Mainly Opera and Ballet
What a wonderful breath of fresh air — an ultimately tragic story but brimming with self-confidence, energy and sparkle. How very different from the recent Covent Garden production of Rossini’s William Tell where superb music and singing was ruined by a flat-footed production team trying to be intellectual. Real cleverness relies on stagecraft, lighting and …
This debut play by Mark Hayhurst about the viciousness inherent in the early days of the Nazi regime began its West End production in the run-up to Holocaust Memorial Day, after a highly successful start in Jonathan Church’s gripping production at Chichester last summer. It illustrates the Nazi regime in its very early days, through …
Pressure indeed! The biggest amphibious landing in history was scheduled for 5th June 1944, but it would be madness to go ahead if the weather were against it. Waves of 6 to 10 feet were difficult, but possible, to deal with. Anything more was impossible, the landing craft would overturn, and the air force would be …
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 …
“O for a muse of fire … a kingdom for a stage, princes to act …”. And though they were but actors all, confined to the stage of the Noël Coward Theatre, this Michael Grandage production came over with conviction. The heavy weathered boards of which sets and stage was made gave a feeling of …
At the end of this play, Helios the sun god comes to Medea’s rescue, carrying her through the air in a chariot from Corinth to Athens. This deus ex machina pulls her out from certain death in a city where her sorcery has killed its king and his only daughter, destroyed her ex-husband Jason’s plans …
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 …
Euripides’ play The Trojan Women is the final part of a trilogy, whose first two parts are largely lost. Yet we know their main themes, and David Stuttard’s recreation of the second part follows that of the first part, given six months ago by AOD at the same venue, Europe House, London. The first part, …
“My opinion is that most people come to grief for expecting too much of one another”, says Zoë Wanamaker’s Eleanor near the beginning of Peter Nichols’ 1981 play about marriage, adultery, and dare I say it … love. Certainly she doesn’t seem to expect too much of Owen Teale as her husband James. He on …
This Jeremy Herrin production grabs our attention with a great bang at the start … followed by the storm at sea with passengers and crew swaying and falling on the tilting deck of a ship, despite the fixed stage. Imagination? Indeed. And my lasting impression is the contrast between the bewitched characters, with their ready …
People are trapped by the expectations of society, and it can take a dramatic rupture from convention to move on with your life. This was something Somerset Maugham dealt with in his 1916 novel The Moon and Sixpence, published when he was forty-two, which is precisely the age of Charlie Battle in this play. Maugham …
Imagine yourself, as a child, the subject of a book — the protagonist in a series of whimsical adventures that happen around you. How would it affect your future life? Being true to yourself and dispensing with the image formed by millions of readers may be hard. And does it make any difference whether you’re …
Just the ticket for the Christmas season, this Feydeau farce is huge fun. The driving force is marital infidelity, real and imagined, and what’s sauce for the goose is … Bedroom doors opening, closing, locking and unlocking, … all done in the round — how is it possible? The answer is doorless doors, working very cleverly with noises off, …
When Ibsen was about 21 he fell in love with Clara Ebbell, an intelligent, spirited girl two years his junior, considered to be the town’s most brilliant young lady. A similar thing happens in this play to the poet Falk and his beloved Svanhild, one of two daughters in a house presided over by Mrs Halm. …
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 …
Actions have consequences, but change the action very slightly and the consequences change. That is the theme of this two-hander with Roland (Rafe Spall) a bee-keeper representing the simple, reliable world of bees, and Marianne (Sally Hawkins) a highly-strung particle physicist representing the complexities of the quantum world. In quantum physics a particle can be in multiple states, …
In Shakespeare’s day a ‘Lord of Misrule’ would call for entertainment and songs on Twelfe Night, a tradition going back to the medieval Feast of Fools and even the Roman Saturnalia. His play celebrates this by making a fool of the miserable Malvolio, hilariously played here by Stephen Fry, with Sir Toby Belch and others representing the spirit …
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. …
This was a theatrical reading at Europe House in London on 25th October 2012. Euripides’ play The Women of Troy starts two days after the Greeks have taken the city, and ends with Queen Hekabe stepping forward into slavery. It is the final part of a Trojan Trilogy whose first two parts are largely lost, but inspired …
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 …
At the start of this production Cleopatra stands in a long golden gown with her back to the audience, and before committing suicide towards the end she appears in the identical position. Thus was framed Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, brilliantly served by Peter McKintosh’s fine designs and beautiful lighting by Paul Pyant. The split-level, with ladders …
Timon is a tragic figure who fails utterly to understand himself, and therefore cannot come close to understanding others. His vast wealth is from lands he owns and mortgages, and he spends it eagerly on his acquaintances along with others come to him for help. When there is no more left he abandons the city, and then chances …
Bertolt Brecht wrote this play, parodying Hitler as Chicago mobster Arturo Ui, in less than a month in 1941 while awaiting his US visa in Helsinki. Other main characters represent various people Hitler either used or killed to get where he was. Its didacticism is intended for an American audience, and although the first act dragged a …
“I’ve come to wive it wealthily in Padua”, as Petruchio sings in Kiss Me Kate, but here at the Globe things seemed very different. Before the start a drunken football hooligan stumbled his way onto the stage and urinated on two plants in the audience before collapsing flat on his back. The plants walked out, and …
Jamie Parker in the title role gave a superb account of a king come of age since his youthful indiscretions, and that wonderful St. Crispin’s day speech, responding to Westmorland’s wishing a few more men for the forthcoming battle of Agincourt, is delivered as if he is making it up as he goes along. In …
The story behind this play is that before he died, Oedipus cursed his sons, and they ended up killing one another in a battle for Thebes. The city is now ruled by Creon, brother to Oedipus’s mother/wife Jocasta. Creon has commanded that one of the two dead brothers — he who ruled the city and exiled his brother …
Following the debacle of the Suez crisis, Anthony Eden resigned as Prime Minister in January 1957, and he and his wife took ship to New Zealand. In this play a young Steward serves him tea, and Eden commends him on winning a boxing competition on board. They get into conversation, and when Eden asks the …
If you like a frothy musical with lots of dancing, and numbers like Cheek to Cheek by Irving Berlin, this is for you. It’s the early 1930s and an American dancer named Jerry Travers has come to London to star in a show produced by wealthy Horace Hardwick. A tap dance routine he performs in his hotel …
Terence Rattigan’s excellent short play The Browning Version is set in a boys’ boarding school, and for the first half of the evening a new play by David Hare, commissioned the Rattigan estate, has a similar setting. The Browning Version is about one of the masters, and Hare’s counterpoint focusses on one of the boys. In both plays …
For mockery and a self-deprecating sense of humour, Roger Allam’s Vanya is hard to beat. From his first clumsy entrance onto stage, to his bumbled expostulation, “I could have been a Dostoevsky”, and his failure to shoot the brother-in-law he’s learned to detest, this was a Vanya fated to manage the estate as an also-ran. The brother-in-law, Professor …
Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, yet it’s a dictate usually unheeded, and like Verdi’s Rigoletto, Sweeney Todd’s actions lead to the death of the woman he holds most dear. The last time I saw this musical drama by Stephen Sondheim was in Chicago with Bryn Terfel as the eponymous character. It was performed at the Lyric Opera House, a …
Losers. In and out of the kitchen at a dinner party in Muswell Hill, talking about their personal concerns, while the Haiti earthquake stands as a background to keep things in perspective. The losers occasionally lose it, but the hostess Jess, brilliantly portrayed by Jasmine Hyde, is a winner who can keep everything in perspective. And while the …
Excerpts from Bellini’s La Sonnambula, Puccini’s Tosca, and Verdi’s Macbeth by young singers trying out their talents in front of Maria Callas. Sometimes she stops them even before they’ve uttered their first note, and it’s glorious fun, with Tyne Daly giving a stunning portrayal of the diva. She’s imperious, impatient, and intensely musical. “Just listen. Everything is in the music”. …
Remember Burgess and Maclean, Philby, Blunt? All concealed their treason very cleverly, and all were gay. In those days homosexual actions were a crime, and concealment part of the game. Britain’s great playwright, Terence Rattigan managed it flawlessly, and this play by Giles Cole shows how he concealed his sexual orientation from both parents all their lives. …
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 …
This powerful new play by Mike Leigh leaves a haunting sense of despair after the fine cast has brought to life characters who just don’t get it. It starts in 1957 when the Russians put up Sputnik, and the doctor’s son is working for Ferranti, designing computers, whatever they are. Exciting times, yet Lesley Manville’s Dorothy and …
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.
In April 1968 Soviet tanks rolled into Vaclav Havel’s home-town of Prague, and in 1971 he wrote this play about the difficulty of replacing a dictatorship without getting something worse. In the meantime, Colonel Gaddafi came to power in Libya, a land once controlled by a colonial power like the fictional country of this drama. At the …
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.
A shilling in the meter, for those of us who remember, was essential to keep the gas and electricity going. Awfully annoying when the money runs out unexpectedly, but in this case it saves Hester’s life. She took sleeping pills and put on the gas deliberately. As Mrs. Page she complains about being a ‘golf …
This is not just a play for ballet fans or anyone who has heard of Diaghilev or Nijinsky, it’s also for Rattigan fans, as Terence Rattigan himself appears on stage, brilliantly played by Malcolm Sinclair. He interacts with the characters in his own drama, particularly Diaghilev, and at the end of Part I we hear the …
A stylish 1960s Neapolitan Godfather who only bribes or uses force when “it’s in a good cause”, Don Antonio is still forceful at age 75, compelling immense obedience and respect. When asked to adjudicate things, he listens but he’s the one who poses the questions and persuades the two parties to a just solution. The …
“For vain pleasure of four-and-twenty years hath Faustus lost eternal joy and felicity. I writ them a bill with mine own blood. The date is expired, the time will come, and he will fetch me”. Thus speaks Faust in the final scene. The scholars seek to save him, but the clock strikes eleven and he …
Charlotte Lucas was brilliantly in control as Claire Sutton, the PM’s Special Policy Advisor, but the plot was a bit thin.
… — you don’t need to know Hamlet to appreciate this quick-witted theatre, and Trevor Nunn’s production has depth and subtlety,…
A young Count, Bertram is brought up in the same household as Helena, a doctor’s daughter he has neither courted nor encouraged. She loves him, is desperate to marry him, and his mother favours the match, but his adamant refusal is over-ruled by the king, so he leaves home, and we should sympathise with him. …
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 …
The direction was very effective at the end when Orestes kills his mother Klytemnestra — it was a nastily convincing murder — but that does not exculpate this bowdlerised combination of three plays. The work of those ancient Greek playwrights has crossed twenty-four centuries or so — a herald of excellence in itself — is that not good enough for us? Why tamper with them?
Anne-Marie Duff as Alma Rattenbury was utterly convincing as a charmingly batty woman who lived life to the full.
In the end, the train, created by a few actors and two lamps, was superbly dramatic, and its juxtaposition with the birth of Kitty’s baby formed a glorious ending. Death and new birth — a reminder that the point of life is life itself.
“Don’t worry, skipper will get us home again . . . and you have to pretend you’re not afraid”, so speaks the tail gunner, a role that Terence Rattigan himself played for real in World War II.
On February 25, 1994 the Jewish festival of Purim fell during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and an Israeli settler named Baruch Goldstein assassinated worshippers in the mosque over the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron.
It’s a clever play, using the housing market to expose the repressed anger of many black Americans and the self-satisfied ‘liberalism’ of many white professionals.
This play is a must-see for any Rattigan fans, or indeed for anyone else, but this delightful theatre is small and tickets scarce.
This witty and cleverly constructed play by Oscar Wilde was beautifully performed by the entire cast. So beautifully in fact that I never had a serious doubt it would all work out well in the end. Perhaps I should have done, because the charmingly dishonest Mrs. Cheveley, brilliantly played by Samantha Bond, exuded an air …
Hilde Wangel … was brilliantly played by Gemma Arterton, portraying her as very attractive, assertive and a bit of a minx. She charms everyone, and is the one character in this performance who is quite obviously crazy. But isn’t Solness crazy too? ….
The slightly worn appearance of the house helped give a sense of impending doom, and as Donald Rayfield writes in the programme, “after . . . watching A Month in the Country you realise quite how painful is the catastrophe that has struck the characters”.
It’s not easy to turn this story — about human anguish occasioned by the First World War — into a screenplay, nor indeed a play for the stage.
David Suchet, Zoë Wanamaker, and the others were so natural, I believed all the emotions I saw on display, and Miller’s play has a deft logic that packs a huge emotional punch.
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 …
“No, I can’t take it anymore” says Knut Brovik, an old architect who now works for Halvard Solness, the Master Builder.
On September 9th, 2001 Ahmed Shah Massoud (aka The Lion of Panjshir) was assassinated by two suicide bombers — Al Qaeda agents posing as journalists. Two days later more suicide bombers crashed planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The rest is history, as they say
… something of a Monty Python feel to the whole thing, except that it wasn’t funny. It was dull and unrelenting, and while Toby Stephens’ extremely emotive portrayal of Danton may have been convincing, it didn’t elicit my sympathy.
Miranda Raison’s smouldering sex appeal and assertive shrewdness in the role [of Anne Boleyn] was by far the most vital thing about this play.
Roger Allam was gloriously endearing as Falstaff — one could not imagine a better portrayal.
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 …
… in these performances the stylish overacting kept the audience in suspense and drew out the humour without ever overdoing it.
This riveting play by Terence Rattigan had the misfortune to open in June 1939, shortly before war was declared, and when the country’s mood rapidly changed it was taken off. … It’s been somewhat ignored for that reason, but this production and cast do it full justice, and I recommend booking tickets before word gets out.
Everything is played at top intensity, but I would have preferred the introspective moments to be taken more calmly.
The principal role is for Cardinal Wolsey, who has some memorable lines, particularly during his final speech, “Had I but served my God with half the zeal I served my King, He would not in mine age have left me naked to mine enemies”.
Stalin loved this play by Mikhail Bulgakov about the aftermath of the revolution in 1917. It’s set in Bulgakov’s home town of Kiev … He’d served as a doctor during the second half of the First World War, and writing later about the years between 1917 and 1920 he said
This production by Lucy Bailey presents a Dante-like vision of hell … The witches in their dark red nun-like robes are gatekeepers of hell — tall, medium and very short, they occasionally skulk around the stage ready to draw the characters to their eternal doom.
There are six scenes, each interesting enough in itself, but lacking overall momentum. The one I enjoyed most was the fourth, where Ben Johnson, entertainingly played by Richard McCabe, is the life and soul of an evening of heavy drinking with Shakespeare.
In the end we are left as we started, each one needing to impress the others with the sincerity of his aims, while going nowhere [but] in the meantime, Jonathan Pryce gave a riveting performance of Davies [the old tramp]
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 play is entertaining and wonderfully informative — not to be missed, though I understand the present run is almost sold out!
The play was produced in about 1595, at a time when Shakespeare’s company, the Chamberlain’s Men, were regularly playing to Elizabeth’s court and it’s quite likely she saw it. In any event it was a masterstroke of Peter Hall to have Judi Dench play the part of Titania, and I found her entirely convincing.
This hugely successful ghost story has been running at the Fortune Theatre in London’s West End for twenty years, …
The powerful people who attract the most contempt are … Gordon Brown, and to a slightly lesser extent the previous Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan,
… in the end [this is] a play about Auden, Britten and indeed Bennett himself, and as usual his dialogue is wonderfully effective.
… as an American friend of mine said, “This may be the best performance of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof you’ll ever see”.
Nor indeed do we feel any sympathy with Mother Courage herself, who was brilliantly played by Fiona Shaw.
[This] old 1950s musical by Julian Slade and Dorothy Reynolds is a feast of joie de vivre and absurdity.
They did brilliantly well, and how they managed the multiple costume changes, lord alone knows.
Samuel West did an excellent job of portraying Skilling as a man driven by a conviction he could outsmart everyone else, and really wasn’t guilty of anything worse than being a victim to forces beyond his control.
This production by Peter Hall of Terence Rattigan’s play about a classics master at boarding school, was beautifully performed.
Altogether this was a good production, well worth seeing, but I wish Hamlet’s speeches had been given with less force and more subtlety.
This Euripedes play was given in a new translation by Frank McGuinness, and… it worked well here, directed by Deborah Bruce, with designs by Gideon Davy,
Simon Russell Beale as the ex-serf Lopakhin did a splendid job of trying to impose some rational behaviour on these once-wealthy landowners, warning them they will lose the whole estate if they do nothing.
In this performance, Phèdre was played by Helen Mirren, portraying an insecure woman only too conscious of her own inadequacies.
This Tom Stoppard play cleverly juxtaposes the modern world of literary scholarship and mathematics with the early nineteenth century world of literary creativity, classical study and scientific enquiry.
This adaptation by Mike Poulton gave a fine insight into the strengths and weaknesses of Wallenstein, showing his enthusiasm for astrology, which caused fatal hesitation in waiting for the right omens.
The role of Leontes was brilliantly played by Simon Russell Beale
Ken Stott was excellent as Eddie, well demonstrating his insecurity, his intensely narcissistic love for his niece Katie and growing disenchantment with his wife.
Throughout the play there are sexual undertones.
This was a terrific performance of Terence Rattigan’s excellent play about a teenage boy wrongly accused of stealing at Naval College.
… while de Sade himself may have appealed to masochists, I did not realise you had to be a theatrical masochist to sit through this stuff.
As Romeo we had Adetomiwa Edun giving a passionate performance, and commanding the stage with his presence
These two plays by Ronald Harwood, dealing with how Germany’s Nazi regime affected the lives of two of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century, were performed on the same day, with the same actors, and the experience was riveting.
