REVIEWS Archives - Page 84 of 548

19May

By Mark DavorenNo Comments

REVIEWS

Salome – The Metropolitan Opera

Director Claus Guth gives the biblical story – already filtered through the beautiful and strange imagination of Oscar Wilde’s play – a psychologically perceptive Victorian-era setting, rich in symbolism and subtle shades of darkness, light, and shadow, as Strauss’ one-act tragedy receives its first new production at The Met in twenty years. Narraboth (Piotr Buszewski) admires the princess Salome (Elza van den Heever) and unable to resist her, allows her to descend into the cell holding Jochanaan (Peter Mattei). She is fascinated by the prophet’s body and begs for his kiss, but he rejects her, and she returns to the palace above. Herod (Gerhard Siegel) appears and offers her food and wine, but she refuses. Jochanaan cries out from below against Salome’s mother, Herodias (Michelle DeY...

19May

By Holly SewellNo Comments

London

Diagnosis – Finborough Theatre

Athena Stevens commands the stage in the world premiere of her new play, Diagnosis, playing at the Finborough Theatre. In a dystopian London police station, a woman with a disability, S/he (Athena Stevens), is questioned about an alleged assault against a stranger. In accordance with new procedural law around ‘vulnerable individuals’, she is taped, watched by an audience through a one-way mirror, and forced to be taken seriously - or that’s the idea. In reality, the endless red tape acts less as a support system than as a distraction from the truth of her story. The set is immediately eerie. There is one window, blinds drawn, through which an ominous red glow seeps into Juliette Demoulin’s dark interrogation room. A camera on a tripod records and projects onstage the entire questioni...

19May

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Keli – Royal Lyceum Theatre

Keli is writer and composer, Martin Green’s response to his adopted community and its music. The writer moved to a small mining town in the South of Scotland and became fascinated by the relationship between the brass band and the pit. The mines were of course long gone, but the music remained and had become an emblem of continuity and resilience, where ‘the band is the toon, and the toon is the band’. At the centre of life Green’s a fictitious small mining town is Keli, a troubled and foul-mouthed young lady with few prospects, an anxiety-ridden mother and a dead-end job stacking shelves. The one good thing in her life is the band, and when she picks up the tenor horn, she becomes a different person, somehow empowered and necessary. When she blows those few inches of air it is the one ...

18May

By Mark DavorenNo Comments

North West

Dirty Dusting – Rainhill Village Hall

Rainhill Garrick Society’s take on Ed Waugh and Trevor Wood’s laugh-out-loud comedy certainly dusts off the cobwebs and guarantees you’ll never look at a vacuum cleaner the same way again! When three elderly cleaners, Olive (Lynn Aconley), Gladys (Linda Saavedra), and Elsie (Jo Webster), are threatened with redundancy by their arch nemesis and boss Dave (Peter Cliffe), they feel that their lives are coming to an end until a chance wrong number gives them a new business start-up idea: why not run a telephone sex chat line? They’ve got motive, opportunity, and a lifetime of experience... some more than others. Cue hilarious one-liners in a style not dissimilar to a Carry-On film. With the play set in a nameless office building in St Helens in 2002, with updated local references, ...

Richard III – New Wimbledon Theatre Studio

16May

By Paul AckroydNo Comments

London

Richard III – New Wimbledon Theatre Studio

Alex Wakelam's new production of Richard III for the Carlton Theatre Group is innovative in the number of ways. As Wakelam explains at length in his directors note in the programme is made various changes to the text, including significantly reducing the number of speaking characters, introducing a scene from Henry VI part 3 and references to the Wars of the Roses. And it worked. The plot was easy to follow, and the dialogue flowed actually using Shakespeare's own language. It is also innovative that it set the entire play around a long dinner table with a cast seated on one side opposite the audience. The period was deliberately ambiguous. Possibly Victorian. The dinner guests were the main characters, kings, queens and courtiers dressed in evening wear, while in the background with th...

Sense & Sensibility – Shakespeare North Playhouse

16May

By Mark DavorenNo Comments

North West

Sense & Sensibility – Shakespeare North Playhouse

The Pantaloons roll up in Prescot again with their delightful ensemble of skits, songs, and gags this time aimed at Jane Austen’s first novel with lashings of Regency romp raising the bar high even if there are a few low flying beams to watch out for. All actors want to perform in a theatre-in-the-round but with nowhere to hide, only the best can deliver: The Pantaloons served up a theatrical masterclass tonight and a timely reminder of how great theatre can be. Sisters Elinor (Alex Rivers) and Marianne (Cicely Halkes-Wellstead) along with their mother are somewhat down on their luck and effectively palmed off by their older half-brother when their father dies to live on the estate of a cousin, Sir John Middleton (Christopher Smart). Elinor is disconsolate as she had become close to Edw...

15May

By Sadie PearsonNo Comments

London

1536 – Almeida Theatre

A period drama which couldn’t be more pertinent, 1536 by Ava Pickett is a triumph of feminist rage against a system which is perpetually rigged against women. The trail of Anne Boylen seen through the eyes of three anonymous women - stripping patriarchal attitudes down to bare bones, this electrifying drama exposes – with a warning claxon – the dangerously well-trodden path toward female subjugation. It is not a play to be missed. ‘History is told by victors. And for most of history, men have been the victors’ states Suzannah Lipscomb in the programme’s foreword. This is a play which inverts that narrative. In a small village near Essex, Anna (Siena Kelly). Jane (Liv Hill) and Mariella (Tanya Reynolds) gather in their seclusion of their childhood meeting place, hungry for London’s gossi...

A Small Enclosed Room with Alfie Murphy – Soho Theatre

15May

By Ralph JeffreysNo Comments

London

A Small Enclosed Room with Alfie Murphy – Soho Theatre

A Small Enclosed Room With Alfie Murphy is a unique and funny show that sometimes struggles to deliver on its strong themes and ideas. We begin as a one-man style show. Alfie confides in us about his life, telling us about his band ‘The Camden Stoners’ and the struggles he has with his more sociable, but rather shallow bandmate Jai. From the moment our other performer, Anna Constable, puts her head through the curtain (as Alfie’s ghostwriter dressed as a ghost), the show moves at lightning speed. Alfie falls out hard with Jai, travels to India to lose become a guru, and suddenly finds himself thrown into a particularly aggressive talk show interview before the fourth wall comes crashing down as Constable begins to object to all the costumes and roles, she is forced to put on in order to...

15May

By Paul ClarkeNo Comments

Yorkshire & Humber

Boys From the Blackstuff – Leeds Grand

‘Gizza a job. Go on, gizza job. I can do that.’ That desolate plea for help from a broken Yosser Hughes helped make Boys From the Blackstuff one of a series of epochal TV series that marked out the newly created Channel 4 as the nation’s social conscience as our industrial heartlands were decimated by Thatcherism. Scouser Alan Bleasdale used all five episodes of his 1982 BAFTA winning masterpiece to follow a bunch of unemployed former asphalt layers - gentle Chrissie, young buck Loggo, wise George, sensible Dixie and Yosser who is prone to headbutting people – who are desperately trying to keep their heads above water working on building sites while claiming the dole as Liverpool’s industries die around them. Bleasdale used these desperate and often broken men as a metaphor for the m...

The Girl on the Train – Liverpool Playhouse

15May

By Jenn McKeanNo Comments

North West

The Girl on the Train – Liverpool Playhouse

What would you do, if you saw something that you knew wasn’t right, but were on a train when you saw it? The Girl on the Train has been adapted from the bestselling book by Paula Hawkins, that was turned into a film starring Emily Blunt. It tells the story of Rachel Watson who watches people on her commute into work, then one day a detective turns up at her door to tell her that a lady she has been watching on the train has disappeared. We follow as Rachel becomes involved in the investigation and figures out things that she has blocked from her memory. Louisa Lytton (best known as Ruby in Eastenders) has taken over the role as Rachel Watson for five weeks and she seems fitted into the cast and the role seamlessly. She really showcases her acting talent in the role and take the audie...