The need to come up with a fresh take on something as renowned as Shakespeare’s Macbeth is understandable. But I trust it is not too much to ask to be able to hear the dialogue, which wasn’t always possible, sometimes because someone was being drowned out by the ensemble saying or chanting something else at the same time, and/or because of loud drumming. The Porter of Act II Scene II usually provides some comic relief, though this adaptation has a light-footed fancifulness to it in the first … [Read more...]
Accidental Death of an Anarchist at the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre
The death of Giuseppe Pinelli (1928-1969) by defenestration, the anarchist in the title of the play, was not at the forefront of very many, if any, people’s minds in a London theatre in 2023, as it was when the show premiered in 1970 in Milan. I suspect it didn’t need to even be re-set in modern-day London in this fresh and bombastic adaptation to be understood. But just because police corruption seems to exist in some form in most parts of the world - and what a damning indictment it is on the … [Read more...]
Ten Days – at The Space Theatre
At the interval, the stage’s back wall displays a series of television news headlines, which I didn’t pay much attention to - it was, after all, the interval. Various people were wanted for various crimes, though what constituted a crime during the 1917 Russian Revolution was debatable, given the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II (Tice Oakfield) and his rule replaced by the Russian Provisional Government, which itself dissolved months after it was formed. In the show proper, the details of who said … [Read more...]
Gilbert & Sullivan’s Ruddigore at Wilton’s Music Hall
It’s sometimes said of Bollywood movies that if you’ve seen one of them, you have, broadly speaking, seen all of them, as the narratives tend to be melodramatic, with song-and-dance routines that are, to be fair, quite the spectacle, and families that don’t exactly get along. You’d be forgiven for making a similar conclusion about Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas. I haven’t seen all fourteen of them, but the ones I have inhabit some very fanciful worlds that allow the audience to indulge in … [Read more...]
All Roads – Studio at New Wimbledon Theatre
Matthew (Tristan Waterson) may well be “no gang member”, and there’s no evidence of him carrying a knife when out and about, let alone a gun, though there are still other stereotypical traits of a young Londoner - his favourite restaurant is a local “chicken shop”, and he doesn’t so much walk as strut and swagger. At least he wears his trousers properly, without his underwear showing. When Chantel (Kudzai Mangombe) recalls what they got up to in the privacy of her bedroom whilst her parents were … [Read more...]
Rob Auton: The Crowd Show
It’s easy for me to tell when I’m not seeing a conventional stand-up comedy set - I’m not inclined to warn people to sit in the front row at their own risk. The audience leaves the theatre knowing nothing about the lives and circumstances of the front-rowers other than a few people’s first names, and I’ve forgotten all but one (Angela, because she introduced herself a second time at a later point in the show) – such is Rob Auton’s drive for the audience as a whole to feel they are a part of the … [Read more...]
TIME: Beinghuman Ltd / Gaynor O’Flynn
Oh dear. It’s different, I’ll give it that, being a show that attempts to overcome a common shortcoming of single-performer productions: that of only providing the narrator’s own perspective on things. Gaynor O’Flynn’s nameless character complains of being increasingly invisible with the passage of time - though, for her, that process ironically begins with being more noticed. The example given was that suddenly, for the first time, she was deemed old enough to be offered a seat on a crowded … [Read more...]