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 challenging debut Skin in the Game bears the feel of such intimacy. Here the abuse does not involve a substance but a process … [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 along to an exuberant love ballad minutes before two terrifying heavyweight boxers step into the ring with the aim of knocking … [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 of Githa Sowerby’s script to lodge it on the modern map and invite comparisons with the work of Henrik Ibsen. Until that … [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 and therefore at odds with the ideal of reconstructing the conditions of that age. Not that her tenure was proving unpopular … [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 process. Of course, the term has acquired an irony which is as tiresome as it is entertaining, depending on your own media … [Read more...]