London Theatre Archives - North West End UK

19Oct

By Prateek SonnyNo Comments

London

Faith Healer – The Questors Theatre

If ever there was a play that asked its audience to pay close attention to every word, it is Brian Friel’s Faith Healer. Directed by Roger Beaumont, this production consists of four monologues that weave a gripping tale of faith, memory, and the elusive nature of truth. The stage is set with a backdrop of a giant banner saying ‘The Fantastic Frank Hardy. Faith Healer. One Night Only’. The set changes before each monologue establish the characters’ respective spaces as they recount their versions of a shared past. The story follows Frank Hardy (David Lemkin), the titular faith healer, who travels with Grace (Sarah Sharpe), his ‘mistress’, and Teddy (David Erdos), his manager, across villages in Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Frank performs supposed miracles for the locals, but whether he c...

16Oct

By Paul AckroydNo Comments

London

Gang Of Three – Richmond Theatre

The 1970s were a time of turbulence in British politics. The Labour Party, having held power during much of the 1960s, lost the 1970 general election and entered a period in opposition, struggling to define its identity in a changing world. This play by Robert Kahn and Tom Salinsky focuses on three major characters in that struggle: Roy Jenkins, Denis Healey and Anthony Crosland. It is a play about political ideas, but primarily about the personalities of these three titans of the Labour movement. They understand the importance of working together in order to create a united vision for the Labour Party, but their ability to support one another is undermined by their personal ambitions. One suspects that this is a universal problem with political egos and so makes much of...

16Oct

By Zandra OdetundeNo Comments

London

Baby – Brixton House

Pearl Mackie takes on a whole cast of characters in Baby, with three chairs and a doll providing most of her company. Written by Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti and directed by Milli Bhatia, the Brixton House and Clean Break production brings a woman’s struggle to keep her child onto a stage that needs very little to make her world feel full. Mackie plays Baby, whose name suggests a degree of care that her life has rarely delivered. She wants to keep Bliss, her own baby. Having experienced abuse and involvement with the criminal justice system, she turns to the audience in the hope that someone might help. There is something of Kafka in the distance between the person seeking help and the system’s ability to understand them, although Bhatti approaches that frustration through a mother’s desire ...

The Awkward Guide to Friendship – White Bear Theatre

13Oct

By Prateek SonnyNo Comments

London

The Awkward Guide to Friendship – White Bear Theatre

An Awkward Guide to Friendship is an auditory treat featuring poetry, music, sing-alongs, and improvisation. It’s a collaborative piece by poet Beth Calverley and musician Beth Roberts, narrating the personal journey of forming and struggling with friendships throughout life. The play takes us on a metaphorical boat ride of friendship and a journey to write a guide for it. The story focuses on Calverley playing a stage version of herself, showing how she was an awkward kid, how she made friends, and the insecurities that kept her from maintaining those connections. It is a unique piece in how both performers present the story through a blend of memoir, spoken-word poetry, narration, and songs. Roberts takes charge as the musician, the guide, and a character version of herself, beaut...

12Oct

By Charlotte MansfieldNo Comments

London

The Big Cheese – The Golden Goose

Surely it can't be hard to sell cheese, can it? Inspired by her own experiences of working in a cheese shop, this new comedy by writer and director Bylli Gomez pokes fun at middle class Britain through a lens of millennial problems. 30 year old Bee, living with her mum after losing both her job and her relationship, is desperate to find work. When she gets a trial shift at a cheese shop, things go from bad to worse for her as she ends up stealing a jacket, destroying an expensive wheel of cheese and drowning her sorrows in a bottle of wine. Gomez herself plays Bee, a woman carving her own way through life, in spite of her constantly disappointed mother. Bee's mistakes are endless, but that doesn't stop her. Gomez makes her character endearing and expressive, easily getting the audie...

Taming of the Shrew: A Kinky Retelling – Bread and Roses Theatre

5Oct

By Kira DanielsNo Comments

London

Taming of the Shrew: A Kinky Retelling – Bread and Roses Theatre

Brush up your Shakespeare and begrime your mind ahead of time to wring all possible pleasure from this depraved and debaucherous play. Shrewd in its commentary on gender and power play but refreshingly earnest in its treatment of romance, this feel good bad boy adaptation is a delight to sink your teeth into. The bite of its unabashedly lewd and unrestrainedly hedonistic humour does little to shield the vulnerability at the story’s heart, that of two people who think they might be able to make something good together that neither one of them has alone. Unremittingly hilarious over the roughly hour-long runtime of raw hijinks, performers Zak Rosen (Petruchio) and Paige Hann (Katharina) nonetheless conjure moments of disarming beauty in the frenzy of arming, dismantling, subverting...

4Oct

By Paul DownhamNo Comments

London

Noises Off – The Questors Theatre

Making theatrical chaos look effortless requires extraordinary control and skill, but The Questors’ production of Michael Frayn’s ‘Noises Off’ delivers precisely that. This is an evening of gloriously escalating disaster performed with such assurance that it ranks among the very best versions of this well-known play. Hilarious from beginning to end, it is a remarkable demonstration of what a cast can achieve when everyone works together. Frayn’s comedy follows a touring company attempting to stage ‘Nothing On’, a farce whose precarious progress is undermined by backstage relationships, professional frustrations and increasingly disastrous misunderstandings. As the action exposes the machinery behind the performance, the distinction between the company’s fictional troubles and its actual...

28Sep

By Prateek SonnyNo Comments

London

Three Men in a Boat – Rose Theatre

Three Men in a Boat, plus a dog, is a spectacular feat of musical comedy directed by Christopher Haydon. Based on a 19th-century novel of the same name, it follows three friends: Jerome (Jonny Weldon), Harris (Bronté Barbé) and George (Richard David-Cane), as Jerome organises a boat trip from Kingston to Oxford as a stag do for Harris. What should have been a picturesque and pleasant trip down the Thames becomes a succession of comic mishaps, misunderstandings and increasingly absurd situations. A splendid contributor to this mayhem is Jerome’s mischievous dog, Montmorency, brought to life through Calum Donald-Bruce’s puppetry. Having the journey begin in Kingston also gives the play a particularly fitting local connection. The play is an absolute visual treat, with a delightful product...

The Last Ship – Theatre Royal Drury Lane

28Sep

By Alan Stuart MalinNo Comments

London

The Last Ship – Theatre Royal Drury Lane

There is a compelling musical somewhere inside ‘The Last Ship’. Its story of a Wallsend shipbuilding community facing the closure of its yard has all the ingredients for a powerful night of theatre, threatened livelihoods, fierce loyalty and the question of what remains when the work that defines a place disappears. Yet, despite its ambition and considerable scale, this production at Theatre Royal Drury Lane left us admiring what we could see far more than we cared about what happened. Visually, it is remarkable, stunning in fact. Jenny Melville’s immense set makes imaginative use of the theatre’s vast stage, establishing the shipyard as both a workplace and the centre of a community’s identity, dominated by the constant presence of the massive ship, Utopia. Adam Bassett’s lighting give...

Causa: The Trial of the Illegal Potato – Lower Marsh Arts Club

27Sep

By Charlotte MansfieldNo Comments

London

Causa: The Trial of the Illegal Potato – Lower Marsh Arts Club

A small basement room in Waterloo, with bare brick walls and a simple lighting rig was the venue for Causa: The Trial of the Illegal Potato, one of the many shows in this year's Lambeth Fringe Festival. The first hint that this show wasn't going to be a tightly put-together piece came as the audience waited outside as the start time came and went with no information on what was happening. Starting nearly twenty minutes late wasn't an auspicious opening. Juana, a Peruvian woman living in London, gets homesick for Causa, a traditional potato dish. When she realises that the yellow potatoes she needs to make it aren't available in the UK, she tracks down someone who can get her a seed potato so that she can grow her own, precipitating an ecological disaster. Described as an 'absurdi...