This tour of the play based on Michael Morpurgo’s 2003 novel for older children has an awful timeliness about it, given the present war in Europe and its enduring images of destruction. Like his earlier story War Horse, which won global fame on the back of the National Theatre’s 2007 production, it focuses on the lives, and deaths, of individuals caught up in the war which was allegedly the one to end all others. This it does with a documentary focus that is both merciless and … [Read more...]
The Da Vinci Code at Richmond Theatre | Review
Dan Brown’s bestselling book was never one for giving its secrets away lightly. Indeed, this was, and is, a substantial part of its appeal. The readers have their work cut out, and the pleasure they experience when/if they make it to the end is a little like that of completing a fair but fiendish crossword. Bringing its convolutions onto the stage was always going to be an ambitious project in its own right, not least because of the massive footprint left by Ron Howard’s 2006 film version … [Read more...]
Catch Me If You Can at Richmond Theatre | Review
Even the title poses problems since there was a 2002 Steven Spielberg film with the same name, starring Tom Hanks and Leonardo Dicaprio. It told the allegedly true story of a prolific teenage con artist becoming a multimillionaire by posing as a Georgia doctor, a PanAm pilot and a Louisiana parish prosecutor. Nothing to do with this stage play by Jack Weinstock and Willie Gilbert, except that both bear an obsession with duplicity and illusion, rather as a stick of rock bears lettering, and a … [Read more...]
Cluedo at Richmond Theatre | Review
Perhaps there has been another board game that has enjoyed fresh life as a stage play, but off the top of my head, I can’t think of one. All right, Chess, but that was a musical. Cluedo, you may or may not remember, was a postwar sensation, a family-friendly whodunit centred on finding the identity of the murderer in a group of weekend revellers at a country house. It was the inspired invention of a musician called David Pratt who, according to his daughter, would spice family jaunts … [Read more...]
The Winston Machine at New Diorama Theatre | Review
Given the Kandinsky company’s ten-year history of theatrical experimentation, The Winston Machine was never going to be a conventional biodrama dedicated to the life and times of Britain’s renowned wartime leader. Its aims are rather more ambitious than that, and what emerges from this free-ranging and hyperactive hour-and-a-bit is the sense of Churchill not so much as an individual but as a sort of climate in which this nation has lived for the best part of a century. His presence, … [Read more...]
Freud’s Last Session at the King’s Head Theatre | Review
It’s possible, though far from certain, that the committed Anglican author C.S. Lewis met the celebrated psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud in London just before the outbreak of the second world war. No matter, they meet here all right, in the King’s Head revival of Mark St Germain’s Broadway hit, Freud’s Last Session. The place is 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, where Freud had come to live with his wife and youngest daughter Anna after escaping the Nazi occupation of his native Austria. … [Read more...]
Folk by Nell Leyshon at Hampstead Theatre
Cecil Sharp is no unsung hero. Without the energy of this driven and at times prickly musician, the traditional folksong of rural England would very possibly have faced extinction in the early decades of the twentieth century. His collecting of thousands of songs was nothing less than a mercy mission into an aural culture made precarious by the grave new world of mechanisation, migration and war-deaths in industrial quantities. In telling of his song-hunting encounter with the Somerset … [Read more...]