Paris earlier this month. The show, created by
Study the greats. That’s the advice to all budding playwrights. And there are few contemporary dramatists more worthy of appreciative scrutiny than Bruce Norris, whose savage and hilarious comedy, Clybourne Park, bagged the Pulitzer Prize in America before transferring to the West End where it stunned audiences with its macabre revelations about bourgeois attitudes to
