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...]
Terence Rattigan’s While The Sun Shines at The Orange Tree Theatre
This early Rattigan play has had an interesting life. Set in the Second World War and premiered while that conflict still raged, it has since found itself rather upstaged by the author’s later and less comedic hits such as The Deep Blue Sea and The Browning Version. Fitting that it should have made its reappearance at the Orange Tree in Kew Road since his first major play, First Episode, was staged at the adventurous, now long defunct, Q Theatre, just a mile up the road. Appropriate too that … [Read more...]
The Good Life at Richmond Theatre
Lazily, the 1970s have been portrayed as a sort of hangover decade after the vividness of The Sixties; quaint old hippie tendencies having to shove over and make room for proper adult pursuits like careers and parenthood. The Good Life, the sitcom which ran on BBC1 for three years from 1975, rather muddied that simplistic picture, and a good job too. This stage version, based on the highly popular TV series, serves as a reminder that Tom and Barbara, the couple originally played by … [Read more...]