‘hope to recontextualise the past, improve the present, and hopefully change the future’ Now I am a history girlie, chuck me a bustle, a hoop skirt, a cod piece (cheeky) or a corset and I’m blissful. However uncomfortably, I am a feminist, and so often the voices of women are absent or drowned out from the past. Enter Ava Pickett! ...
‘A no man’s land of time and place keeps everything suspended somewhat’ There is neither a silent nor holy night featured in the Almeida’s big December production. Instead, we get all the sweaty sauce-sodden scraping of the Pollitt family in a poisonously un-festive production. Tennessee Williams’s most classical play is a sprawling family drama set (not so shockingly) in the ...
‘Extremes are the rule of the day’ Morfydd Clark (centre) shines in Roots. Photograph: Marc Brenner Double trouble indeed. Staging two different plays with the same cast on alternating days is quite the gift for an actor. But what about the audience? The end of the 1950s in England was a time of great political and personal upheaval: post-war, nuclear threat, ...
‘Emotional guts and gore’ In the age of Facebook and Instagram, the whammy of a school reunion is lessened to a certain point. But reuniting with an older version of yourself trapped in the memories of other people is an utterly jarring experience. It is an experience that Branden Jacobs Jenkins tackles with a spectral touch in the UK premiere ...
‘A thinking person’s musical’ Flippantly christened “a Soviet-peasant Fame” (by me), Paweł Pawlikowski’s Oscar-nominated 2018 film, Cold War, has now been musicalised. And you can add in a sprinkle of Elvis Costello and a sparkle of Conor McPherson because, after all, it is Christmas. Luminous telly stars and Polish folk music combine for an evening that glows, in a smoky ...
‘Impressive depiction of crumbling mental health’ Your enjoyment of a show can be as fickle as a spring breeze. Sometimes the stars don’t align, and a serene work might fall on deaf ears or a closed heart. The day you have led leading up to the anticipated evening obscures the trip itself. This is the conundrum I find myself in ...
‘Like layers of an onion’ Everyone loves a wedding, or at least that’s what you’re meant to say. But you know what nobody loves… an oppressive political regime. Sam Holcroft, building from her tremendous success at The National with Rules for Living (2015) provides a dark new drama, set under the gaze of totalitarian baddies. Much is expected from Holcroft ...
‘A story steeped in the heat and horror of the early days of the civil rights movement but with an urgent message for our current warming and woeful world’ I love honey, and the little yellow jackets that craft it so carefully (much to the disappointment of my vegan mother), AND I love Lynn Nottage’s glowing version of Sue Monk ...
‘Constantly confusing, delighting, and scandalising’ With Arthur Miller’s The Crucible popping up like a perineal plague (the Gielgud in June if you’re interested) Britain’s obsession with witches, misogynism and singeing is alive and well. But what if we turned all that on its head? Well…. Let’s pull things back, to the very country the Puritans of Salem were fleeing. 1640, Charles the ...
‘Little mistakes puncture a layered tapestry’ With discussions and support for mental health reaching a historic high, a play about a precipitous spiral into instability might seem an easy win. But Director Rebecca Frecknall has a difficult task on her hands, trading in the worn-out sequins of Cabaret (her most recent coup) for something much darker and arguably more complex. One of Tennessee ...