Folk tales only become old because they speak about timeless issues to successive generations of the young. If they were to lose their relevance, they would fade and die, simple as that. No wonder then that Jack and the Beanstalk is as durable as they come, with its supernatural backdrop of a giant in the sky and its social realism foreground of a boy struggling to … [Read more...]
INALA with the Soweto Gospel Choir and International Dancers | Review
It is more than thirty years since the South African male choral group Ladysmith Black Mambazo achieved global fame through the unorthodox route of collaboration with an American rock star. The result of that was the landmark album Graceland, made controversial by the fact that the star in question, Paul Simon, appeared to be breaking the cultural boycott imposed by … [Read more...]
Prism starring Robert Lindsay and Tara Fitzgerald | Review
It is one thing to be a visually literate playwright; quite another to create a full-length drama which appropriates the techniques of the cinema as whole-heartedly as Terry Johnson has done in his latest play. Obeying the old principle of showing rather than telling, Johnson lays before us the life of the late and undoubtedly great cinematographer Jack Cardiff, … [Read more...]
The Entertainer at New Victoria Theatre, Woking | Review
They may not have called it a state-of-England play back then, but when The Entertainer was premiered in London in 1957, there could have been no doubting the author’s intention. Here he was depicting a fading music-hall hero desperately hanging on to his old and once-reliable repertoire of jokes while the newer media of TV and cinema were stealing the audiences from … [Read more...]
Skin in the Game at the Old Red Lion Theatre | Review
Compulsive disorders can be hideously dramatic subjects. Think of Duncan Macmillan’s 2016 hit show People, Places and Things, set in an alcohol rehab clinic. Or of the young Noel Coward’s handling of cocaine addiction in The Vortex almost a century ago. Clear-eyed studies of such socially bleary issues tend to be hard-won through personal exposure, and Paul Westwood’s … [Read more...]
Fisher Stevens in A Beautiful Noise at the Lyric Theatre
These days, one of the most notable things about Neil Diamond’s extraordinary career is the continuing success of his 1969 hit Sweet Caroline. You hear it everywhere, not just coming from bar room wall speakers but from the throats of enormous stadium crowds at sporting events. This gives rise to the strange phenomenon of tens of thousands of men and women singing … [Read more...]
Review of Rutherford and Son at the Lyttelton Theatre
This is, in a sense, the revival of a revival. It was the National who played what must be called a central role in this great play’s life with director Katie Mitchell’s production here in 1994. Yes, it had received modern stagings, notably by the feminist theatre company Mrs. Worthington’s Daughters in 1980, but it took the Cottesloe’s stark and passionate reading … [Read more...]
Wise Children at Richmond Theatre | Review
Emma Rice, you may remember, was the short-lived artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe. Her dismissal was a contentious affair which, to the outsider, looked like a clash between modernity and the theatre’s commitment to authenticity. At the risk of crude simplification, she wanted to do things with the lighting that would have been impossible in Shakespeare’s day … [Read more...]
Fake News by Osman Baig at Theatre503 | Review
Whatever else his achievements, or lack of them, Donald Trump can take much of the credit, or blame, for the pairing of words which forms this snappy little play’s title. It was, and remains, a sarky juxtaposition, asserting that information supplied as fact is nothing more than a counterfeit product designed to steal attention from the truth and make money in the … [Read more...]