Mainly Opera and Ballet
This gripping play is about mothers and daughters, loss and recovery, escape and belonging. It’s about letting go and moving on. Two colleagues I knew who were on the final Kindertransport from Vienna on 1 September 1939 never spoke of it. After one of them died, his wife of fifty years went through his papers …
On the face of it this is a play about the suppression and expression of homosexual feelings in men. But it strikes deeper than that by exploring how we come to terms with who we really are, and how our lives interact with those of others. The main protagonists are Philip and Oliver, but in …
The best way to do comedy is to take it seriously, and while the topic of this play is entirely serious, I don’t remember laughing so much for a long time. The first half is hilarious. Told that a potential sponsor, Miss Sutherland is interested in modern art, one miner’s response, “Well, you’ve come to …
In the original Greek play by Euripides, Medea is a barbarian princess brought to Corinth by Jason as his wife. After he leaves her to marry the daughter of Creon, king of Corinth, her sexual and vengeful energy finds a way to burn up those holding power over the civilization she finds herself in. In this modern tragic-comic …
This David Hare play focuses on two moments in Oscar Wilde’s relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie). One is at the Cadogan Hotel during the day leading up to his arrest, the other in Naples after his release from prison. The audience found several of Wilde’s lines amusingly witty, and some of Bosie’s breathtakingly narcissistic. …
In the mid-late 1990s at my son’s high school in America, the janitor was accused of having been a Ukrainian concentration camp guard in World War II. Most of the students wanted to excuse him, because like the title character in this play, written about the same time, he was a nice guy who wouldn’t harm …
This intriguingly melodramatic adaptation of Dickens’ novel by Scottish playwright Jo Clifford tells Pip’s story very effectively. There are two Pips, Paul Nivison as the adult, narrating and facing the ghosts of the past, and the young Pip, brilliantly played by Taylor Jay-Davies. In this stage realisation by Graham McLaren the past ghosts may scream at Pip, but with …
This Neil Simon comedy was co-directed by Maureen Lipman who also played the part of the mother, Mrs Banks. As in all comedies, timing is of the essence, and Lipman was superb, as was Oliver Cotton as Victor Velasco, the engagingly impecunious Hungarian neighbour of her newlywed daughter Corrie. Corrie schemes to get her mother out to dinner with …
Could Prince Andrew’s daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie have thought that their appearance at the Royal Wedding in those eye-catchingly frightful hats would place them in the pantomime roles of Ugly Sisters? Surely not. That would be taking publicity-seeking too far. Yet I imagine the Richmond Cinderella is not the only one to use their names, as well as producing copies …
There’s a lovely conjuring trick using a box having a top, four sides and no bottom. You open it out to show that it’s empty, then close it up again and produce things from the inside. I thought of this in seeing Stephen Daldry’s interesting production of J. B. Priestley’s 1945 play, with the inspector as …
Christine Keeler is a name to conjure with, but this play is really about Stephen Ward, the fashionable osteopath and portrait painter who committed suicide after the Profumo scandal blew up in 1963. He is portrayed here as a very nasty piece of work, a man who, on behalf of Russian Intelligence, was using Keeler to …
Porphyria is a disease stemming from a genetic condition and if that was indeed his problem, it points to the utter futility of the treatments meted out to [George III]. These include the appalling practice of blistering, which we see performed on stage.
On 26 May, Paul Reynard the new French Prime Minister flew to London with proposals for negotiations, leading to three days that formed a turning point in the Second World War. The war cabinet had to decide whether to play for more time and try further peace deals, or tell Mussolini and Hitler to take a running jump.
Charlotte Lucas was brilliantly in control as Claire Sutton, the PM’s Special Policy Advisor, but the plot was a bit thin.
From the first moments of irascible folly to the final moments of grief as he cradles the body of his dearest Cordelia, Derek Jacobi’s Lear came alive on stage in a way that made this relatively long play seem to race past in no time. The production by Michael Grandage, touring from the Donmar, uses …
How do you play a character who has given her name to a word in the Oxford dictionary? Sincerely rather than as a caricature is what Penelope Keith gave us in her elegantly intelligent and sharply drawn portrayal of Mrs. Malaprop. It was a glowing performance, very well supported by Peter Bowles as an irascibly …
What is the point of life? For a performer who can no longer perform — in this case an opera singer who can no longer sing — the lights have already gone out. “I’m not the same person any more,” says Susannah York as she joins three other ex-opera singers at a rest home for …
Everything is played at top intensity, but I would have preferred the introspective moments to be taken more calmly.
If we as humans are motivated by sex, money and power, then Rosamund Pike’s Hedda shows a complete absence of interest in the first two, and her twisted use of power is what produces the final bang in this well-judged production by Adrian Noble.
This hugely successful ghost story has been running at the Fortune Theatre in London’s West End for twenty years, …
Ken Stott was excellent as Eddie, well demonstrating his insecurity, his intensely narcissistic love for his niece Katie and growing disenchantment with his wife.
