Marivaux’s “Le Jeu de l’amour et du hazard” was first produced in 1730 and over the years the debate has been as to whether it is a true “French Farce” or more a Comedy of Manners, Sex and Class. Matthew Partridge, adapter and Director, takes the latter view and successfully so. The setting in the London of the mid 1960s is clever and works well. I remember at that time being invited to the 21st Birthday party of a friend who was a bit of a Toff (I wasn’t!). The party was full of delicious … [Read more...]
1984 is a gripping, superbly staged and realistically acted play
The revival of Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan’s brilliant 2013 interpretation of George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is timely and this is a fine new production, well staged and performed. The year 1984 was 36 years in the future when Orwell wrote the book and it is now 30 years in the past. It was this fact that led me to conclude at the end of the play that contrary to the conventional description “George Orwell wrote a book as a prophecy of the future” (as one edition of the book … [Read more...]
Review of The Songbook of Judy Garland
The “Great American Songbook” provides the not-so-raw material for the musical greats of the mid to late 20th Century - from Crosby and Sinatra to Streisand and Bennett. But few of these stars “owned” a song in the way that Judy Garland did. Indeed whilst she was at home with the standards which others sang - “Chicago” or “Stormy Weather” for example - there are “Garland” songs which while others may have attempted them, nobody came close to the emotion and originality of the treatment that Judy … [Read more...]
Review of Duncton Wood at Union Theatre Southwark
The “Fantasy” genre as a source for the musical theatre is in the eye at the moment because of the success of the film of Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” and with “Duncton Wood” we have another example of how allegory can tell us some truths that, perhaps, realistic theatre misses. William Horwood’s novel was first published in 1980, a few years after “Watership Down” with which it is often compared. The moles of Duncton Wood, like Richard Adams' rabbits, are a long way from Beatrix … [Read more...]
Review of In the Dead of Night at the Landor Theatre
Claudio Macor’s new play is an ambitious and highly successful recreation of the type of story told by the Film Noir filmmakers of the 1940s - with one crucial exception. Whereas directors like Huston, Ray and Curtiz were restricted by the strictest of rules - the Hays Code - no such restrictions, of course, apply today. So, as Associate Producer David Orchard rather gleefully points out in a programme note, “Our play breaks nearly all of the 36 [Hays] rules!” The setting is New Year’s Eve in … [Read more...]