Philip Ridley’s stage plays are so often described in such terms as other and alien that you might think he holds real estate in the city of Dystopia. As the author of such popular, challenging work as The Pitchfork Disney and The Fastest Clock in the University, he certainly knows how to feed the plain materials of daily life through a richly distorting lens. This he does with a great, poetic adeptness in Radiant Vermin. As the title might imply, this is a darkly luminous piece. Its subject, … [Read more...]
Hobson’s Choice at the Jack Studio Theatre | Review
It may have become a fixture in our theatrical repertoire, but Hobson’s Choice can still spring surprises. This it does from the very start of Matthew Townshend's ebullient production, when we seem to be a long way from the Salford of 1880, the location in which it was placed by its author Harold Brighouse. This looks and sounds remarkably like the 1950s, complete with early jive dancing to the first raw twangs of rock ‘n’ roll. You can even spot a Dansette record player. Has this masterpiece … [Read more...]
Sketchy Nights: part of the Sketchy London Exhibition 2018 | Review
Back in the early days of British postwar satire, the sketch was a fashionable dramatic instrument, miniature in form but massive in potential. So it’s good to find it alive and well at the vibrant Stour Space, a reclaimed building among the waterways of Hackney. The address - Roach Road, Fish Island - is eloquent. But wait a minute. Sketchy Nights might well be the title of the evening, but the reference is visual as well as dramatic, for here is an art show lending its space to a handful of … [Read more...]
Noël Coward’s Private Lives at Lauderdale House | Review
Just as Noel Coward was, Lauderdale House in North London has been many things in the course of its life: private residence, posh school, Quaker meeting place, hospital and, for the past forty years, an arts and education centre. When he preached here in 1782, John Wesley called it one of the most elegant boarding houses in England. A strangely apt setting therefore for the Deauville Hotel where in 1930 we find Coward’s quartet of embattled newlyweds. This being an open-air production, … [Read more...]
Barry Humphries’ Weimar Cabaret at the Barbican | Review
If you’ve followed Barry Humphries’ career this past half-century – and be honest, possums, most of you have – you won’t be entirely surprised by his idea of compiling and hosting an evening of music and song from the Weimar years. If you weren’t aware of quite how strong this preoccupation has been in the course of his life’s eight and a half decades, this is probably because he was busy upstaging himself with his own menagerie of grotesques, Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson being the … [Read more...]