Theatre review: The Art of Illusion

After a couple of homegrown successes, Hampstead Downstairs premieres a play that's already been a hit in France for Alexis Michalik (whose plays have all had long runs there, as the playwright himself informs us in the programme. Multiple times.) The Art of Illusion gets its UK premiere in a version by Waleed Akhtar and a production by Tom Jackson Greaves, but while its premise playfully tunes into an appealing sense of wonder, it soon comes a cropper when trying to make a story out of it. In fact the play follows three Parisian stories, two real, one fictional: In the first half of the 19th century, Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin (Kwaku Mills) is a magician and automaton-designer who becomes the father of modern magic, taking the tricks from carnival sideshows to theatres and royal courts. In the late 19th and early 20th century, Georges Méliès (Norah Lopez Holden) is a big fan of Robert-Houdin's, who uses this sense of magic and spectacle when he becomes a filmmaker and pioneer of visual effects.

Stage-to-screen review: Jane Clegg

It's one of my own personal clichés that the Finborough Theatre approaches programming as if it's the fringe's answer to the National, with the ambition if not the budget to match. It proves true too during lockdown, with the room above an Earl's Court pub matching some of the country's biggest venues, by offering up archive recordings on YouTube for people missing their theatrical fix. Jane Clegg falls into the venue's remit that 50% of its shows be revivals of forgotten classics, as the play was a hit when it debuted in 1913, and its original star Sybil Thorndike kept returning to the title role throughout her career, but the play hadn't been seen in London since 1944 until David Gilmore's revival last year. St John Ervine's play was written with the Suffragettes in the news, and it reflects a new reality where a man might still legally be the king of his castle, but can no longer necessarily rule unquestioned.

Theatre review: King John (RSC / Swan)

In a theatrical landscape experimenting excitedly with gender-flipped, gender-blind and gender-neutral casting, it's good for a company to find its own niche, although the RSC's take seems to be an eccentric one: Casting women in male title roles, but largely going with the ones male actors weren't in any particular hurry to play in the first place. So a couple of years ago there was a female Cymbeline, and now the unloved - both in-universe and within the canon - King John, as Rosie Sheehy takes the nominal lead in Eleanor Rhode's production. John - the gender-flipped characters are largely given dresses in Max Johns' design but the pronouns stick to what Shakespeare wrote - has inherited the throne from his much more popular brother Richard the Lionheart, along with the usual convoluted politics with England and France fighting over claims to each other's kingdom.

Theatre review: The Lieutenant of Inishmore

It’s starting to look like 2018 might be the first year I don’t see Damien Molony on stage since I started this blog; instead it’s his Being Human predecessor who makes his West End debut in The Lieutenant of Inishmore. And while I guess Poldark fans probably make up more of the audience, it’s those of us who are used to seeing Aidan Turner covered in blood who’ll be most at home here. We first meet Turner’s Mad Padraic when he’s torturing small-time drug dealer James (Brian Martin,) stringing him upside-down from a meat hook and asking him to choose which nipple to lose. A nationalist considered too crazy even for the IRA, Padraic has joined splinter group the INLA instead, and has spent the last year travelling around Ireland, blowing up chip shops (they’re not really a legitimate political target, but they’re much easier to infiltrate.) James’ nipple is saved at the last minute by a phone call from Padraic’s father.

Theatre review: Boudica

Closing this year’s Globe summer season is a new play that playwright Tristan Bernays has crafted to fit in very well with the old ones that make up most of the theatre’s repertory. And it’s based around a character who it’s strange to think none of the original Globe’s playwrights tackled, the only reason I can think of being the ban on female actors meaning too big a burden being placed on a young boy; because Boudica has all the elements Jacobethan theatre liked to get stuck into. Set during Nero’s reign, the Roman Empire occupies Britain with the help of some of the former tribal kings. Known as client-kings, they pay taxes and stop their people from rebelling in return for getting to keep their titles and lands. The play begins with the death of a leading client-king, whose widow Boudica (Gina McKee) expects to inherit half his land as per the agreement he made with the Romans.

Theatre review: Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare's Globe)

This time last year I'd yet to see a production of Titus Andronicus, but the popularity of Shakespeare plays really does seem to go in cycles, and now I've notched up my third. Lucy Bailey's production at the Globe is in fact a revival of a hit version from 2006, and sees William Houston take on the titular role of the Roman general whose deeds in battle are so impressive, he's tasked with choosing the next Emperor out of a pair of rival brothers. He gives the laurel wreath to Saturninus (Matthew Needham) but the Andronicus family's favour with the ruler is short-lived: Titus' daughter Lavinia (Flora Spencer-Longhurst) rejects Saturninus' proposal in favour of his brother, and instead the new Emperor marries Tamora, Queen of the Goths (Indira Varma,) whose eldest son Titus just sacrificed. Suddenly Titus' greatest enemy is the most powerful woman in Rome.