Theatre review: The Other Place

The National's currently got a full programme of shows that are as critically acclaimed as they are, frankly, bleak, and after the Dorfman's A Tupperware of Ashes and the Olivier's Coriolanus I'm completing the hat trick at the Lyttelton with Alexander Zeldin's The Other Place. Loosely (very loosely, which is why it's got a different title, Simon,) inspired by Antigone, the story's look at burial rites as a way of showing respect or contempt becomes one of how they're about saying goodbye, and how grief can turn into something toxic and twisted. Adam killed himself at his rural family home a few years ago; his brother Chris (Tobias Menzies) now owns it, and has kept the ashes there where he now lives with his new wife Erica (Nina Sosanya) and her teenager Leni (Lee Braithwaite,) as well as Adam's youngest daughter Issy (Alison Oliver) who moved back in when she couldn't pay her rent.

Theatre review: BRACE BRACE

My last trip to David Byrne's (not that one) first season at the Royal Court is for Oli Forsyth's BRACE BRACE, the story of a young couple surviving a hijacking only to face unexpected consequences in the rest of their lives, and Daniel Raggett's production which ramps up the tension and twists - but can't disguise the gaping plot holes. Sylvia (Anjana Vasan) and Ray (Phil Dunster*) are flying to their honeymoon when a lone, mentally ill man manages to take over the plane, briefly looking like he'll bring it down. Ray gets knocked out when trying to stop the hijacker but Sylvia manages to defeat him, becoming a popular have-a-go hero in the press. Inevitably it puts a strain on their relationship, and at first it looks like this will take the form of Ray's wounded pride at being written out of the story in favour of his wife as sole heroine, while she takes it in her stride.

Theatre review: The New Real

My relationship with David Edgar's plays has been mixed: I think my still-strong memories of enjoying Pentecost in the '90s make me always want to give his new work a try, but the RSC's most-commissioned modern writer was also responsible for the notoriously dreary Written on the Heart, and after last week's meh Here In America I felt a bit of trepidation towards the second of his premieres this autumn. The New Real is also described by the blurb as both "epic" and "panoramic," so they're really making sure you know it's going to be long. Still, my first show at Stratford's The Other Place since it was serving as The Courtyard twelve years ago turns out to be flawed, but worth checking out. Edgar returns to Eastern Europe and an unnamed former Soviet state, in a story spanning the last 22 years and looking at the question that has been worrying many political playwrights: How did politics move so far to the Right and so far from reality in that time?

Theatre review: Coriolanus (National Theatre)

This year's National Theatre Shakespeare is a fairly rarely-performed one, and one that I'm generally pretty happy to have stay that way; it does though get a big selling point in David Oyelowo making a long-awaited return to the stage to play Coriolanus. Set in the days of the Roman Republic, Oyelowo's Caius Martius is a nobleman and general who earned his titular surname by almost single-handedly sacking the city of Coriolis, stronghold of the enemy Volscians. On his return to Rome, among the honours heaped on him is the expectation that the next stage in his career will be election as Consul, a position of considerable political power. But first he has to gain the support of the public, whose Tribunes Sicinius and Brutus (Stephanie Street and Jordan Metcalfe) are determined to show him up as unsuitable for power.

Theatre review: A Tupperware of Ashes

The Dorfman's about to go dark for a while for another refurb, but it bows out for now in style with a show reminiscent of The Father, both in subject matter and in being something I was very glad to catch, but wouldn't want to put myself through again in a hurry. In Tanika Gupta's A Tupperware of Ashes Meera Syal plays Queenie, a name whose significance is obscure to start with, but which becomes clearer as Gupta gives us a loose reimagining of King Lear, charting the tragic mental breakdown of an independent, successful British-Bengali woman. Queenie is a chef with her own, recently Michelin-starred restaurant, although some of the things we learn about her success early on in the play come into question soon after: Her behaviour has started to change quite a lot, and her doctor daughter Kamala's (Natalie Dew) worst suspicions are confirmed when she sends her off for tests.

Theatre review: White Rabbit Red Rabbit

I've seen Nassim Soleimanpour's second and third plays structured as cold reads for a different performer every night, but had missed his original hit which, out of necessity, created his signature format in the first place. But following the run of ECHO at the Royal Court a couple of months ago, White Rabbit Red Rabbit now returns for an equally starry West End run at @sohoplace, the theatre with a name so current it's recently invested heavily in Global Hypercolor shares. This afternoon the comedian, actor and rapper Ben Bailey-Smith was the guest reader of Soleimanpour's script, something which threatened to derail what turns out to be a pretty dark tale, as a couple of audience members seemed to think they were at a gig and proceeded to heckle him. Fortunately they soon got the message that Bailey-Smith had a script to stick to. In subsequent shows Soleimanpour has expanded on the concept to add himself to the action remotely, but here we get the format in its purest form.

Theatre review: Here in America

It seems a long time since I saw a David Edgar play and all of a sudden he's got two new ones out; first up at the Orange Tree is Here In America, a look at the friendship and professional relationship between playwright Arthur Miller and his regular director Elia Kazan, and how it was strained by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which called them both to testify with very different outcomes. Although the play makes no disguise of who the characters are, they all go by nicknames: Kazan goes by Gadg, short for Gadget (Shaun Evans,) who's invited Art (Michael Aloni) to his house to look at cheese, and to confess to him that he's about to go in front of HUAC to name members of their theatre company who were communists alongside him. Of the two, Art was never actually a card-carrying party member, but he's the one who's still held onto the strongest anti-capitalist beliefs, as well as the sense of honour in not betraying his friends.

Theatre review: The Real Ones

The creative team behind The P Word return to the Bush for what feels like another autobiographical story from Waleed Akhtar - especially given that both leads are aspiring playwrights - about life as a gay British-Pakistani man. This time the scope feels wider though, as it takes us through the sometimes melancholy story of a close friendship over almost twenty years. Zaid (Nathaniel Curtis) and Neelam (Mariam Haque) were friends at school, but only become especially close at the age of 19, when we first meet them: Zaid has moved away to study, and as her parents have only allowed her to go to a local university so she can stay at home, visiting him (while pretending to be on a getaway for young Muslim girls) is one of the only ways Neelam can expand her horizons. Their parents' expectations are something that follow them for much of the story - Akhtar's play is called The Real Ones, and at times it feels as if it's only with each other that they show their real selves.

Theatre review: Bellringers

Bellringers may answer an eternal theatrical question: What if Beckett, but bearable? I have to say my heart sank early on in Daisy Hall's play, as its two male characters, lifelong, loving friends, ponder the big questions of life, death and the universe in a roundabout, chatty manner - the debt to Waiting for Godot is hard to miss. So it was especially heartening to go on to see Hall hold the attention in a way Beckett's never managed for me. Clement (Luke Rollason) and Aspinall (Paul Adeyefa) are in the belltower of their village's church during a violent thunderstorm, the kind that's been laying waste to all the towns in the area for some time now. Someone has to be up there to ring the bells when the storm comes directly overhead, to scare away the thunder and lightning, but it's the most dangerous job as it's the place most likely to be struck, so the villagers do it on a rota system.

Theatre review: Giant

I know I say it all the time but here comes another play set in the past that feels alarmingly relevant to the present: No, not a beloved children's author turning out to be a bit fash, but Israeli attacks on Palestine and Lebanon that draw out arguments on both sides, and the question of how to criticise the actions of a state created for a specific religion, without criticising the religion itself. Not that this was a particular concern for Roald Dahl: Mark Rosenblatt's Giant is set in 1983, when the author was under fire for publishing a review of a book about Middle Eastern politics, in which his criticism of Israel's actions came couched in much broader Antisemitic sentiment. We meet Dahl (John Lithgow) in cranky mood, where it seems his biggest concerns are the noisy remodelling of his house, and his suspicion that illustrator Quentin Blake is getting a larger share of his royalties than he deems fair.

Theatre review: Cake: The Marie Antoinette Playlist

A few days after the official follow-up to SIX, I'm off to a show with a different creative team (including some big names in its development process so far) but which has clear - perhaps way too clear - ambitions to follow in its footsteps. Cake: The Marie Antoinette Playlist also features a famous historical queen with a detachable head, Zizi Strallen (part of the Z-series of Strallens that also includes Zoltar, Zuzan and Zabulon) taking on the title role, and even casts original West End SIX stars Renée Lamb and Millie O'Connell, but things haven't panned out quite as well so far: The official line is that Cake's ticket sales were so bad the run got cut short before it had even had a press night, so the Sunday matinée I'd booked turned out to be the penultimate performance.

Theatre review: Here You Come Again

Dolly Parton is hardly a stranger to writing entire new musicals of her own, but her extensive back catalogue means she'll always be an attractive prospect for the jukebox musical treatment as well. Bruce Vilanch, Gabriel Barre and Tricia Paoluccio's Here You Come Again has already had successful runs in the US, and for its first UK national tour it also gets a rewrite from Jonathan Harvey to provide a new setting and some gags that'll make more sense to British audiences. For tonight's performance on the Richmond leg of the tour it also gets a seemingly last-minute change of gender as Kevin, a middle-aged gay man, has been changed to Kerry, a middle-aged lesbian, although to be fair that doesn't make it any less likely that the lead will be a huge Dolly Parton fan. Charlotte Yorke, who usually understudies Dolly, plays Kerry, a wannabe standup comedian whose girlfriend has dumped her in the middle of the Covid lockdown in summer 2020.

Theatre review: Why Am I So Single?

Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss' SIX was very much an outlier in how modern musical theatre hits tend to be made: A small-scale musical written at university and taken to Edinburgh, it currently stands as a long-runner both in the West End and on Broadway, with its fanbase making its songs a streaming juggernaut as well. So with the team a firmly established one, launching a new musical straight into the West End comes with very different expectations, and surely the most high profile theatrical case of Difficult Second Album Syndrome in many years. So the premise of follow-up Why Am I So Single Question Mark feels audacious in just how basic it is: A pair of characters directly and explicitly modelled on Marlow & Moss have a case of Difficult Second Album Syndrome, and decide to base their next musical on their daily lives.

Theatre review: A Face in the Crowd

Kwame Kwei-Armah's final directing job at the Young Vic is a new musical by Elvis Costello (music and lyrics) and Sarah Ruhl (book,) that adapts the 1957 movie A Face in the Crowd. Judging by the Wikipedia summary of Elia Kazan's film, some liberties have been taken with the plot to make it even more topically relevant, but it certainly seems like this was a story that called out for revisiting in a year full of high-profile elections. Marcia Jeffries (Anoushka Lucas) is a small-town radio host whose show focuses on regular people whose voices don't usually get heard - like the inmates of the county jail, where she finds Lonesome Rhodes (Ramin Karimloo,) being held for drunk and disorderly behaviour. When he sings a song that charms both her and her listeners she invites him to become a regular contributor, and within weeks his hokey folk wisdom has made him the star of the show.

Theatre review: Princess Essex

Like most years the Globe ends its summer season with a new play, usually one that looks at historical events filtered through very modern concerns. Anne Odeke's Princess Essex doesn't buck that trend: Filling in the gaps in a true story many of whose details remain unknown, the play is inspired by a woman calling herself Princess Dinubolu of Senegal, the first black woman to compete in an English beauty pageant. So the play at times takes unflinching looks at issues of racial discrimination, particularly standards of perceived beauty, colonialism and racial fetishisation; but it does so mostly in the context of a pretty broad and bright comedy, which Robin Belfield's production approaches with energy and tongue in cheek. Odeke plays Joanna, a mixed-race housekeeper who knows nothing about her parents or early life, except that she ended up in the entertainment capital of the world: Southend-on-Sea.

Theatre review: Julius Caesar(Icarus / Southwark Playhouse)

I wonder if Julius Caesar is another play that's currently on the syllabus, as Southwark Playhouse had a production from Lazarus Theatre Company scheduled which fell through; instead of cancelling, they replaced it with a completely different production of the same Shakespeare play from Icarus Theatre Collective, a company specialising in creative captioning who've previously presented Ionesco at the venue. Max Lewendel's production has apparently gone through extensive R&D, something I wish I could say was better reflected in what's ended up on stage in The Large. Instead we're in a dystopian future, one theoretically embedded in very modern concerns about AI and online mobs, but in design more obviously rooted in the kind of 1980s sci-fi that tried to remake Mad Max on a 30p budget.

Theatre review: Our Country's Good

After a few years away from its ubiquity about a decade ago, I'm going to guess Our Country's Good is back on the A'Level syllabus as it makes a return to the stage (and the school groups in the audience seemed very familiar with the play as well.) For Rachel O'Riordan's production at the Lyric Hammersmith Timberlake Wertenbaker has made some revisions to her most famous play, apparently to provide a more authentic voice to the speeches by the play's sole Australian First Nations character, who casts a detached, quizzical eye over the hordes of British men and women who've come off a fleet of ships. In addition to these text revisions, which I guess are the translations into Aboriginal dialect that pepper the speeches, instead of a man in traditional dress Killara (Naarah) is now a woman in modern clothes, witnessing the soldiers and convicts arriving in what will eventually become Sydney in the late 18th century.

Stage-to-screen review: The Old Man and the Pool

We're coming up to mid-September, traditionally the time when London theatre suddenly goes from a wasteland to a frantic stampede, so barring any unexpected health issues (whether global or personal) this should be the last of the current crop of screen and radio adaptations I use to pad out the dry season. Speaking of health issues, that's the focus of Mike Birbiglia's mix of stand-up and autobiographical storytelling, The Old Man and the Pool, which ran in London at Wyndham's Theatre a year ago. I'd been vaguely tempted but I do occasionally remember not to spend money I don't have on shows I'm not sure about I didn't book, and only a few months later Seth Barrish's production got added to Netflix anyway. Here the starting point is a medical check-up that reveals his regular breathing strength is the same as that of someone in the middle of a heart attack, and is advised to take up regular swimming.

Theatre review: Silence! The Musical

Despite Unfortunate from January remaining one of my favourite shows of this year so far, I'm generally not that enthused about the amount of parody musicals that seem to be ubiquitous at the moment. Still, I remembered enjoying Hunter Bell (book,) Jon Kaplan and Al Kaplan's (music & lyrics) Silence Exclamation Mark The Musical when it made its London debut, so figured it would be worth revisiting as Christopher Gattelli's Edinburgh Fringe production moves straight to the Turbine Theatre. Although the story comes from Thomas Harris' original novel, this musical adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs is very much a direct spoof of Jonathan Demme's Oscar-hoovering 1991 film, as it makes very clear in its opening sequence of FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Phoebe Panaretos) slow-motion jogging, before launching into an impression of Jodie Foshter's very shpeshific vocal performanshe from the movie.

Theatre review: G

Teenagers Kai (Selorm Adonu,) his half-brother Khaleem (Ebenezer Gyau) and their friend Joy (Kadiesha Belgrave) have grown up knowing there's one part of their neighbourhood where they have to show utmost respect: A pair of pristine white trainers have hung from a power line over the road for the last 20 years, and the story goes that they belonged to a young black boy from their school, mistaken for a convenience store robber, who was run over by a car while fleeing police. His ghost, known as Baitface, wants revenge on the real criminal, so no young black boy should ever walk under the trainers without a balaclava on, in case the spirit should think he's the robber and destroy him - Joy's heard a rumour that Daniel Kaluuya recently walked under the trainers, and got retrospectively wiped from every film he ever made.